tristanhaze has not written any posts yet.
tristanhaze has not written any posts yet.
Why is it OK to use deduction theorem, though? In standard modal logics like K and S5 the deduction theorem doesn't hold (otherwise you could assume P, use necessitation to get []P, and then use deduction theorem to get P -> []P as a theorem).
Would be good to see some more references and discussion of illusionism as a view in its own right. For my money the recent work of Wolfgang Schwarz on imaginary foundations and sensor variables gives a powerful explanation of why we might have this illusion.
I'd be interested to hear how this compares with Wolfgang Schwarz's ideas in 'Imaginary Foundations' and 'From Sensor Variables to Phenomenal Facts'. Sounds like there's some overlap, and Schwarz has a kind of explanation for why the hard problem might arise that you might be able to draw on.
Link to the second of the papers mentioned: https://www.umsu.de/papers/sensorfacts.pdf
Very interesting. I'm stuck on the argument about truthfulness being hard because the concept of truth is somehow fraught or too complicated. I'm envisaging an objection based on the T-schema ('<p> is true iff p').
Nate writes:
Now, in real life, building a truthful AGI is much harder than building a diamond optimizer, because 'truth' is a concept that's much more fraught than 'diamond'. (To see this, observe that the definition of "truth" routes through tricky concepts like "ways the AI communicated with the operators" and "the mental state of the operators", and involves grappling with tricky questions like "what ways of translating the AI's foreign concepts into human concepts count as manipulative?" and... (read more)
This is an instance of arc that clever people have been going through for ages, so I'd like to see more teasing apart of the broader phenomenon from the particular historical episode of the Sequences etc.
A lot of the mixed feelings and lack of identification as rationalists on the part of lots of people who found the Sequences interesting reading is to be explained in terms of their perceiving the vibe you describe and being aware of its pitfalls.
Interesting to read, here are a couple of comments on parts of what you say:
>the claim that all possibilities exist (ie. that counterfactuals are ontologically real)
'counterfactuals are ontologically real' seems like a bad way of re-expressing 'all possibilities exist'. Counterfactuals themselves are sentences or propositions, and even people who think there's e.g. no fact of the matter with many counterfactuals should agree that they themselves are real.
Secondly, most philosophers who would be comfortable with talking seriously about possibilities or possible worlds as real things would not go along with Lewis in holding them to be concrete. The view that possibilities really truly exist is quite mainstream and doesn't commit you to modal... (read more)
Ramsey could be on the list too but I guess his tragically short life makes it hard to do some of the cells.
Maybe a bit off-colour to call the fact that three of Wittgenstein's brothers committed suicide 'delicious'...
Wittgenstein had so many ideas and is such a difficult thinker that I think one ought to read him before secondary sources. Also he's a wonderful writer.
I think there's a potentially confusing fact which you're neglecting in this post, namely the reality of literature as territory not map. If you're interested in literature, then when you read it you get lots of knowledge of what e.g. certain books contain, what certain authors wrote, and that can be very instructive not just within literature. I'd like to see you and others with this kind of viewpoint wrestle more with this kind of consideration.
Recent news reminded me of point 5 here (found again with the help of a chatbot). I wonder if this is being re-thought now.