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From my article:
[I]sn’t the difficulty of changing an explanation at least partly a property not of the explanation itself but of whoever is trying to change it? If I’m having difficulty changing it, maybe that’s because I lack imagination. Or maybe I’m just new to that field and an expert could easily change it. In which case the difficulty of changing an explanation is, again, not an objective property of that explanation but a subjective property of its critics. How could subjective properties be epistemologically fundamental?
From my article:
[D]epending on context, being hard to change can be a bad thing. For example, ‘tight coupling’ is a reason software can be hard to change, and it’s considered bad because it reduces maintainability.
Deutsch’s stance in my own words:
The distinguishing characteristic between rationality and irrationality is that rationality is the search for good explanations. All progress comes from the search for good explanations. So the distinction between good vs explanations is epistemologically fundamental.
A good explanation is hard to vary “while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” (BoI chapter 1 glossary.) A bad explanation is easy to vary.
For example, the Persephone myth as an explanation of the seasons is easy to change without impacting its ability to explain the seasons. You could arbitrarily replace Persephone and other characters and the explanation would still ‘work’. The axis-tilt explanation of the earth, on the other hand, is hard to change without breaking it. You can’t just replace the axis with something else, say.
The quality of a theory is a matter of degrees. The harder it is to change a theory, the better that theory is. When deciding which explanation to adopt, we should “choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.” (BoI chatper 9; see similar remark in chapter 8.)
From my article:
[I]sn’t the difficulty of changing an explanation at least partly a property not of the explanation itself but of whoever is trying to change it? If I’m having difficulty changing it, maybe that’s because I lack imagination. Or maybe I’m just new to that field and an expert could easily change it. In which case the difficulty of changing an explanation is, again, not an objective property of that explanation but a subjective property of its critics. How could subjective properties be epistemologically fundamental?
Deutsch says rationality means seeking good explanations, so without a step-by-step guide on how to seek good explanations, we cannot know when we are being irrational. That’s bad for error correction.
Popper formalized much of his epistemology, such as the notions of empirical content and degrees of falsifiability. Why hold Deutsch to a different standard? Why couldn’t he formalize the steps for finding the quality of a given explanation?
No, it’s asking for a formalization of rational decision-making, which is a related but separate issue. Given a set of explanations (after they’ve already been created), what non-creative sorting algorithm do we use to find the best one?
Isn’t this asking for a formalization of creativity, which is impossible?
No, see #3706. I’m open to user input (within reason). That covers any creative parts. The non-creative parts can be automated by definition.
Isn’t this basically asking for a specification of the creative program? Isn’t this effectively an AGI project?
Deutsch says to choose between explanations “according to how good they are” – note the plural.
What if I can only come up with one explanation? Can I just go with that one? What if it’s bad but still the best I could do? He leaves such questions open.
Deutsch contradicts his yardstick for understanding a computational task. He says that you haven’t understood a computational task if you can’t program it. His method of decision-making based on finding good explanations is a computational task. He can’t program it, so he hasn’t understood it.
Even if we allow creative user input, eg a score for the quality of an explanation, we run into all kinds of open questions, such as what upper and lower limits to use for the score, and unexpected behavior, such as criticisms pushing an explanations score beyond those limits.
Isn't every theory infinitely underspecified ?
This stance is presumably a version of the epistemological cynicism I identify here.
Deutsch leaves open how we find out how hard to vary an explanation is. We need more details. In some cases it’s obvious, but we need a general description for less-obvious cases.
Deutsch’s stance in my own words:
The distinguishing characteristic between rationality and irrationality is that rationality is the search for good explanations. We make progress by searching for good explanations.
A good explanation is hard to vary “while still accounting for what it purports to account for.” (BoI chapter 1 glossary.) A bad explanation is easy to vary.
For example, the Persephone myth as an explanation of the seasons is easy to change without impacting its ability to explain the seasons. You could arbitrarily replace Persephone and other characters and the explanation would still ‘work’. The axis-tilt explanation of the earth, on the other hand, is hard to change without breaking it. You can’t just replace the axis with something else, say.
The quality of a theory is a matter of degrees. The harder it is to change a theory, the better that theory is. When deciding which explanation to adopt, we should “choose between [explanations] according to how good they are…: how hard to vary.” (BoI chatper 9; see similar remark in chapter 8.)
The act of making different types of idea jibe (propositional ideas, feelings etc.), doesn’t seem to me to be best explained as a rational process. They don’t have a shared metric or inter-translatability that would enable comparison. If feelings and other non-rational mental contents cannot be reduced to explicit reasons, then the process of integrating them cannot itself be arrived at through reasoning alone. This doesn’t mean reason cannot critique feelings or other non-rational content, only that the integrative process itself operates differently than rational deliberation.
Thanks for asking good questions.
Is it accurate to view reason more as a process than a static state?
Yes.
Where the process might be summed up by
1. Being open to criticism
2. Truth-seeking (commitment to getting ideas to jibe)
Yes. Aka ‘common-preference finding’ aka ‘fun’.
Some of the virtues that @benjamin-davies has put together are part of it, too.
Thanks for asking good questions.
Is it accurate to view reason more as a process than a static state?
Yes.
Where the process might be summed up by
1. Being open to criticism
2. Truth-seeking (commitment to getting ideas to jibe)
Yes. Aka ‘common-preference finding’.
Some of the virtues that @benjamin-davies has put together are part of it, too.
Maybe I don’t understand the question, but I don’t think there’s a one-size-fits-all criterion to use for that scenario. It depends on the content of the ideas and how they conflict exactly.
All I can say without more info is that we can try to criticize ideas and adopt the ones with no pending criticisms. That’s true for any kind of idea – explicit, inexplicit, conscious, unconscious, executable, etc. See #2281.
Yeah. I mean finding unanimous consent between different kinds of ideas generally, not just between ideas about rationality. See also #3049 and #2281.
[A]ny system only ever has input, output, and functions that determine how that output is generated. What else is there?
Minds don’t necessarily output anything. Also, they don’t just run existing functions, they create new ones.
Don't you think our particular perspective (which is filtered through the body as sense perception) affects our conceptual system and ways we understand ideas?
Parochially. Culture has more impact.
Why would an AGI use spacial metaphors like understand, arrive, close to understand ideas?
Because it would be a product of our culture and speak English.