The Simple Truth (2008)
yudkowsky.net
yudkowsky.net
This does not have much of a point. It goes on forever. It's really not that great, and doesn't give much of a take-away for its length. Even if you just want to satisfy your curiosity, you will probably walk away disappointed. The foreword contains the only real content.
Yes, there is somewhat of a point to the metaphor, but I think more horses died than sheep.
>“The sheep interact with things that interact with pebbles…” I search for an analogy. “Suppose you look down at your shoelaces. A photon leaves the Sun; then travels down through Earth’s atmosphere; then bounces off your shoelaces; then passes through the pupil of your eye; then strikes the retina; then is absorbed by a rod or a cone. The photon’s energy makes the attached neuron fire, which causes other neurons to fire. A neural activation pattern in your visual cortex can interact with your beliefs about your shoelaces, since beliefs about shoelaces also exist in neural substrate. If you can understand that, you should be able to see how a passing sheep causes a pebble to enter the bucket.”
I think the main thrust of the article is about quantum reality. (Note also the part about 'private universes').
"'I can’t create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it ‘reality’. This ‘reality’ is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘belief’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’."
I don't think the essay as a whole communicates much more than that point, but it's not a bad one.
In other words, what is described here is a sufficient, but not necessary condition for existence of the reality. Though thinking more about it, it's not sufficient either. We know people that are not able to predict or control their own thoughts and actions. They are usually considered "mentally ill", but that's beside the point - it is so only because such mode of existence is very inconvenient for the person and hinders his interactions with the society. But if there was not reality except for the said person's mind, this person still could make wrong predictions about what is going to happen. If fact, one does not have to be particularly crazy for it - many people, just this season, claim with complete belief and certainty, that they will do certain things very soon over which they have full and complete control - such as start exercising, eat healthily, cease smoking, improve their behavior in some other way, etc. Many of them will discover, some time later, that it did not happen. Does it mean something other than their own will made it so? No, I think it does not - it just means they were fallible.
So it looks like the experimenter being wrong is not either necessary not sufficient condition for the existence of the reality independent from the said experimenter. (Note of course I don't claim it does not exist - I just say the proof offered in this paragraph does not prove what it intends to prove).
I would be very thankful if you could point me towards his better writings!
It's less about the quality of writing or how quickly you can absorb it and much, much more about fascinating ideas and concepts.
And I have thoroughly enjoyed "Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality" http://www.elsewhere.org/rationality/
In this post, Eliezer is mocking philosophical arguments about the meaning of "truth", to illustrate that truth isn't that complicated: a belief is true if and only if it corresponds to reality. Eliezer has recently written a much clearer version of this viewpoint [2], in which he again uses the idea of walking off a cliff to illustrate the difference between strong beliefs and true beliefs.
[1] http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Map_and_Territory_(sequence)
Eliezer probably talks about quantum mechanics more than most philosophers, so his recent explanation [4] of how statements about day-to-day objects can be true despite the fact that only fundamental particles really exist is probably original.
[3] http://lesswrong.com/lw/frp/train_philosophers_with_pearl_an...
[4] http://lesswrong.com/lw/frz/mixed_reference_the_great_reduct...
I don't know that it's fair to say he's just a logical positivist. But he seems intent on layering LP with a lot of jargon from physics and information theory to create distinctions without difference.
"The Simple Truth" was generated by an exercise of this discipline to describe "truth" on a lower level of organization, without invoking terms like "accurate", "correct", "represent", "reflect", "semantic", "believe", "knowledge", "map", or "real".
And a summary:
The only way you can be sure your mental map accurately represents reality is by allowing a reality-controlled process to draw your mental map.
A sheep-activated pebble-tosser is a reality-controlled process that makes accurate bucket numbers.
The human eye is a reality-controlled process that makes accurate visual cortex images.
Natural human patterns of thought like essentialism and magical thinking are NOT reality-controlled processes and they don't draw accurate mental maps.
Each part of your mental map is called a "belief". The parts of your mental map that portray reality accurately are called "true beliefs".
Q: How do you know there is such a thing as "reality", and your mental map isn't all there is? A: Because sometimes your mental map leads you to make confident predictions, and they still get violated, and the prediction-violating thingy deserves its own name: reality.
[1] http://lesswrong.com/lw/66u/rewriting_the_sequences/4cj6
1 - There is no such thing as truth
2 - If [1] is correct it follows that it is internally inconsistent. Something cannot be true if truth has no meaning.
3 - Therefore [1] is not correct.
That's the most interesting part of the question for me - our own inescapable biases.
However, I do think there is a reality that is not dependant on interpretation or observation to exist; I just can't experience it without filter. But there is something there, and it's consistent, I can communicate about it with others etc... that's imperfect, it's often silly, but that's fine; I cannot dismiss my small, subjective truth just because it's not as good as some kind of objective knowledge of reality that doesn't even exist, and probably can't exist (I mean that knowledge of reality, not reality itself).
Truth is the thing we must never cease reaching towards, even though we will never reach it, or even come closer to it. Just because it's there :)
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödels_incompleteness_theorem...
Gödel's incompleteness theorems are two theorems of mathematical logic that establish inherent limitations of all but the most trivial axiomatic systems capable of doing arithmetic.
Essentially, any system of axioms will have an inconsistency of essentially the form you described. But this only says that all models will be incomplete. Eliezer is questioning -- or perhaps reminding his readers -- the relationship between models of reality and reality itself.
In other words, the only thing you "know" is that you cannot model consistently a system where truth is non-existent. You don't know that, therefore, truth exists.
And more precisely, you are only pointing out a flaw in logical truth, and logic is merely one model.
Problem solved!