Category: Philosophy

Learning around the Non Sequiturs

Mark DavisLeave a comment

If Solomonoff Induction and its conceptual neighbors have not yet found application in enhancing human reasoning, there are definitely areas where they have potential value.  Automatic, unsupervised learning of sequential patterns is an intriguing area of application. It also fits closely with the sequence inferencing problem that is at the heart of algorithmic information theory.

Pragmatically, the problem of how children learn the interchangeability of words that is the basic operation of grammaticality is one area where this kind of system might be useful. Given a sequence of words or symbols, what sort of information is available for figuring out the grammatical groupings? Not much beyond memories of repetitions, often inferred implicitly.

Could we apply some variant of Solomonoff Induction at this point? Recall that we want to find the most compact explanation for the observed symbol stream. Recall also that the form of the explanation is a computer program of some sort that consists of logical functions. It turns out that creating a program that, for every possible sequence, finds the absolutely most compact program is uncomputable. The notion of what is “uncomputable” (or incomputable) is a mathematical result that has to do with how many different potential programs must be investigated to try to find the shortest one. If that number grows faster than the length of a program, it becomes uncomputable. Being uncomputable is not a death sentence, however. We can come up with approximate methods that try to follow the same procedure because any method that incrementally compresses the explanatory program will get closer to the hypothetical best program.

Sequitur by Nevill-Manning and Witten is an example of a procedure that approximates Algorithmic Information Theory optimization for string sequences.… Read the rest

Adaptive Ethics via iBooks Author

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For fun, I decided to try writing a partial post using Apple’s iBooks Author. The application runs on Mac OS X Lion and is available for free. It appears to be derivative of Keynote, which explains Apple’s rapid development of the authoring tool.

There are some limitations, though. I couldn’t embed equations from Word for Mac 2011 without converting them into images. It also only publishes to iBookstore,  although you can export to PDF (as below). There are few PDF export options, however, and the metadata and labeling includes Apple logos.

Tearing apart the .iba format via unzip showed a collection of .jpg and .tiff images, a binary color array, and an .xml specification of the project. Fairly simple, but not including the compiled .epub file that iBookstore generally takes.

Total elapsed time: 1 hour (including download/installation). With improvements to the software and with more experience, that should be halved.

… Read the rest

Solomonoff Induction, Truth, and Theism

Mark Davis1 Comment

LukeProg of CommonSenseAtheism fame created a bit of a row when he declared that Solomonoff Induction largely rules out theism, continuing on to expand on the theme:

If I want to pull somebody away from magical thinking, I don’t need to mention atheism. Instead, I teach them Kolmogorov complexity and Bayesian updating. I show them the many ways our minds trick us. I show them the detailed neuroscience of human decision-making. I show them that we can see (in the brain) a behavior being selected up to 10 seconds before a person is consciously aware of ‘making’ that decision. I explain timelessness.

There were several reasons for the CSA community to get riled up about these statements and they took on several different forms:

  • The focus on Solomonoff Induction/Kolmogorov Complexity is obscurantist in using radical technical terminology.
  • The author is ignoring deductive arguments that support theist claims.
  • The author has joined a cult.
  • Inductive claims based on Solomonoff/Kolmogorov are no different from Reasoning to the Best Explanation.

I think all of these critiques are partially valid, though I don’t think there are any good reasons for thinking theism is true, but the fourth one (which I contributed) was a personal realization for me. Though I have been fascinated with the topics related to Kolmogorov since the early 90s, I don’t think they are directly applicable to the topic of theism/atheism.  Whether we are discussing the historical validity of Biblical claims or the logical consistency of extensions to notions of omnipotence or omniscience, I can’t think of a way that these highly mathematical concepts have direct application.

But what are we talking about? Solomonoff Induction, Kolmogorov Complexity, Minimum Description Length, Algorithmic Information Theory, and related ideas are formalizations of the idea of William of Occam (variously Ockham) known as Occam’s Razor that given multiple explanations of a given phenomena, one should prefer the simpler explanation.… Read the rest

Are Theists Obligated to Create a Simulated Universe?

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I recently re-read Mark Alan Walker‘s manuscript (unpublished?), A Neo-Irenaean Theodicy: Evolution, Playing God and Becoming Gods. The argument is straightforward and expands on the Theodicy of Irenaeus: God created evil as part of the process of letting His children–humanity–develop their own moral faculties as part of becoming gods ourselves. This quiet trick contra Augustinian Theodicy made it fashionable to treat The Fall as somewhat metaphorical that was inverted by the reclamation of the potential for moral perfection by Mary and Jesus.

