I agree that Solomonoff’s epistemology is noncentral in the way you describe, but I don’t think it impacts my points very much; replace Solomonoff with whatever epistemic theory you like. It was just a convenient example.
(Although I expect defenders of Solomonoff to expect the program bits to be meaningful; and I somewhat agree. It’s just that the theory doesn’t address the meaning there, instead treating programs more like black-box predictors.)
In my view, meaning is the property of being optimized to adhere to some map-territory relationship. However, this optimization itself must always occur within some model (it provides the map-territory relationship to optimize for). In the context of Solomonoff Induction, this may emerge from the incentive to predict, but it is not easy to reason about.
In some sense, reality isn’t made of bits, propositions, or any such thing; it is of unknowable type. However, we always describe it via terms of some type (a language).
I’m no longer sure where the disagreement lies, if any, but I still feel like the original post overstates things.
I agree that Solomonoff’s epistemology is noncentral in the way you describe, but I don’t think it impacts my points very much; replace Solomonoff with whatever epistemic theory you like. It was just a convenient example.
(Although I expect defenders of Solomonoff to expect the program bits to be meaningful; and I somewhat agree. It’s just that the theory doesn’t address the meaning there, instead treating programs more like black-box predictors.)
In my view, meaning is the property of being optimized to adhere to some map-territory relationship. However, this optimization itself must always occur within some model (it provides the map-territory relationship to optimize for). In the context of Solomonoff Induction, this may emerge from the incentive to predict, but it is not easy to reason about.
In some sense, reality isn’t made of bits, propositions, or any such thing; it is of unknowable type. However, we always describe it via terms of some type (a language).
I’m no longer sure where the disagreement lies, if any, but I still feel like the original post overstates things.