From: Jef Allbright (jef@jefallbright.net)
Date: Thu Sep 15 2005 - 21:03:19 MDT
Ben -
I've been watching the last few days' discussion and wondering how closely
this relates to your position that subjective experience is primary relative
to the "objective".
I suspect both of these positions of yours may have some basis in common.
- Jef
On 9/15/05, Ben Goertzel <ben@goertzel.org> wrote:
>
>
> Just one more thing...
>
> I started out this whole silly thread by saying that:
>
> > > If probability theory as standardly deployed states that an
> observation
> > > of a non-black non-raven provides a NON-ZERO amount of evidence toward
> > > the hypothesis that all ravens are black, then this shows there is
> > > something wrong with probability theory as standardly deployed.
> > >
> > > Of cousre, an approach that yields small errors may still be valuable
> > > for practical AI purposes.
> > >
> > > However, what frustrates me about the quote you cite, and your
> attitude,
> > > is that you seem to be denying that probability theory as standardly
> > > deployed is conceptually and logically erroneous in this case --
> albeit
> > > the magnitude of its error is generally small.
>
> I admit that in my followup discussions, after making this statement,
> I manifestly failed to demonstrate its truth...
>
> Instead, I made some careless and silly errors, both with the standard
> formulation of probability theory and with my own PTL formulation. I
> apologize for this -- I'm not usually quite *that* error-prone even
> when badly overworked, but what can I say, it happens from time to
> time....
>
> However, after all that, I *still* hold the same intuition that I had
> originally. And this is with the probabilistic arguments regarding the
> Hempel paradox quite fresh in my mind and quite fully understood both
> conceptually and arithmetically.
>
> I don't doubt the math of probability theory, but I still have a nagging
> intuitive suspicion that the way the math is being applied to this
> situation
> is not conceptually right. Furthermore, I still have the same suspicion
> that this conceptual wrongness is related to other problematic issues
> with standard AI deployments of probability theory such as Bayes nets.
>
> I will be traveling for most of the next two weeks, so don't expect any
> brilliant insights or stupid errors from me in this regard in the
> immediate
> future -- but I suspect we haven't heard the last of this issue.
>
> -- Ben G
>
>
>
>
>
This archive was generated by hypermail 2.1.5 : Wed Jul 17 2013 - 04:00:52 MDT