Anyway, here’s the basis of my question: tulips do exist. They’re real, mind independent things and they are part of the furniture of the universe. Any god or AI who came into our universe would have an incomplete understanding of this universe if they failed to include tulips in their story.
Tulips objectively exist as a fuzzy cluster in configuration space, and if an AI were to list all facts about the world, this would be one of them. But unlike us, an AI or god doesn’t necessarily have a reason to notice this clustering or make any use of it. It’s kind of like 22581959 being prime is an objective fact that you and I can discover, but don’t necessarily have any reason to notice or make use of.
BTW, Eliezer argued, and I agree with, that this kind of objective clustering can’t be used directly to define morally relevant concepts like “people”.
Tulips objectively exist as a fuzzy cluster in configuration space, and if an AI were to list all facts about the world, this would be one of them.
I was being a bit ambiguous: I mean to talk about concrete individual tulips, not the species. Even given the framework in ’The Cluster Structure...”, each actual tulip is a point in thingspace, not a cluster.
If an AI were to list all facts about the world, it would list that the wavefunction of the universe can be approximately factored into X, where X corresponds to what we would call an individual tulip. (Note that an individual tulip is also actually a cluster in configuration space, because it’s a blob of amplitude-factor, not a single point in configuration space. Of course this cluster is much smaller than the cluster of all tulips.)
Tulips objectively exist as a fuzzy cluster in configuration space, and if an AI were to list all facts about the world, this would be one of them. But unlike us, an AI or god doesn’t necessarily have a reason to notice this clustering or make any use of it. It’s kind of like 22581959 being prime is an objective fact that you and I can discover, but don’t necessarily have any reason to notice or make use of.
BTW, Eliezer argued, and I agree with, that this kind of objective clustering can’t be used directly to define morally relevant concepts like “people”.
I was being a bit ambiguous: I mean to talk about concrete individual tulips, not the species. Even given the framework in ’The Cluster Structure...”, each actual tulip is a point in thingspace, not a cluster.
If an AI were to list all facts about the world, it would list that the wavefunction of the universe can be approximately factored into X, where X corresponds to what we would call an individual tulip. (Note that an individual tulip is also actually a cluster in configuration space, because it’s a blob of amplitude-factor, not a single point in configuration space. Of course this cluster is much smaller than the cluster of all tulips.)
Okay, that answers my question, thanks.