So to try to summarize what I am now reasonably certain the criticism was:
Eliezer argues that “truth”, as a concept, reflects our expectation that our experiences of reality can match our experiences of reality.
Aella’s criticism is that “of reality” adds nothing to the previous sentence, and Eliezer is sneaking reality into his concept of truth; that is, Eliezer’s argument can be reframed “Our expectation of our experiences can match our experiences”.
The difficulty I had in understanding Aella’s argument is that she framed it as a criticism of the usefulessness of truth, itself. That is, I think she finds the kind of “truth” we are left with, after subtracting a reality (an external world) that adds nothing to it, to be kind of useless (either that or she expects readers to).
Whereas I think it’s basically the same thing. Just as subtracting “of reality” removes nothing from the argument, I think adding it doesn’t actually add anything to the argument, because I think “reality”, or “external world”, are themselves just pointers at the fact that our experiences can be expected, something already implicit in the idea of having expectations in the first place.
Reality is just the pattern of experiences that we experience. Truth is a pattern which correlates in some respect with some subset of the pattern of experiences that we experience.
When I expect it to rain and then it doesn’t and I feel surprised, what is happening? In my subjective experience, this moment, I am imagining a prior version of myself that had a belief about the world (it will rain!), and I am holding a different belief than what I imagine my previous self had (It isn’t raining!). I am holding a contrast between those two, and I am experiencing the sensation of surprise. This is all surprise is, deep down. Every interpretation of reality can be described in terms of a consistent explanation of the feeling of our mental framework right at this moment.
...it feels like some map-and-territory confusion. It’s like if I insisted that the only things that exist are words. And you could be like: “dude, just look at this rock! it is real!”, and I would say: “but ‘dude’, ‘just’, ‘look’, ‘at’, ‘this’, ‘rock’, ‘it’, ‘is’, and ‘real’ are just words, aren’t they?” And so on, whatever argument you give me, I will ignore it and merely point out that it consists of words, therefore it ultimately proves me right. -- Is this a deep insight, or am I just deliberately obtuse? To me it seems like the latter.
By this logic, it’s not even true that two plus two equals four. We only have a sensation of two plus two being four. But isn’t it interesting that these “sensations” together form a coherent mathematics? Nope, we only have a sensation of these sensations forming a coherent mathematics. Yeah, but the reason I have the sensation of math being coherent is because the math actually is coherent, or isn’t it? Nah, you just have a sensation of the reason of math’s coherency being the math’s actual coherency. But that’s because… Nope, just a sensation of becauseness...
To make it sound deeper: the moon allegedly does not exists, because your finger that points at it is merely a finger.
EDIT: A comment below the criticism points out that the argument against reality can be also used as an argument against existence of other people (ultimately, only your sensations of other people exist), therefore this line of thought logically ends at solipsism.
EDIT: It’s actually quite an interesting blogger! The article on reality didn’t impress me, but many others did. For example, Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums is a way more charitable interpretation of the “geeks and sociopaths” dynamics in communities.
EDIT: It’s actually quite an interesting blogger! The article on reality didn’t impress me, but many others did. For example, Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums is a way more charitable interpretation of the “geeks and sociopaths” dynamics in communities.
Her writing is pretty good, yeah.
The rest of the blog made me pause on the article for a lot longer than I usually would have, to try to figure out what the heck she was even arguing. There really is a thing there, which is why when I figured it out I came here and posted it. Apparently it translates no better than her own framing of it, which I find interesting.
Talking about words is an apt metaphor, but somewhat misleading in the specifics. Abstractly, I think Aella is saying that, in the map-territory dichotomy, the “territory” part of the dichotomy doesn’t actually add anything; we never experience the territory, it’s a strictly theoretical concept, and any correspondence we claim to have between maps and territory is actually a correspondence of maps and maps.
