From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Sep 01 2002 - 11:58:18 MDT
Eugen writes
>[Lee wrote to Damien]
>> I have a couple of simple questions for you.
>>
>> 1. Do you believe that there is a big hot ball of gas
>> about 8 light minutes from the Earth that we call
>> "the sun"?
>
> However, a very large fraction of people on Earth won't
> [answer "yes"]... The concept of lightminutes is
> meaningless for the vast majority of people on this
> planet, and the notion that it's a ball of plasma is
> equally outlandish.
> You would have to rephrase this..."do you see/perceive
> that big bright/warm thing in the sky yonder". All of
> the concepts should be familiar to surface-dwellers,
> and in >90% of all cases the answer will be yes (the
> rest would lie, suspect a trick question, or be insane,
> or similar).
As you realize, most people's answers to *your* question,
would not be "yes", but another question, which when
translated into the King's English would be "what---do
you mean the sun, you twit?"
So your question ;-) is as bad as mine, for them. I
guess we agree on the point: they, as well as we and
almost everyone, would be referring to something large,
hot, and far away, that everyone has an everyday common
term for (namely "the sun", suitably translated, as you
said in a part of your post that I cut).
> [Damien had written]
>>> Had I lived a thousand years ago, I would have `known'
>>> in exactly the same sense that the Sun is a small
>>> bright flaming ball which orbits about our flat world.
>
> [and Eliezer writes]
>> And you would have been *wrong*. Yes, beliefs have
>> complex causal histories. But beliefs which correspond
>> to reality remain true, and beliefs which depart from
>> reality remain false.
> That's not the point. You wouldn't know you were wrong.
Well, to you, Eugen, the "point" is evidently the state of
mind of the speaker. To Eliezer and me, it's whether the
map is in accordance with the territory. I agree with
you that the primitive guy has his *theory* about what
the sun is, and we have ours. But to me (and I'm sure
Eliezer) the point is that we are talking about the same
*referent*, that is, about the same *object* up there,
regardless of what its actual details turn out to be,
(or even whether it's an object at all!).
> The answer to the question would have been honest and
> self-consistent within your belief frame of reference.
> The symbol "Sun" would have tweaked entirely different
> representation systems. He would disagree with what
> you claim "Sun" is.
He would disagree with us only about the details of its
size, distance, and origins. If he's sensible, he'd
admit that he wasn't sure about any of that. If we
are sensible, we also concede that all knowledge is
conjectural, and it may turn out that the sun is only
symbol 0xf27d187af24de02a66a2198abf1b35486cd9ff22
in the global VR or something (as you say).
I think the key point is that he's not talking about
the moon, or that tree, or Venus, or the sky, or a
cloud near the horizon, or a bird, or that mountain,
or any one of approximately ten thousand other referents
that anthropologists could identify being represented
in his verbal world. He's talking about the same thing
we are, namely, the sun.
> Similar holds for the future. If you're a superbeing
> who understands stellar physics at reflex level the symbol
> 0xf27d187af24de02a66a2198abf1b35486cd9ff22 is associated
> with a vastly more refined model of reality than "Sun".
Yes, but you're talking symbols, no? I'm talking about
the utter referent, in exactly the same way that Dan F.
was in his post of Sat 8/31/2002 11:43 PM. Now even if
the *referent* turns out not to be in 3D space at all,
but is indeed only a computer memory location (which itself
contains only a pointer), then we continue towards the
evaluation of the ultimate referent, just as one does
with indirect addressing in computers. We all---the
primitive, you and I, the superbeing---want to talk
about the ultimate referent, because that is what is
interesting to us.
Now physiologists, semanticists, and post-modernist/
structuralists (or whatever Damien is), and computer
scientists also *sometimes* want to talk about the ultimate
referent just as we do (especially when they're getting
their cars fixed), but those people often like to talk
about the intermediate links, the symbols, the pointers,
and so on. Fine. Those symbols, pointers, and intermediate
links and their relationships need to be understood too.
Eliezer continued
>> But beliefs which correspond to reality remain true, and
>> beliefs which depart from reality remain false.
> That assumes you can always tell what is closer to reality,
> and what it isn't. Even in science, it can be damn difficult.
> Outside of science, it pays more to be in synch with the
> current consensus models.
I demur a little; I think Eliezer's statement should be
taken as it stands. When you write "That assumes you
can always tell what is closer to reality...", I disagree.
We *think* that we can tell (and not always!) what is
closer to reality, but the primitive guy thought so too.
"Even in science"? I don't think that scientists have
any better handle on reality than housewives, carpenters,
detectives, executives, programmers, sailors, insurance
salesmen, school teachers, or telephone line repairmen,
or Kalahari bushmen. Yes, scientists know more about
the sun.
You like to speak of "models". This is one of those
intermediate steps I was speaking of. Some of us
prefer to refer to the ultimate evaluation of the
pointers (which reads okay even if you aren't a
computer scientist). You choose to talk about
models, e.g., "Our model of the Earth's motion around
the sun is an ellipse", whereas we prefer "the Earth's
path around the sun is an ellipse", skipping over the
intermediate steps. It's perhaps a matter of taste,
interest, and emphasis.
Lee
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