shminux's Shortform

So, is he saying that he is calibrated well enough to have a meaningful "action-conditional" p(doom), but most people are not? And that they should not engage in "fake Bayesianism"? But then, according to the prevailing wisdom, how would one decide how to act if they cannot put a number on each potential action?

Thank you, I forgot about that one. I guess the summary would be "if your calibration for this class of possibilities sucks, don't make up numbers, lest you start trusting them". If so, that makes sense.

There is an emergent reason, one that lives in the minds of the agents. The universe just is. In other words, if you are a hypothetical Laplace's demon, you don't need the notion of a reason, you see it all at once, past, present and future.

Is there anything different about the orld that I should expect to observe depending on whether Platonic math “exists” in some ideal realm? If not, why would I care about this topic once I have already dissolved my confusion about what beliefs are meant to refer to?

Word of Yud is that beliefs aren't just about predicting experience. While he wrote Beliefs Must Pay Rent, he also wrote No Logical Positivist I.

(Another thing that has been going on for years is people quoting VBeliefs Must Pay Rent as though it's the whole story).

Maybe you are a logical positivist, though....you're allowed to be , and the rest of us are allowed not to be. It's a value judgement: what doesn't have instrumental value toward predicting experience can still.have terminal value.

If you are not an LP,.idealist, etc, you are interested in finding the best explanation for.your observations -- that's metaphysics. Shminux seems.sure that certain negative metaphysical claims are true -- there are No Platonic numbers, objective laws,.nor real probabilities. LP. does not allow such conclusions: it rejects both positive and negative metaphysical claim as meaningless.

The question is what would support the dogmatic version of nomic antirealism, as.opposed to the much more defensible claim that we don't know one way or the other (irrealism)

Later on in the thread, you talked about “laws of physics” as abstractions written in textbooks, made so they can be understandable to human minds. But, as a terminological matter, I think it is better to think of the laws of physics as the rules that determine how the territory functions, i.e., the structured, inescapable patterns guiding how our observations come about, as opposed to the inner structure of our imperfect maps that generate our beliefs.

The term can be used in either sense. Importantly, it can be used in both senses: the existence of in-the-mind sense doesn't preclude the existence of the in--reality sense. Maps dont necessarily correspond to reality, but they can. "Doesn't necessarily correspond " doesnt mean the same thing as necessarily doesn't correspond".

@Shminux

It is not clear whether any randomly generated world would necessarily get emergent patterns like that, but the one we live in does, at least to a degree

And maybe there is a.reason for that...and maybe the reason is the existence of Platonic in -the-territory physical laws. So there .s an argument for nomic realism. Is there an argument against? You haven't given one, just "articulated a claim".

So in your opinion, there is no reason why anything happens?

There is an emergent reason, one that lives in the minds of the agents.

But that's not the kind of reason that makes anything happen -- it's just a passive model.

The universe just is.

That isn't an argument against or for Platonic laws. Maybe it just is in a way that includes Platonic laws, maybe it isn't.

In other words, if you are a hypothetical Laplace’s demon, you don’t need the notion of a reason, you see it all at once, past, present and future.

I think you mean a hypothetical God with a 4D view of spacetime. And LD only has the ability to work out the future from a 3D snapshot. Yes, if you could see past present , you wouldn't need in-the-mind laws to.make predictions..but, again that says nothing about in-the-territory, Platonic laws. Even if God doesn't need in-the-mind laws, it's still possible that reality needs in-the-territory laws to make things happen.

“a causal or explanatory factor” is also inside the mind

Anthropics and Boltzmann brains are also in the mind. As concepts.

What's in the mind has to make sense, to fit together. Even if maths is all in the mind, maths problems still need to be solved. Saying maths is all in the mind does not tell you whether a particular theorem is true or false. Likewise , saying metaphysics is all in the mind does bot tell you that nomic realism is false, and anthropics true.

We have a meta map of the mind world relation, and if we assume a causal relation from the world to the mind, we can explain where new information comes from, and if we assume lawful behaviour in the world, we can explain regularities. Maybe these are all concepts we have, but we still need to fit them.together in a way that reduces the overall mystery, just as we still need to solve maths problems.

What do you mean by an “actual explanation”?

Fitting them.together in a way that reduces the overall mystery.

We live in it and are trying to make sense of it

And if you want us to believe that the instrumentalist picture makes the most sense, you need to argue for it. The case for realism.l, by contrast, has been made.

A more coherent question would be “why is the world partially lossily compressible from the inside”, and I don’t know a non-anthropic answer

The objective existence of physical laws, nomic realism, is a non anthropic answer which has already been put to you.

ETA

Maybe, again, we differ where they live, in the world as basic entities or in the mind as our model of making sense of the world.

...or both, since...

it is foolish to reduce potential avenues of exploration.

Yudowsky's argument that probability is subjective is flawed [LW(p) · GW(p)], because it rests on assumption that the existence of subjective probability implies the non existence of objective probabilty but the assumption is never justified. But you seem to buy into it anyway. And you seem to be basing your anti realism o n a similar unargued assumption.

Thank you for your thoughtful and insightful reply! I think there is a lot more discussion that could be had on this topic, and we are not very far apart, but this is supposed to be a "shortform" thread. 

I never liked The Simple Truth post, actually. I sided with Mark, the instrumentalist, whom Eliezer turned into what I termed back then as "instrawmantalist". Though I am happy with the part

“Necessary?” says Inspector Darwin, sounding puzzled. “It just happened. . . I don’t quite understand your question.”

Rather recently Devs the show, which, for all its flaws, has a bunch of underrated philosophical highlights, had an episode with a somewhat similar storyline.

Anyway, appreciate your perspective.

By "Platonic laws of physics" I mean the Hawking's famous question

What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes a universe for them to describe…Why does the universe go to all the bother of existing?

Re

Current physics, if anything else, is sort of antiplatonic: it claims that there are several dozens of independent entities, actually existing, called "fields", which produce the entire range of observable phenomena via interacting with each other, and there is no "world" outside this set of entities.

I am not sure if it actually "claims" that. A HEP theorist would say that QFT (the standard model of particle physics) + classical GR is our current best model of the universe, with a bunch of experimental evidence that this is not all it is. I don't think there is a consensus for an ontological claim of "actually existing" rather than "emergent". There is definitely a consensus that there is more to the world that the fundamental laws of physics we currently know, and that some new paradigms are needed to know more.

"Laws of nature" are just "how this entities are". Outside very radical skepticism I don't know any reasons to doubt this worldview.

No, I don't think that is an accurate description at all. Maybe I am missing something here.

Thanks for the link! I thought it was a different, related but a harder problem than what is described in https://iep.utm.edu/hard-problem-of-conciousness. I assume we could also try to extract what an AI "feels" when it speaks of redness of red, and compare it with a similar redness extract from the human mind. Maybe even try to cross-inject them. Or would there be still more to answer?

The testing seems easy, one person feels the quale, the other reports the feeling, they compare, what am I missing?

Yeah, I think this is exactly what I meant. There will still be boutique usage for hand-crafted computer programs just like there is now for penpals writing pretty decorated letters to each other. Granted, fax is still a thing in old-fashioned bureaucracies like Germany, so maybe there will be a requirement for "no LLM" code as well, but it appears much harder to enforce.

I think your point on infinite and cheap UI/UX customizations is well taken. The LLM will fit seamlessly one level below that. There will be no "LLM interface" just interface.

Hence the one tweak I mentioned.