Professor Walker’s paper takes Irenaeus further by suggesting that the obligation of becoming like God extends further towards perhaps genetic manipulation of ourselves, for if by having bigger, better brains makes us less likely to sin and more like God, then that transforms into a moral obligation. The argument seems to prescribe even more radical actions, too: are theists morally obligated, following our ascension as gods, to create new universes? Are simulations mandatory? Should Christians begin now?

… Read the rest

Simulated Experimental Morality

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I’m deep in Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. It’s also only about the third book I’ve tried to read exclusively on the iPad, but I am finally getting used to the platform. The core thesis of Pinker’s book is something that I have been experimentally testing on people for several years: our moral facilities and decision-making are gradually improving. For Pinker, the thesis is built up elaborately from basic estimates of death rates due to war and homicide between non-state societies and state societies. It comes with an uncomfortable inversion of the nobility of the savage mind: primitive people had a lot to fight about and often did.

My first contact with the notion that morality is changing and improving was with Richard Dawkin’s observation in The God Delusion that most modern Westerners feel very uncomfortable with the fire bombing of Tokyo in World War II, the saturation bombing of Hanoi, nuclear attack against civilian populations, or treating people inhumanely based on race or ethnicity. Yet that wasn’t the case just decades ago. More moral drift can be seen in changing sentiments concerning the rights of gay people to marry. Experimentally, then, I would ask, over dinner or conversation, about simple moral trolley experiments and then move on to ask whether anyone would condone nuclear attack against civilian populations. There is always a first response of “no” to the latter, which reflects a gut moral sentiment, though a few people have agreed that it may be “permissible” (to use the language of these kinds of dilemmas) in response to a similar attack and when there may be “command and control assets” mixed into the attack area.… Read the rest

Singularities as Child’s Play

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Dystopian literature is mostly about the unintended consequences of technological change.  Cory Doctorow expands on this theme related to technological singularities on Boing Boing:

Indeed, it seems to me that in literature, the Singularity’s role is to serve as a straw-man for critiquing technology as a one-sided panacea.

Fair enough. Literature and drama are all about conflicts and Man vs. Technology is at least one of the primary conflicts of the modern age.

Heaven stuffBut why is it that we are drawn to this notion of some kind of transcendent mechanism that alleviates us of the struggles of everyday existence? It’s a central theme of Hinduism (get off the wheel of existence), Buddhism (existence is void; free the mind of your very desire of it), Christianity and Islam (post-life existence is better and more perfect). I think it arises from the same predisposition for magical thinking combined with hope that is part of imaginative play among children. In play, the child creates an imagined and utopian existence where their alter egos typically overcome all obstacles. There are a few sex differences that are part conditioning and likely partly biological, but the patterns are remarkably utopian in terms of the dispositions of the children’s play avatars.

The translation of this into adult formulations of heavens filled with inchoate goodness and light (or many virgins), or even an emptiness that defies ordinary characterization, is just an extension of this urge to play. In a technological world, singularities are the secular equivalent, but with the additional propellant of observed technological change that surrounds all of us.… Read the rest

Evolution, Rationality, and Artificial Intelligence

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We now know that our cognitive facilities are not perfectly rational. Indeed, our cultural memory has regularly reflected that fact. But we often thought we might be getting a handle on what it means to be rational by developing models for what good thinking might be like and using it in political, philosophical, and scientific discourse. The models were based on nascent ideas like the logical coherence of arguments, internal consistency, few tautologies, and the consistency with empirical data.

But an interesting and quite basic question is why should we be able to formulate logical rules and create increasingly impressive systems of theory and observations given a complex evolutionary history. We have big brains, sure, but they evolved to manage social relationships and find resources–not to understand the algebraic topology of prime numbers or the statistical oddities of quantum mechanics–yet they seem well suited for these newer and more abstract tasks.

Alvin Plantinga, a theist and modern philosopher whose work has touched everything from epistemology to philosophy of religion, formulated his Evolutionary Argument Against Naturalism (EANN) as a kind of complaint that the likelihood of rationality arising from evolutionary processes is very low (really he is most concerned with the probability of “reliability,” by which means that most conclusions and observations are true, but I am substituting rationality for this with an additional Bayesian overlay).

Plantinga mostly wants to advocate that maybe our faculties are rational because God made them rather than a natural process. The response to this from an evolutionary perspective is fairly simple: evolution is an adaptive process and adaptation to a series of niche signals involves not getting those signals wrong. There are technical issues that arise here concerning how specific adaptation can result in more general rational facilities but we can, at least in principle, imagine (and investigate) bridge rules that extend out from complex socialization to encompass the deep complexities of modern morality and the Leviathan state, and the extension of optimizing spear throwing to shooting rockets into orbit.… Read the rest