When you look at the world, you have a map; you are seeing a representation of the world, not the world itself. When you hear the world, you have a map. All of your senses provide maps of the world. Your interpretation of those senses is a map-of-a-map. Your model of those interpretations is a map-of-a-map-of-a-map. It’s maps all the way down, and there is no territory to be found anywhere. The “territory” is taken axiomatically—there is a territory, which maps can match better or worse, but it is never actually observed. In this sense, there is no external world, because there is no reality.
I think the criticism here is of a conceptualization of the universe in which there’s a platonic ideal of the universe—reality—which we interact with, and with regards to which we can make little facsimiles—theories, or statements, or maps—which can be more or less reproductions of the ideal (more or less true).
So strictly speaking, this it’s-all-maps explanation is also misleading. It’s territory all the way down, too; your sight isn’t a map of reality, it is part of reality. There are no maps; everything is territory. There is no external reality because there is not actually a point at which we go from “things that aren’t real” to “things that are real”, and on a deeper level, there’s not a point at which we go from the inside to the outside.
Is an old map of a city, which is no longer accurate, true?
The “maps all the way down” does not explain why there is (an illusion of) a reality that all these maps are about. If there is no underlying reality, why aren’t the maps completely arbitrary?
The criticism Aella is making is substantively different than “reality isn’t real”.
So, imagine you’re god. All of reality takes place in your mind; reality is literally just a thought you had. How does Eliezer’s concept of “truth” work in that case?
Suppose you’re mentally ill. How much should you trust something that claims to be a mind? Is it possible for imaginary things to surprise you? What does truth mean, if your interface to the “external world”/”reality” isn’t reliable?
Suppose you’re lucid dreaming. Does the notion of “truth” stop existing?
(But also, even if there is no underlying reality, the maps still aren’t going to be completely arbitrary, because a mind has a shape of its own.)
So, imagine you’re god. All of reality takes place in your mind; reality is literally just a thought you had. How does Eliezer’s concept of “truth” work in that case?
Then the god’s mind would be the reality; god’s psychological traits would be the new “laws of physics”, kind of.
I admit I have a problem imagining “thoughts” without also imagining a mind. The mechanism that implements the mind would be the underlying reality.
We can suppose that the god is just observing what happens when a particular mathematical equation runs; that is, the universe can, in a certain sense, be entirely independent of the god’s thoughts and psychological traits.
Independence might be close enough to “external” for the “external world” concept to apply; so we can evaluate reality as independent from, even for argument’s sake external to, the god’s mind, even though it exists within it.
So we can have truth which is analogous to Eliezer’s truth.
Now, the question is—does the “external world” and “independence” actually add anything?
Well, suppose that the god can and does alter things; observes how the equation is running, and tweaks the data.
Does “truth” only exist with respect to the parts of this world that the god hasn’t changed? Are the only “true” parts of this reality the parts that are purely the results of the original equation? If the god makes one adjustment ever, is truth forever contaminated?
Okay, let’s define the external world to be the equation itself. The god can choose which equation to run, can adjust the parameters; where exactly in this process does truth itself lay? Maybe in the mathematics used to run the equation? But mathematics is arbitrary; the god can alter the mathematics.
Well, up to a point, the point Aella points at as “consistency.” So there’s that piece; the truth has to at least be consistent. And I think I appreciate the “truth” of the universe that isn’t altered; there’s consistency there, too.
Which leaves the other part, experience.
Suppose, for a moment, we are insane (independently, just imagine being insane); the external reality you observe is illusory. Does that diminish the value of what we consider to be the truth in anticipating our experiences? If this is all a grand illusion—well, it’s quite a consistent illusion, and I know what will happen when I engage in the experience I refer to when I say I drop an apple. I call the illusion ‘reality’, and it exists, regardless of whether or not it satisfies the aesthetic ideal I have for what “existence” should actually mean.
Which is to say—it doesn’t matter if I am living in reality, or in a god’s mathematical equation, or in a fantasy. The existence or nonexistence of an external reality has no bearing on whether or not I expect an apple to hit the ground when I let go of it; the existence or nonexistence of an external reality has no bearing on whether the apple will do so. Whether the apple exists in the real world, or as a concept in my mind, it has a particular set of consistent behaviors, which I experience in a particular way.
