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Comment by Nate_Barna2 on Surface Analogies and Deep Causes · 2008-06-22T14:28:11.000Z · LW · GW

When did I start to distrust supposed knowledge from the perceptual to the conceptual? When I recognized that when I perceive a tree my head doesn't explode because it didn't duplicate it. Aha, if I'm to trust any knowledge, including provisional, I can trust abstractions. Indeed, that's what the tree is in my brain at a significant etiological terminus. If I'm to recognize other trees and to be able to talk about them, my perceptual apparatus had better be able to abstract relevant tree-properties from trees automatically. The principle: Perceptual 2-D maps are not intrinsically superior to conceptual n-D maps. Hanson makes this sort of point very clear.

Comment by Nate_Barna2 on Grasping Slippery Things · 2008-06-17T21:49:08.000Z · LW · GW

Eliezer, if you became Reality, if you were as such a causa sui closed system, and if you were still able to change (or transcend yourself), then you might prefer analyzing various abstract choices of how to induct yourself without being able to predict in advance how you would, to trivially riding the wave of a fixed algorithmic complexity. If so, it doesn't seem this possibilistic idea of Be Acquainted Only With The Necessary would be much help.