I normally would not make a comment that adds nothing to the conversation, but I feel I need to in this case. If you are one of those who reads the comments before the links, a warning:
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.
Also, it looks like the author is poking fun at certain trends in philosophy, such as intentionality[1], and if you don't know or care about this stuff, the article probably isn't intended for you. (I don't know or care about this stuff; I just got curious and looked it up.)
I was going to post something similar earlier. I was put off by what I perceived as a very condescending tone in the essay. I got the impression that the author envisioned his audience as children, or unintelligent adults.
After reading a couple paragraphs, I came here to see this specific comment. The extremely generic title was another clue to the substance of the content. Thanks for the time saved.
I'm feeling positively stupid - I read through the whole thing and the only point I got from it is that author paints one of the characters as some kind of very dumb postmodernist philosopher and then kills him. But in service of which point and how the point is being proven? And why after declaring that it's "too simple" author proceeds with 6000+ word parable the point of which is not exactly crystal clear?
Anybody could give me a TLDR version (I actually did read, but that didn't help) of the point of it?
You're right, I think, in complaining that this is too verbose. Yudkowsky has some very good writings, but this isn't among them. The key point, I think, is here:
"'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.
That post is part of a sequence called "Map and Territory" [1] in which Eliezer explains that your beliefs are a map, which may or may not correspond to reality, the territory which the map is supposed the represent.
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.
>“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').
This post is very long and probably not worth the time of HN's readership. On this thread[1], there's an explanation of why it is like this:
"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.
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.
The ancient scepticists tackled that problem by simply not asserting that there are no truths that can be known, they suspended judgement in the matter (which they did with literally everything, they must have been infuriating to debate with).
[+] [-] jrajav|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] greenyoda|13 years ago|reply
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intentionality
[+] [-] diego|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] muhuk|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] smsm42|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hypersoar|13 years ago|reply
"'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.
[+] [-] gelisam|13 years ago|reply
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)
[2] http://lesswrong.com/lw/eqn/the_useful_idea_of_truth/
[+] [-] archgoon|13 years ago|reply
>“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').
[+] [-] lalc|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] manamana|13 years ago|reply
"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
[+] [-] 3pt14159|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] jessedhillon|13 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] kryptiskt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fideloper|13 years ago|reply
That's the most interesting part of the question for me - our own inescapable biases.
[+] [-] baddox|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] md224|13 years ago|reply
Problem solved!
[+] [-] friendofasquid|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] finnw|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CalvinCopyright|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] fideloper|13 years ago|reply