First, an ontology is just an agents way of organizing information about the world...
Second, a third-person perspective is a “view from nowhere” which has the capacity to be rooted at specific locations...
Yep I’m with you here
Well, what’s a 3rd-person perspective good for? Why do we invent such things in the first place? It’s good for communication.
Yeah I very much agree with justifying the use of 3rd person perspectives on practical grounds.
we should be able to consider the [first person] viewpoint of any physical object.
Well if we are choosing to work with third-person perspectives then maybe we don’t need first person perspectives at all. We can describe gravity and entropy without any first person perspectives at all, for example.
I’m not against first person perspectives, but if we’re working with third person perspectives then we might start by sticking to third person perspectives exclusively.
Let’s look at a different type of knowledge, which I will call tacit knowledge—stuff like being able to ride a bike (aka “know-how”). I think this can be defined (following my “very basic” theme) from an object’s ability to participate successfully in patterns.
Yeah right. A screw that fits into a hole does have mutual information with the hole. I like the idea that knowledge is about the capacity to harmonize within a particular environment because it might avoid the need to define goal-directedness.
Now we can start to think about measuring the extent to which mutual information contributes to learning of tacit knowledge. Something happens to our object. It gains some mutual information w/ external stuff. If this mutual information increases its ability to pursue some goal predicate, we can say that the information is accessible wrt that goal predicate. We can imagine the goal predicate being “active” in the agent, and having a “translation system” whereby it unpacks the mutual information into what it needs.
The only problem is that now we have to say what a goal predicate is. Do you have a sense of how to do that? I have also come to the conclusion that knowledge has a lot to do with being useful in service of a goal, and that then requires some way to talk about goals and usefulness.
The hope is to eventually be able to build up to complicated types of knowledge (such as the definition you seek here), but starting with really basic forms.
I very much resonate with keeping it as simple as possible, especially when doing this kind of conceptual engineering, which can become so lost. I have been grounding my thinking in wanting to know whether or not a certain entity in the world has an understanding of a certain phenomenon, in order to use that to overcome the deceptive misalignment problem. Do you also have go-to practical problems against which to test these kinds of definitions?
Yep I’m with you here
Yeah I very much agree with justifying the use of 3rd person perspectives on practical grounds.
Well if we are choosing to work with third-person perspectives then maybe we don’t need first person perspectives at all. We can describe gravity and entropy without any first person perspectives at all, for example.
I’m not against first person perspectives, but if we’re working with third person perspectives then we might start by sticking to third person perspectives exclusively.
Yeah right. A screw that fits into a hole does have mutual information with the hole. I like the idea that knowledge is about the capacity to harmonize within a particular environment because it might avoid the need to define goal-directedness.
The only problem is that now we have to say what a goal predicate is. Do you have a sense of how to do that? I have also come to the conclusion that knowledge has a lot to do with being useful in service of a goal, and that then requires some way to talk about goals and usefulness.
I very much resonate with keeping it as simple as possible, especially when doing this kind of conceptual engineering, which can become so lost. I have been grounding my thinking in wanting to know whether or not a certain entity in the world has an understanding of a certain phenomenon, in order to use that to overcome the deceptive misalignment problem. Do you also have go-to practical problems against which to test these kinds of definitions?