Whereas I take the view that truth in the sense in the sense of instrumentalism, prediction of experience, and truth in the sense of realism, correspondence to the territory, are different and both valid. Having recognised the difference, you don’t have to eliminate one, or identify it with the other
It took me a little while to understand what criticism Aella raised over Eliezer’s defense of the concept of truth.
So to try to summarize what I am now reasonably certain the criticism was:
Eliezer argues that “truth”, as a concept, reflects our expectation that our experiences of reality can match our experiences of reality.
Aella’s criticism is that “of reality” adds nothing to the previous sentence, and Eliezer is sneaking reality into his concept of truth; that is, Eliezer’s argument can be reframed “Our expectation of our experiences can match our experiences”.
The difficulty I had in understanding Aella’s argument is that she framed it as a criticism of the usefulessness of truth, itself. That is, I think she finds the kind of “truth” we are left with, after subtracting a reality (an external world) that adds nothing to it, to be kind of useless (either that or she expects readers to).
Whereas I think it’s basically the same thing. Just as subtracting “of reality” removes nothing from the argument, I think adding it doesn’t actually add anything to the argument, because I think “reality”, or “external world”, are themselves just pointers at the fact that our experiences can be expected, something already implicit in the idea of having expectations in the first place.
Reality is just the pattern of experiences that we experience. Truth is a pattern which correlates in some respect with some subset of the pattern of experiences that we experience.
I have read that criticism, and...
...it feels like some map-and-territory confusion. It’s like if I insisted that the only things that exist are words. And you could be like: “dude, just look at this rock! it is real!”, and I would say: “but ‘dude’, ‘just’, ‘look’, ‘at’, ‘this’, ‘rock’, ‘it’, ‘is’, and ‘real’ are just words, aren’t they?” And so on, whatever argument you give me, I will ignore it and merely point out that it consists of words, therefore it ultimately proves me right. -- Is this a deep insight, or am I just deliberately obtuse? To me it seems like the latter.
By this logic, it’s not even true that two plus two equals four. We only have a sensation of two plus two being four. But isn’t it interesting that these “sensations” together form a coherent mathematics? Nope, we only have a sensation of these sensations forming a coherent mathematics. Yeah, but the reason I have the sensation of math being coherent is because the math actually is coherent, or isn’t it? Nah, you just have a sensation of the reason of math’s coherency being the math’s actual coherency. But that’s because… Nope, just a sensation of becauseness...
To make it sound deeper: the moon allegedly does not exists, because your finger that points at it is merely a finger.
EDIT: A comment below the criticism points out that the argument against reality can be also used as an argument against existence of other people (ultimately, only your sensations of other people exist), therefore this line of thought logically ends at solipsism.
EDIT: It’s actually quite an interesting blogger! The article on reality didn’t impress me, but many others did. For example, Internet communities: Otters vs. Possums is a way more charitable interpretation of the “geeks and sociopaths” dynamics in communities.
Her writing is pretty good, yeah.
The rest of the blog made me pause on the article for a lot longer than I usually would have, to try to figure out what the heck she was even arguing. There really is a thing there, which is why when I figured it out I came here and posted it. Apparently it translates no better than her own framing of it, which I find interesting.
Talking about words is an apt metaphor, but somewhat misleading in the specifics. Abstractly, I think Aella is saying that, in the map-territory dichotomy, the “territory” part of the dichotomy doesn’t actually add anything; we never experience the territory, it’s a strictly theoretical concept, and any correspondence we claim to have between maps and territory is actually a correspondence of maps and maps.
When you look at the world, you have a map; you are seeing a representation of the world, not the world itself. When you hear the world, you have a map. All of your senses provide maps of the world. Your interpretation of those senses is a map-of-a-map. Your model of those interpretations is a map-of-a-map-of-a-map. It’s maps all the way down, and there is no territory to be found anywhere. The “territory” is taken axiomatically—there is a territory, which maps can match better or worse, but it is never actually observed. In this sense, there is no external world, because there is no reality.
