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Value isn’t in the object itself. It’s in the owner’s mind. If the owner doesn’t consent to the replacement, the value may well be lower.

For example, imagine somebody replacing your teddy bear from childhood with the ‘same’ one but new.

Not to be a stickler but I think you mean ‘inexplicit’.

Implicit = not said directly but implied. Can still accompany explicit speech though.
Inexplicit = not expressed in words or symbols.

At least that’s how I use the terms.

…as the postmoderns pointed out…

Citation needed.

I think you misunderstand both my own argument and the meaning of ambiguity.

You’re saying that, to hold a true idea in the sense of absolute truth in my head, I’d have to have perfect definitions, which require infinite amounts of information, and having all that information is impossible. Right?

While you obviously know what those words mean, you do not have absolute, 100% defined boundaries of what they refer to and what they don't.

I think it’s enough to know what the words mean for the idea to be true. We don’t have to have “100% defined boundaries”.

Truth means correspondence with the facts (Tarski). Not infinite precision.

I think a ‘trick’ cynics use (not maliciously, still I like to call it a trick) is to set an unrealistically high standard for truth. And then, when no idea ends up being able to meet that standard, they say the idea can’t be true.

You probably missed this in The Beginning of Infinity by David Deutsch: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/gTvuzxY-SXg

Follow me on Instagram for more fitness tips: https://www.instagram.com/lets.recomp/

‘Are all our ideas false? 🤔’ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MrQ9lrYGObc

If it introduces falsehood only fallibly, then it might fail sometimes, and the target idea would still be true after all. So no, it would need some infallible way – ie, a criterion of truth.

In this related article, I write:

If we could not speak the truth, our minds would have to have some subconscious mechanism that evaluates our ideas and detects and rejects true ones, or modifies them a bit to introduce errors, before we become aware of them. Otherwise, we could still utter the truth, if only “by chance”, as Xenophanes says. Such a mechanism would itself depend on a criterion of truth. So the epistemological cynics, though inspired by Popper’s fallibilism, and even though they would call themselves ‘fallibilists’, are not actually fallibilists. Whether they realize it or not, they rely on the existence of a criterion of truth and (simultaneously, ironically) reject the possibility that some of our knowledge is true.

… for absolute truth, the boundaries of meaning of your terms must be completely determined.

You seem to be using ‘absolute truth’ differently than others. Wikipedia:

Absolute truth is a statement that is true at all times and in all places. It is something that is always true no matter what the circumstances. It is a fact that cannot be changed. For example, there are no round squares.

This is what I think Popper had in mind. Also that absolute truth leaves no room for deviation (which I think is the reason it’s “true at all times and in all places”). Nothing related to definitions or meanings. Popper wasn’t very interested in definitions.

Hi Rob, welcome to Veritula. It’s nice to meet another software engineer. Be sure to read ‘How Does Veritula Work?’ and ‘How Do Bounties Work?’ to make the most of V.

Re: definitions, you raise an argument others have made before, namely that language has some unavoidable ambiguity or incomplete information, which necessarily introduces error. I already addressed that argument in the article linked in the discussion header:

I don’t know if I agree that natural language is always ambiguous, but even if so, I don’t see how that implies error. We can make ambiguous but true statements. ‘I’m currently located in a hemisphere’ is ambiguous as to which hemisphere, but it’s still true. We could be silly and ask, on which planet? This one. Earth. We all know what we’re talking about.

Therefore, I disagree that we need perfect definitions or infinite precision to find absolutely true ideas. (But correct me if I’m wrong to think you’re making the same argument.)

I suggest you read the article in full, otherwise you may inadvertently make more arguments that have been addressed: https://libertythroughreason.com/fallibilism-vs-cynicism/

There’s also https://blog.dennishackethal.com/posts/don-t-take-fallibilism-too-far.

Our ideas can be 100% true in the sense of absolute truth. It’s possible to come up with true ideas. There’s no criterion of truth to tell that they’re true, but they can still be true.

