I think Jack meant the sort of modern platonism that philosophers believe, not Tegmark-style platonism. Modern platonism is the position that, as Wikipedia says, abstract objects exist in a sense “distinct both from the sensible external world and from the internal world of consciousness”, while in Tegmark’s platonism, abstract objects exist in the same sense as the external world, and the external world is a mathematical structure.
endoself
Karma: 1,979
If you find it strange that I make no use of the qualities one calls heat, cold, moistness, and dryness…, as the philosophers [of the schools] do, I tell you that these qualities appear to me to be in need of explanation, and if I am not mistaken, not only these four qualities, but also all the others, and even all of the forms of inanimate bodies can be explained without having to assume anything else for this in their matter but motion, size, shape, and the arrangement of their parts.
-- René Descartes
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time(b) - time(a)to
time(a) - time(b)
You can make it into a bookmarklet and add it to your bookmarks bar. I don’t know what browser you’re looking for, but you can google for specific instructions if you don’t know how.
Szilard was proposing the idea of fission chain reactions in general. Of course he would be less confident if asked about a specific isotope, but he’s still right that the idea is important if he gets the isotope wrong. Anyway, the fact that he discusses uranium specifically shows that the evidence available to him points toward uranium and that this sort of reference class is not using all the evidence that they had at the time.
I think shminux is talking about the possibility of future research addressing bounded reasoners, who could be uncertain of P=NP even if it followed from ZFC.
Is that because any non-trivial action could run a chance of changing the AGI, and thus the AGI wouldn’t dare do anything at all? (If (false), disregard the following. Return 0;).
That or it takes actions changing itself without caring that they would make it worse because it doesn’t know that its current algorithms are worth preserving. Your scenario is what might happen if someone notices this problem and tries to fix it by telling the AI to never modify itself, depending on how exactly they formalize ‘never modify itself’.
Oh I see, we want physically possible computers. In that case, I can get it down to log(n) with general relativity, assuming I’m allowed to set up wormholes. (This whole thing is a bit badly defined since it’s not clear what you’re allowed to prepare in advance. Any necessary setup would presumably take Ω(n) time anyways.)
When we talk about the complexity of an algorithm, we have to decide what resources we are going to measure. Time used by a multi-tape Turing machine is the most common measurement, since it’s easy to define and generally matches up with physical time. If you change the model of computation, you can lower (or raise) this to pretty much anything by constructing your clock the right way.
Actually, only the output; sometimes you only need the first few bits. Your equation holds if you know you need to read the end of the input.
Say your bit string is s and the program you find that outputs s is p. Now you know that K(s) ≤ |p|, meaning the length of p. However, we wanted to show that K(s)>L, so the bound is in the wrong direction. We need to show that there’s no shorter program that also outputs s, which is impossible by Chaitin’s theorem.
The actual proof of Chaitin’s theorem is somewhat similar to your argument here. Basically, if we have can prove that any string has a Kolmogorov complexity greater than L, we write a program to search through all proofs until it find a proof that some string s has complexity greater than L and outputs that string. By choosing L sufficiently large, this program itself has complexity less than L, but it outputs s, contradicting K(s)>L.
I think before you make this conclusion, you have to say something about how one is supposed to pick the weights.
I agree with this concern. The theorem is basically saying that, given any sensible aggregation rule, there is a linear aggregation rule that produces the same decisions. However, it assumes that we already have a prior; the linear coefficients are allowed to depend on what we think the world actually looks like, rather than being a pure representation of values. I think people, especially those who don’t understand the proof of this theorem, are likely to misinterpret it.
There’s a Less Wrong meetup group in Waterloo if you’re interested.
I think he’s talking about the obvious fact that you’d be able to think to yourself “it seems I’m trying to maximize paperclips”, as well as the other differences in your experience that would occur for similar reasons.
Combine this with the simulation hypothesis; a universe can only simulate less computationally expensive universes. (Of course this is handwavy and barely an argument, but it’s possible something stronger could be constructed along these lines. I do think that much more work needs to be done here.)
I mean that there are other minds in the world, in the sense of other people. Neither Copenhagen nor many worlds chooses a preferred mind, but people don’t notice it as strongly in Copenhagen since they’re already used to the idea of other conscious beings.
I’m not sure what you’re getting at here. Even under Copenhagen, one can duplicate an upload as it’s running.
So Copenhagen (wave function collapse) is a theory of what I will experience, MWI is not.
Copenhagen is not a theory of what you will experience either; there are multiple minds even in Copenhagen’s single world
The problem with that is that people here aren’t familiar with many of the concepts. For example, I like Hume’s work on the philosophy of science, but I’m not a philosopher and I have no idea what it means for a position to be Humean or non-Humean. I think more people would answer without really understanding what they are answering than would take the time to figure out the questions.