This is correct. If someone is going to add something with such high Kolmogorov complexity as non-physical minds to their ontology, they’d better have a really good reason for doing so.
...add something with such high Kolmogorov complexity as non-physical minds to their ontology...
Translation:
Words like “supernatural” demand further explanation. That is because words like “supernatural” are vague and using them in your arguments causes your arguments to become opaque. And the validity of opaque arguments is hard to judge. You have to make your arguments more transparent by defining your terms.
Reducing the vagueness of words like “supernatural”, by being more specific, or by naming concrete examples, causes your argument to become more complex (technically the complexity is already comprised in the vagueness of your terms, but ignore that for now). Your argument will be made up of a lot of additional sentences that can be false. The conclusion of an argument that is made up of a lot of statements that can be false is more unlikely to be true. That is because complex arguments can fail in a lot of different ways. You need to support each part of the argument that can be true or false and you can therefore fail to support one or more of its parts, which in turn will render the overall conclusion false.
Consider the above and what it means to accept that the supernatural does exist. If you claim that there is a category of things labeled “supernatural” you will have to define what you mean and consequently support each step of your definition. Can you be more specific, can you name some concrete examples of things that fit into the category you label “supernatural”? And more importantly, are you able to provide argumentative or evidence based support for your category?
An example of argumentative support in favor of the category of things that you call “supernatural” would be able to explain why things that you believe to belong to that category do not fit into any other category, e.g. the category that is labeled “natural”. Consider an arbitrary “natural” element, can you explain what it would take for that element to become “supernatural”?
An example of evidence based support would be able to tell how you anticipate the world to change if the category you label “supernatural” would suddenly cease to exist. Can you explain what caused you to accept the existence of “supernatural” things, what necessitated it?
If everything would be the same without a category labeled “supernatural”, why don’t you abandon it?
Be careful not to assume the conclusion, e.g. “Non-physical minds have high K complexity because my preferred Turing language assigns high K complexity to non-physical minds (and my preferred Turing language makes sense, dammit!).”. The high K complexity isn’t want makes us suspicious of “non-physical” phenomena, it’s all the reasons that make our chosen ontology the pragmatic one. As of yet we can’t get an agent to formally “update” its Turing language or choose a “natural” one, though SI folk are very interested in that problem. Steve Rayhawk had some interesting and related ideas about extracting bits of Chaitin’s constant from computation latent in the environment, which sneakily highlights some themes of Friendliness.
In things like Cartesian Dualism, mind stuff is supposed to have mental properties as essential and irreducible features.
Cartesian minds, are , conroversially, “without moving parts”. Surely that would make them low in complexity.
Right. It gets kind of funny, though, when you chase that a little further onto a tangent. Human minds think that “without moving parts” is simple because of their mechanical intuitions, and humans got their mechanical intuitions because they evolved in a universe with straightforward physical laws. Or! Human minds think “without moving parts” is simple because of their mechanical intuitions, and human minds got their mechanical intuitions because mechanical intuition is a convergent property of minds, and wherever you have a mind you will find mechanical intuition, via non-fallacious teleology. Put another way, that minds were preceded by some evolutionary process is questionable, or contingent and trivial if “true”. Given the latter interpretation, pointing out that human minds evolved is just the genetic fallacy. Given the former interpretation, though, the latter can conceivably be called the teleological fallacy. Dissolving the debate requires resolving the inherent logical uncertainty, and that is a little trickier than some seem to think.
Put another way, that minds were preceded by some evolutionary process is questionable, or contingent and trivial if “true”. Given the latter interpretation, pointing out that human minds evolved is just the genetic fallacy. Given the former interpretation, though, the latter can conceivably be called the teleological fallacy. Dissolving the debate requires resolving the inherent logical uncertainty, and that is a little trickier than some seem to think.
(Voted back up to 0.) If you downvoted Peterdjones, please, stop that. He’s doing an excellent job at showing how positions like dualism aren’t completely stupid, and downvoting him is the sort of behavior that makes LW echo chamber-y. It makes sense to downvote someone if they say something that sounds false without good explanation; I say things that sound like nonsense all the time and it’s understandable that I get downvoted for it, even if I know it’s due to misunderstanding. But Peterdjones is writing comprehensible and informative comments and I see no good reason to downvote them. If there is a good reason please explain it.