I think the criticism here is of a conceptualization of the universe in which there’s a platonic ideal of the universe—reality—which we interact with, and with regards to which we can make little facsimiles—theories, or statements, or maps—which can be more or less reproductions of the ideal (more or less true).
So strictly speaking, this it’s-all-maps explanation is also misleading. It’s territory all the way down, too; your sight isn’t a map of reality, it is part of reality. There are no maps; everything is territory. There is no external reality because there is not actually a point at which we go from “things that aren’t real” to “things that are real”, and on a deeper level, there’s not a point at which we go from the inside to the outside.
Is an old map of a city, which is no longer accurate, true?
The “maps all the way down” does not explain why there is (an illusion of) a reality that all these maps are about. If there is no underlying reality, why aren’t the maps completely arbitrary?
The criticism Aella is making is substantively different than “reality isn’t real”.
So, imagine you’re god. All of reality takes place in your mind; reality is literally just a thought you had. How does Eliezer’s concept of “truth” work in that case?
Suppose you’re mentally ill. How much should you trust something that claims to be a mind? Is it possible for imaginary things to surprise you? What does truth mean, if your interface to the “external world”/”reality” isn’t reliable?
Suppose you’re lucid dreaming. Does the notion of “truth” stop existing?
(But also, even if there is no underlying reality, the maps still aren’t going to be completely arbitrary, because a mind has a shape of its own.)
Then the god’s mind would be the reality; god’s psychological traits would be the new “laws of physics”, kind of.
I admit I have a problem imagining “thoughts” without also imagining a mind. The mechanism that implements the mind would be the underlying reality.
We can suppose that the god is just observing what happens when a particular mathematical equation runs; that is, the universe can, in a certain sense, be entirely independent of the god’s thoughts and psychological traits.
Independence might be close enough to “external” for the “external world” concept to apply; so we can evaluate reality as independent from, even for argument’s sake external to, the god’s mind, even though it exists within it.
So we can have truth which is analogous to Eliezer’s truth.
Now, the question is—does the “external world” and “independence” actually add anything?
Well, suppose that the god can and does alter things; observes how the equation is running, and tweaks the data.
Does “truth” only exist with respect to the parts of this world that the god hasn’t changed? Are the only “true” parts of this reality the parts that are purely the results of the original equation? If the god makes one adjustment ever, is truth forever contaminated?
Okay, let’s define the external world to be the equation itself. The god can choose which equation to run, can adjust the parameters; where exactly in this process does truth itself lay? Maybe in the mathematics used to run the equation? But mathematics is arbitrary; the god can alter the mathematics.
Well, up to a point, the point Aella points at as “consistency.” So there’s that piece; the truth has to at least be consistent. And I think I appreciate the “truth” of the universe that isn’t altered; there’s consistency there, too.
Which leaves the other part, experience.
Suppose, for a moment, we are insane (independently, just imagine being insane); the external reality you observe is illusory. Does that diminish the value of what we consider to be the truth in anticipating our experiences? If this is all a grand illusion—well, it’s quite a consistent illusion, and I know what will happen when I engage in the experience I refer to when I say I drop an apple. I call the illusion ‘reality’, and it exists, regardless of whether or not it satisfies the aesthetic ideal I have for what “existence” should actually mean.
Which is to say—it doesn’t matter if I am living in reality, or in a god’s mathematical equation, or in a fantasy. The existence or nonexistence of an external reality has no bearing on whether or not I expect an apple to hit the ground when I let go of it; the existence or nonexistence of an external reality has no bearing on whether the apple will do so. Whether the apple exists in the real world, or as a concept in my mind, it has a particular set of consistent behaviors, which I experience in a particular way.
Whereas I take the view that truth in the sense in the sense of instrumentalism, prediction of experience, and truth in the sense of realism, correspondence to the territory, are different and both valid. Having recognised the difference, you don’t have to eliminate one, or identify it with the other