I do think natural latents could have a significant role to play somehow in QACI-like setups, but it doesn’t seem like they let you avoid formalizing, at least in the way you’re talking about. It seems more interesting in terms of avoiding specifying a universal prior over possible worlds, if we can instead specify a somewhat less universal prior that bakes in assumptions about our worlds’ known causal structure. it might help with getting a robust pointer to the start of the time snippet. I don’t see how it helps avoiding specifying “looping”, or “time snippet”, etc. natural latents seem to me to be primarily about the causal structure of our universe, and it’s unclear what they even mean otherwise. it seems like our ability to talk about this concept is made up of a bunch of natural latents, and some of them are kind of messy and underspecified by the phrase, mainly relating to what the heck is a physics.
it might help with getting a robust pointer to the start of the time snippet.
That’s mainly what I meant, yes.
Specifying what the heck a physics is seems much more tractable to me.We don’t have a neat theory of quantum gravity, but a lattice simulation of quantum field theory in curved space-time, or just a computer game world populated by characters controlled by neural networks, seems pretty straightforward to formally specify. We could probably start coding that up right now.
What we lack is a pointer to the right initial conditions for the simulation. The wave function of Earth in case of the lattice qft setup, or the human uploads as neural network parameters in case of the game environment.
I do think natural latents could have a significant role to play somehow in QACI-like setups, but it doesn’t seem like they let you avoid formalizing, at least in the way you’re talking about. It seems more interesting in terms of avoiding specifying a universal prior over possible worlds, if we can instead specify a somewhat less universal prior that bakes in assumptions about our worlds’ known causal structure. it might help with getting a robust pointer to the start of the time snippet. I don’t see how it helps avoiding specifying “looping”, or “time snippet”, etc. natural latents seem to me to be primarily about the causal structure of our universe, and it’s unclear what they even mean otherwise. it seems like our ability to talk about this concept is made up of a bunch of natural latents, and some of them are kind of messy and underspecified by the phrase, mainly relating to what the heck is a physics.
That’s mainly what I meant, yes.
Specifying what the heck a physics is seems much more tractable to me.We don’t have a neat theory of quantum gravity, but a lattice simulation of quantum field theory in curved space-time, or just a computer game world populated by characters controlled by neural networks, seems pretty straightforward to formally specify. We could probably start coding that up right now.
What we lack is a pointer to the right initial conditions for the simulation. The wave function of Earth in case of the lattice qft setup, or the human uploads as neural network parameters in case of the game environment.