You’re using an AIXI-like notion of senses and actions related by a turing machine or other computation? Isn’t such a model annoyingly incomplete in that it can by design provide no explanation for how the input and output streams themselves came about?
provide no explanation for how the input and output streams themselves came about?
Right, you postulate input streams and use the feedback from our intentions to act back to the input streams to define outputs. Whether this is more complicated than postulating external reality is a separate discussion.
Um, I don’t think I’m concerned with “complexity” as such. It’s more like...
Consider the Newtonian universe. “This place” is a euclidean space full of little billiard balls bouncing back and forth. You can point at some subset of the universe and say “that’s me”. If I ask “why am I seeing [something]?” you can answer that with “because that thing there is a brain, the one computing your experience of consciousness, and it is attached to eyes which happen to be looking at [something]”. I guess, it’s reductionist.
In the AIXI/instrumentalist model, “sensory input” doesn’t seem to reduce to anything else, and the self is “taken for granted”. Doesn’t that bother you?
In the AIXI/instrumentalist model, “sensory input” doesn’t seem to reduce to anything else, and the self is “taken for granted”. Doesn’t that bother you?
it does. But I prefer this over futile arguments over QM interpretations, modal realism and whatever Tegmark writes. Possibly this is a false dichotomy, and I’d be happy to subscribe to an idea of external reality which did not lead to such debates, but I am yet to come across one.
You’re using an AIXI-like notion of senses and actions related by a turing machine or other computation? Isn’t such a model annoyingly incomplete in that it can by design provide no explanation for how the input and output streams themselves came about?
Right, you postulate input streams and use the feedback from our intentions to act back to the input streams to define outputs. Whether this is more complicated than postulating external reality is a separate discussion.
Um, I don’t think I’m concerned with “complexity” as such. It’s more like...
Consider the Newtonian universe. “This place” is a euclidean space full of little billiard balls bouncing back and forth. You can point at some subset of the universe and say “that’s me”. If I ask “why am I seeing [something]?” you can answer that with “because that thing there is a brain, the one computing your experience of consciousness, and it is attached to eyes which happen to be looking at [something]”. I guess, it’s reductionist.
In the AIXI/instrumentalist model, “sensory input” doesn’t seem to reduce to anything else, and the self is “taken for granted”. Doesn’t that bother you?
it does. But I prefer this over futile arguments over QM interpretations, modal realism and whatever Tegmark writes. Possibly this is a false dichotomy, and I’d be happy to subscribe to an idea of external reality which did not lead to such debates, but I am yet to come across one.