From: Eliezer S. Yudkowsky (sentience@pobox.com)
Date: Tue Nov 02 1999 - 02:54:13 MST
hal@finney.org wrote:
>
> It seems to me that accepting the premise of an interventionist alien
> civilization in residence on or near this planet, as several people
> have suggested, forces you to accept as a reasonable, plausible and
> significant probability that any number of miraculous, non-scientific
> events may in fact have been real, and may still be real.
It seems to me that you're having trouble accepting the proposition that
anything is possible. In my philosophy, this is an engineering fact
verging on an axiom; the fact that I cannot assign a 100% probability to
any assertion trivially implies that I cannot assign a 0% probability to
any assertion. I don't navigate qualitatively, ruling out branches of
the future. I navigate quantitatively, using Occam's Razor.
Yes, anything is possible, but some explanations are more complex than
others. Which is more likely; that the known forces of human memetics
generated a legend, or that a Power intervened in this case, but not in
others? The information contained in the memetics specification arises
naturally from human psychology, evolution, and ultimately the laws of
physics; on a fundamental level, it requires almost nothing that we
haven't assumed already. Unless you can find an interventionist
specification for some set of miracles that compactly explains why the
Power intervened in these cases but not in other, similar cases, then
your specification pretty much assumes what it's supposed to explain,
requiring a much greater quantity of information to specify. Under the
information-theoretic formulation of Occam's Razor, which is what I
usually use, this would mean the first explanation is correct.
And while I agree that "Don't use Powers to explain things" has,
historically, great value as a heuristic, cognition doesn't dictate
external reality. If my model of the Universe predicts local and
interventionist Powers, and a model that lacks said Powers is more
complex and in fact contains characteristics that are obviously assumed
solely to prevent said Powers from being there, then Occam's Razor - the
rule underlying the no-Powers heuristic - takes over and makes the first
explanation correct. Because the *real* heuristic is that you can't
assume what you're trying to prove; that's why Power-based explanations
don't *work*, they attribute the blueness of the sky to someone's
intention that the sky be blue, and then refuse to explain the
intention. That explanation contains as much information as what it
explains. The simplest explanation is *not* "The lady down the block is
a witch; she did it," because you haven't explained her motives.
Reductive explanations are far more compact, informationally; you can
explain complex surface behaviors by reference to simple elements and
rules of interaction. And since we're in a reductive reality, and our
world *is* made up of interacting elements, Occam's Razor works.
--
sentience@pobox.com Eliezer S. Yudkowsky
http://pobox.com/~sentience/tmol-faq/meaningoflife.html
Running on BeOS Typing in Dvorak Programming with Patterns
Voting for Libertarians Heading for Singularity There Is A Better Way
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