And yet the problem is commonly ignored routinely and nonchalantly, even here, where people pride themselves on fearless and consistent reductionism.
Yes. To be honest it looks like local version of reductionism takes the ‘everything is reducible’ in declarative sense, declaring that concepts it uses are reducible regardless of their reducibility.
Thanks! That’s spot on. It’s what I think much of those ‘utility functions’ here are. Number of paperclips in the universe, too. Haven’t seen anything like that reduced to formal definition of any kind.
The way humans actually decide on actions, is by evaluating the world-difference that the action causes in world-model, everything being very partial depending to available time. The probabilities are rarely possible to employ in the world model because of the combinatorial space exploding real hard. (also, Bayesian propagation on arbitrary graphs is np-complete, in very practical way of being computationally expensive). Hence there isn’t some utility function deep inside governing the choices. Doing the best is mostly about putting limited computing time to best use.
Then there’s some odd use of abstractions—like, every agent can be represented with utility function therefore whatever we talk about utilities is relevant. Never mind that this utility function is trivial 1 for doing what agent chooses 0 otherwise and everything just gets tautological.
Yes. To be honest it looks like local version of reductionism takes the ‘everything is reducible’ in declarative sense, declaring that concepts it uses are reducible regardless of their reducibility.
Greedy reductionism.
Thanks! That’s spot on. It’s what I think much of those ‘utility functions’ here are. Number of paperclips in the universe, too. Haven’t seen anything like that reduced to formal definition of any kind.
The way humans actually decide on actions, is by evaluating the world-difference that the action causes in world-model, everything being very partial depending to available time. The probabilities are rarely possible to employ in the world model because of the combinatorial space exploding real hard. (also, Bayesian propagation on arbitrary graphs is np-complete, in very practical way of being computationally expensive). Hence there isn’t some utility function deep inside governing the choices. Doing the best is mostly about putting limited computing time to best use.
Then there’s some odd use of abstractions—like, every agent can be represented with utility function therefore whatever we talk about utilities is relevant. Never mind that this utility function is trivial 1 for doing what agent chooses 0 otherwise and everything just gets tautological.