Whether the above idea (#4751) is refuted or not, there are no viable alternative solutions to the "PROBLEM" raised in #4752.
(Criticize this with alternative solutions).

Assumption A1: Only programs that are people can, while running, constitute qualia/experience/subjectivity/consciousness.

To clarify and add on to #4805: No, we couldn't program an LLM (on its own) to do random variation in the sense constituting evolution, because all of the randomly chosen changes to its outputs are still implicit from its current knowledge (training data + design from programmers). There is also no means of criticism that are not also implicit: any niche or criterion it generates, then seeks to satisfy, was derived again from its existing knowledge. It is a closed system (whether or not we have run it such as to reveal everything it implies!).

#4806 is saying: variations of knowledge being agnostic to that knowledge's meaning means they are not implicit from it, else implicit doesn't mean anything. So #4806 is only really asking if what matters is the source of knowledge, and that isn't really a criticism of #4805.
Criticism #4875 applies to #4806, as shown.

Yes, everything is not implied by everything else, so I think what we must mean by implicit is: can be deduced from/assembled using available transformations.

For knowledge to be truly novel in the sense of having come from creativity, it must not be deducible. Ambient, unjustified substrate is "taken from the environment" and filtered by selection. What survives can be increasingly truth-containing.

Mutations to a substrate, meaning blind mutations, not specific or designed, must not be implicit from the substrate; the result of their application cannot be deduced in any way... Otherwise the knowledge they might contain would already have been present...

Knut, you’ve won the bounty. You need to integrate with Stripe to get paid.

I agree this feature should be optional and toggleable but that doesn’t address its (potential) shortcomings. It just kinda hides them.

I’m saying it’s not clear to be how deeply nested comments would be shown.

If I’m understanding you correctly, you dislike having to scroll up and down in a discussion. You see empty space on the right and you think it should be filled. Hence your suggestion to put top-level ideas next to each other rather than on top of each other.

But then where do comments on each top-level idea go? Do they still go underneath? Nesting needs indentation. So that means deep nesting gets lots of indentation. So there’ll still be plenty of empty space.

Those are the kinds of things we’d need to figure out to have a mature design proposal ready for implementation.

Thanks! Creativity is one of the most interesting ideas in DD's philosophy. If you come across any articles or resources on it that you've found helpful, I'd love for you to send them over.

I'm actually in the channel, just haven't been very active.

Upon review, we should maybe say instead that personhood should not be defined solely in terms of tractability, which the bounty terms are not clear about. As it stands (bounty aside), I find myself still seeing tractability as an important aspect of epistemology and the mystery of personhood/knowledge creation, a hunch reinforced as I continue reading through "Why Philosophers Should Care About Computational Complexity" by Scott Aaronson: https://www.scottaaronson.com/papers/philos.pdf

Removed hyphenation

I agree that tractability is related to a given problem space, and that creativity is about reshaping the problem space, among other things. Given that I've been thinking of the problem space as the space of all explanations, I'm not sure where I stand... Maybe the "space of all explanations" framing is wrongheaded, because a mind never has any actionable knowledge of that space? We can discuss the space of all explanations in some sense, but we can't organize or describe it in any substantive way...

Also, per #4865, you helped me remember that personhood could involve intractable algorithms, but ones which only ever run with small inputs, since that can still be perfectly practical. Whether or not that means the whole person is a tractable algorithm or not, I'm not sure.

Between these points I think this is enough for you to claim the bounty, because it does argue that personhood "should not be defined in terms of tractability", per the bounty terms (italics mine, here). Tractability does not help explain personhood. Or, in any case, it doesn't seem like this line of discussion will be very fruitful (but this could itself be mistaken).

"Secondarily" meaning:
Implementations of an algorithm inherit the algorithm’s asymptotic behavior. If an implementation has a different asymptotic behavior than one algorithm, it is effectively a different algorithm.