This is correct. If someone is going to add something with such high Kolmogorov complexity as non-physical minds to their ontology, they’d better have a really good reason for doing so.
Translation:
Words like “supernatural” demand further explanation. That is because words like “supernatural” are vague and using them in your arguments causes your arguments to become opaque. And the validity of opaque arguments is hard to judge. You have to make your arguments more transparent by defining your terms.
Reducing the vagueness of words like “supernatural”, by being more specific, or by naming concrete examples, causes your argument to become more complex (technically the complexity is already comprised in the vagueness of your terms, but ignore that for now). Your argument will be made up of a lot of additional sentences that can be false. The conclusion of an argument that is made up of a lot of statements that can be false is more unlikely to be true. That is because complex arguments can fail in a lot of different ways. You need to support each part of the argument that can be true or false and you can therefore fail to support one or more of its parts, which in turn will render the overall conclusion false.
Consider the above and what it means to accept that the supernatural does exist. If you claim that there is a category of things labeled “supernatural” you will have to define what you mean and consequently support each step of your definition. Can you be more specific, can you name some concrete examples of things that fit into the category you label “supernatural”? And more importantly, are you able to provide argumentative or evidence based support for your category?
An example of argumentative support in favor of the category of things that you call “supernatural” would be able to explain why things that you believe to belong to that category do not fit into any other category, e.g. the category that is labeled “natural”. Consider an arbitrary “natural” element, can you explain what it would take for that element to become “supernatural”?
An example of evidence based support would be able to tell how you anticipate the world to change if the category you label “supernatural” would suddenly cease to exist. Can you explain what caused you to accept the existence of “supernatural” things, what necessitated it?
If everything would be the same without a category labeled “supernatural”, why don’t you abandon it?
Be careful not to assume the conclusion, e.g. “Non-physical minds have high K complexity because my preferred Turing language assigns high K complexity to non-physical minds (and my preferred Turing language makes sense, dammit!).”. The high K complexity isn’t want makes us suspicious of “non-physical” phenomena, it’s all the reasons that make our chosen ontology the pragmatic one. As of yet we can’t get an agent to formally “update” its Turing language or choose a “natural” one, though SI folk are very interested in that problem. Steve Rayhawk had some interesting and related ideas about extracting bits of Chaitin’s constant from computation latent in the environment, which sneakily highlights some themes of Friendliness.
In things like Cartesian Dualism, mind stuff is supposed to have mental properties as essential and irreducible features. Cartesian minds, are , conroversially, “without moving parts”. Surely that would make them low in complexity.
Right. It gets kind of funny, though, when you chase that a little further onto a tangent. Human minds think that “without moving parts” is simple because of their mechanical intuitions, and humans got their mechanical intuitions because they evolved in a universe with straightforward physical laws. Or! Human minds think “without moving parts” is simple because of their mechanical intuitions, and human minds got their mechanical intuitions because mechanical intuition is a convergent property of minds, and wherever you have a mind you will find mechanical intuition, via non-fallacious teleology. Put another way, that minds were preceded by some evolutionary process is questionable, or contingent and trivial if “true”. Given the latter interpretation, pointing out that human minds evolved is just the genetic fallacy. Given the former interpretation, though, the latter can conceivably be called the teleological fallacy. Dissolving the debate requires resolving the inherent logical uncertainty, and that is a little trickier than some seem to think.
I didn’t follow that.
(Voted back up to 0.) If you downvoted Peterdjones, please, stop that. He’s doing an excellent job at showing how positions like dualism aren’t completely stupid, and downvoting him is the sort of behavior that makes LW echo chamber-y. It makes sense to downvote someone if they say something that sounds false without good explanation; I say things that sound like nonsense all the time and it’s understandable that I get downvoted for it, even if I know it’s due to misunderstanding. But Peterdjones is writing comprehensible and informative comments and I see no good reason to downvote them. If there is a good reason please explain it.