But none of those things is what he means by ‘real.’ Else it would be nonsense to ask, ‘Can completely boring, completely unobservable things be real?‘; the answer would be ‘Trivially, they cannot be real.’
What we mean by ‘real’ is similar to what we mean by ‘exists’ and ‘actual’ and ‘territory’ (in the map-territory sense). You could argue that the existential quantifier is too general to be meaningful, that we should make it more anthropocentric, make it mean ‘something we could observe’ or ‘something we could observe or imagine observing’ or similar. But this would simply be a semantic non-starter. As a linguistic fact, that is not what we mean by ‘reality’ or ‘existence.’ We mean the most general category to which instantiated things can belong—a highly disjunctive property, perhaps, but not on that account a meaningless one.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice Eliezer basically has spent a significant portion of this sequence saying precisely that completely boring unobservable things, in a broad enough sense of those words, can’t be real.
You list a bunch of synonyms, of which the “instantiated” at the end if one, by standard rationalists taboo these are not allowed either.
I am not saying they are meaningless; however, like most words, if you want to examine their referent closely rather than conveniently referring to it with a shorthand, you need to be able to taboo them. This does not mean they are not meaningful; like most words they are both useful and meaningful, but only as a compression of a much longer and more awkward expression, and not uniquely indispensable.
you’ll notice Eliezer basically has spent a significant portion of this sequence saying precisely that completely boring unobservable things, in a broad enough sense of those words, can’t be real.
Can you give me some examples? They seem absent from this particular post, where Eliezer explicitly allows that boring unobservable things can be real. (If he didn’t allow this, then he couldn’t substantively argue against the likelihood that they actually are real. It makes no sense to give evidence in support of the proposition that P is P.)
I allow that rationality taboo is very useful. But it is also limited. If you go deep enough, eventually all attempts to define or explain our terms will end up being circular, arbitrary, or grounded in an ostensive act. The basic verificationist fallacy is to think that all definitions are ultimately reducible to ostension; or, in its even more hyperbolic form, that they are all immediately reducible to ostension. But obviously our language does not work this way. We learn new terms by their theoretical roles and associations as much as by linking them to specific perceptions. The idea of ‘territory’ (i.e., of ‘reality,’ of ‘the world,’ of ‘what exists’ at its most general) is one of those terms that is best understood in terms of its theoretical role, not in terms of a disjunction of all the observation-statements.
If any of our words are fundamental, ‘reality’ and ‘existence’ almost certainly are. Suppose I asked you to taboo negation. Can you explain to me what negativity is, without appeal to any terms that are themselves in any way negative? Is this necessary for rational discourse involving negations?
And I disagree about taboos bottoming out: eventually you should reduce words to things that are not words, such as images and equations. If you think “real” can’t be reduced to other words or math, feel free to point at a heap of real things, a heap of non-real things, or even better machine that outputs “1″ when you show it a real thing and “0” when you show it a non-existent thing.
edit: missed last paragraph: “a negative number is one for wich there exists a number wich is not itself negative that when added to it yelds zero”. ugly and probably has a few bugs, but works as prroof of concept thoguh up in 5 seconds.
Or maybe you meant logical negation, in wich case I say “1 → 0, 0 → 1″
Quote a specific line where Eliezer’s words suggest that ‘real’ for him means simply ‘important’ or ‘interesting’ or ‘observable.’
And I disagree about taboos bottoming out: eventually you should reduce words to things that are not words, such as images and equations.
Why? If you understand my words in terms of their relationship to other words, what added value is gained in reducing to an act of mere gesturing? (Also, images and equations are still symbols, so they’re clearly not where ostension should bottom out; the meanings of images and equations require bottoming out, on your view, in something that is not itself meaningful. A better example might be a sense-datum. See Russell’s The Relation of Sense-data to Physics.)
“a negative number is one for wich there exists a number wich is not itself negative that when added to it yelds zero”
Sorry, I’m not talking about negative numbers like −5. I’m talking about negated propositions, like “2 plus 2 is not equal to five,” or “fire is not cold.” I don’t think negative numbers are conceptually basic, but I think that negation is.
For a statement to be comparable to your universe, so that it can be true or alternatively false, it must talk about stuff you can find in relation to yourself by tracing out causal links.
yea, not a very good one, I’m really tired and can’t find a better one at the moment, I remember there were some in there somewhere...
Rationalist taboo is supposed to get around the problems associated with fuzzy human words. There might still be problems with more direct forms of reference in theory, but in practice the word specific ones are usually enough.
