http://vimeo.com/3981759 – Economics of A.I.

http://vimeo.com/4007677 – Hard Takeoff Panel – Robin Hanson & Hugo de Garis

I finally abandoned Many Worlds (MWI). Basically, I finally realized that QM actually implies a failure of reductionism. I now believe all the problems of QM come from conflating what are really different irreducible levels of reality. It’s no surprise that Yudkowsky and co. are many-worlds believers, I now think this is a gross confusion arising from the attempt to interpret reality with a single-level model of causality (reductionism).

Listen:

“The delving of the dark energy diving through the sea of starry treasure powers the perfect spheres of the rain-drops ringing Paris, and the wetness in the eyes of the actress reflects the dripping candy floss orbs eaten on the amusement wheel, whose rotation sparks the royal crystal glass held in hand, cupping the champagne from the court of Champagne’”

There now. Doesn’t that do more for you all than years of posts on Bayesian rationality ever will?

Bayesian Induction alone is never going to work. The reason is this: to avoid computational intractability, many different types of knowledge representations are required. Induction alone can’t provide the interfaces between the different representations, you need a system of mapping between different representations and analogy formation does that.

Further, Induction itself can be reinterpreted as just another analogy, since Induction involves a mapping between the *functional* properties of things – it depends on causal mappings, which rely on the fact that the mapping between states at two different time coordinates is ’smooth’ or ‘continuous’.

Academics have to be blind to overlook this whoppingly obvious fact.

To quote Hofstadler again;

“One should not think of analogy-making as a special variety of reasoning (as in the dull and uninspiring phrase “analogical reasoning and problem-solving,” a long-standing cliché in the cognitive-science world), for that is to do analogy a terrible disservice. After all, reasoning and problem-solving have (at least I dearly hope!) been at long last recognized as lying far indeed from the core of human thought. If analogy were merely a special variety of something that in itself lies way out on the peripheries, then it would be but an itty-bitty blip in the broad blue sky of cognition. To me, however, analogy is anything but a bitty blip — rather, it’s the very blue that fills the whole sky of cognition — analogy is everything, or very nearly so, in my view.”

Ref:
Presidential Lectures:DouglasR.Hofstadter

Another example of the blinkered nature of academics is the so-called Newcomb’s Problem. What problem? You take the one box only, I don’t need some super-duper decision theory to tell me this whoppingly obvious fact, just plain old Geddesian common sense.

Also, you have an interesting definition of “following”; Hofstadter has been on about analogy formation for the better part of three decades and, to my knowledge, work in this direction hasn’t achieved anywhere near the success that Bayesian induction has. Nice try, though.

Unfortunately the ideas still must have the status of ‘wild speculation’ at this time. *I know* I’m right about everything of course, but unfortunately rigorous formulations require a lot of brain-power and the time and money to spend all day and all night working on it, which I don’t have and can’t do, respectively.

All I can do is state the facts and hope someone picks up on it. I have finally seen a hint of a ‘break’ on OB with Robin Hanson’s threads on the low-entropy puzzle – which I’m sure is the beginning of the chain of reasoning which will eventually validate my ideas – Hanson has realized something is very wrong with standard thermodynamics. This *must* be pursued further.

Also, Douglas Hofstadler (one of the worl’d top AI researchers) is following my line on analogy formulation. In a recent interview in ‘Scientific American’ he states:

“I’m working on a book with a French colleague, Emmanuel Sander, which is about how I see analogy as being the core of all of human thought”

Link:

Hofstadter Interview