If I understand correctly, by “discreteness” you mean that it simply says that one agent can know neither the meaning of symbols used by another agent nor the “degree” of grokking the meaning. Just cannot say anything.
This is correct, but the underlying reason why this is correct is the same as why solipsism or the simulation hypothesis cannot be disproven (or proven!).
So yeah, I think there is no tangible relationship to the alignment problem, except that it corroborates that we couldn’t have 100% (literally, probability=1) certainty of alignment or safety of whatever we create, but it was obvious even without this philosophical argument.
So, I removed that paragraph about Quine’s argument from the post.
If I understand correctly, by “discreteness” you mean that it simply says that one agent can know neither the meaning of symbols used by another agent nor the “degree” of grokking the meaning. Just cannot say anything.
This is correct, but the underlying reason why this is correct is the same as why solipsism or the simulation hypothesis cannot be disproven (or proven!).
So yeah, I think there is no tangible relationship to the alignment problem, except that it corroborates that we couldn’t have 100% (literally, probability=1) certainty of alignment or safety of whatever we create, but it was obvious even without this philosophical argument.
So, I removed that paragraph about Quine’s argument from the post.