“Not” is one of those things that reduce to math. Specifically, the formal system of boolean algebra.
But none of those things is what he means by ‘real.’ Else it would be nonsense to ask, ‘Can completely boring, completely unobservable things be real?‘; the answer would be ‘Trivially, they cannot be real.’
What we mean by ‘real’ is similar to what we mean by ‘exists’ and ‘actual’ and ‘territory’ (in the map-territory sense). You could argue that the existential quantifier is too general to be meaningful, that we should make it more anthropocentric, make it mean ‘something we could observe’ or ‘something we could observe or imagine observing’ or similar. But this would simply be a semantic non-starter. As a linguistic fact, that is not what we mean by ‘reality’ or ‘existence.’ We mean the most general category to which instantiated things can belong—a highly disjunctive property, perhaps, but not on that account a meaningless one.
If you pay attention, you’ll notice Eliezer basically has spent a significant portion of this sequence saying precisely that completely boring unobservable things, in a broad enough sense of those words, can’t be real.
You list a bunch of synonyms, of which the “instantiated” at the end if one, by standard rationalists taboo these are not allowed either.
I am not saying they are meaningless; however, like most words, if you want to examine their referent closely rather than conveniently referring to it with a shorthand, you need to be able to taboo them. This does not mean they are not meaningful; like most words they are both useful and meaningful, but only as a compression of a much longer and more awkward expression, and not uniquely indispensable.
Can you give me some examples? They seem absent from this particular post, where Eliezer explicitly allows that boring unobservable things can be real. (If he didn’t allow this, then he couldn’t substantively argue against the likelihood that they actually are real. It makes no sense to give evidence in support of the proposition that P is P.)
I allow that rationality taboo is very useful. But it is also limited. If you go deep enough, eventually all attempts to define or explain our terms will end up being circular, arbitrary, or grounded in an ostensive act. The basic verificationist fallacy is to think that all definitions are ultimately reducible to ostension; or, in its even more hyperbolic form, that they are all immediately reducible to ostension. But obviously our language does not work this way. We learn new terms by their theoretical roles and associations as much as by linking them to specific perceptions. The idea of ‘territory’ (i.e., of ‘reality,’ of ‘the world,’ of ‘what exists’ at its most general) is one of those terms that is best understood in terms of its theoretical role, not in terms of a disjunction of all the observation-statements.
If any of our words are fundamental, ‘reality’ and ‘existence’ almost certainly are. Suppose I asked you to taboo negation. Can you explain to me what negativity is, without appeal to any terms that are themselves in any way negative? Is this necessary for rational discourse involving negations?
examples: pretty much this entire post: http://lesswrong.com/lw/ezu/stuff_that_makes_stuff_happen/
And I disagree about taboos bottoming out: eventually you should reduce words to things that are not words, such as images and equations. If you think “real” can’t be reduced to other words or math, feel free to point at a heap of real things, a heap of non-real things, or even better machine that outputs “1″ when you show it a real thing and “0” when you show it a non-existent thing.
edit: missed last paragraph: “a negative number is one for wich there exists a number wich is not itself negative that when added to it yelds zero”. ugly and probably has a few bugs, but works as prroof of concept thoguh up in 5 seconds. Or maybe you meant logical negation, in wich case I say “1 → 0, 0 → 1″
Quote a specific line where Eliezer’s words suggest that ‘real’ for him means simply ‘important’ or ‘interesting’ or ‘observable.’
Why? If you understand my words in terms of their relationship to other words, what added value is gained in reducing to an act of mere gesturing? (Also, images and equations are still symbols, so they’re clearly not where ostension should bottom out; the meanings of images and equations require bottoming out, on your view, in something that is not itself meaningful. A better example might be a sense-datum. See Russell’s The Relation of Sense-data to Physics.)
Sorry, I’m not talking about negative numbers like −5. I’m talking about negated propositions, like “2 plus 2 is not equal to five,” or “fire is not cold.” I don’t think negative numbers are conceptually basic, but I think that negation is.
looks like i linked the wrong post, meant to link the previous one ( http://lesswrong.com/lw/eva/the_fabric_of_real_things/ ). Quote anywya:
yea, not a very good one, I’m really tired and can’t find a better one at the moment, I remember there were some in there somewhere...
Rationalist taboo is supposed to get around the problems associated with fuzzy human words. There might still be problems with more direct forms of reference in theory, but in practice the word specific ones are usually enough.
“Not” is one of those things that reduce to math. Specifically, the formal system of boolean algebra.