stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,09:40    A thread for Missing Shade of Blue's questions.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,10:18    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,01:25) Consider the predicate grue, which translated into our language, means "green if discovered before 2012, and blue afterwards", and the corresponding predicate bleen, "blue if discovered before 2012, and green afterwards." Quote (Reciprocating Bill @ Dec. 20 2008,07:09) [ETA: I see Keiths has touched on this above as well: "Simpler means less expensive. If both systems are functionally equivalent during the evolution of the system, then natural selection will favor the less expensive one." Exactly. and CURSES, Keiths.] And complex systems, such as multi-year timers don't typically evolve in the absence of selection, which is clearly not an option for a one-time event. (But if it switched back-and-forth over time, then we might expect adaptation. Like day and night vision, or seasonal variations in behavior.) More complex systems have a higher likelihood of breakage, causing embarrassing, premature grue, something to be avoided. The timing system has no reason to be set on 2012 rather than any other time. Each organism might make a different bet. Those with early dates have already gone extinct due to inopportune, awkward bleen. The best bet based on past experience is no date. Historically, finding a mate and making babies is a better strategy. But, Missing Shade of Blue, let's take it one step further. There could conceivably be such a timer in the genomes of organisms. The Theory of Evolution would *predict* that no such timer would exist. By finding such a timer, you could overturn the Theory of Evolution. Do you consider this a reasonable career choice for a budding biologist? Or do you think that further investigation, based on all we know of biology, would mean this search would in all likelihood be futile? -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Wesley R. Elsberry Posts: 4966 Joined: May 2002 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,12:54    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,05:14) Wesley, I'm not claiming our inductive biases are perfect, especially when it comes to highly theoretical predicates like "phlogiston" or "caloric". What, heat transfer is more complex than the chemistry of color perception and cognition? I don't think so. But at least we have an agreement that the "none have come to pass" claim was false.   Quote But our folk inductive assumptions about medium-sized dry goods (stuff like shape, sensory properties, causal properties, etc.) works well enough to allow us (and all kinds of other animals) to get by pretty well. And that in itself is surprising to me. So far, you haven't managed to communicate that surprise in a way that would make it contagious. For those of us with some grounding in the history of science, cognition, and zoology, the claim that perceptual systems represent "inductive biases" requiring supernatural tuning for their effectiveness does not look at all attractive. And I had to choke back quite a bit to make that description more neutral.   Quote The radical Humean skeptic about induction: "Hey, why do you think nature will continue to be so stable and uniform? How do you know Planck's constant won't change tomorrow? Or that your cat won't turn into some kind of evil fire-breathing demon?" This is the kind of thing people make fun of philosophers for. We know, by induction, that future conditions will change. Populations here are not preparing for Sol's eventual red giant stage of stellar evolution.   Quote Goodman's skepticism is subtly different, and to me far more troubling. It's not "Why do you think nature is, to a large extent, uniform across time?" But it isn't uniform across time. Paleontology tells us that.   Quote It's "Granted that nature is uniform, what does that mean?" And the answer is that it depends on your choice of vocabulary. What it would be for nature to be uniform is different for creatures with blue-green vs. grue-bleen predilections. Now we were endowed with certain predilections in the distant past, and it turns out that so far, nature has actually been pretty uniform on our preferred descriptions. Our biases haven't been perfect, sure, but our inductive expectations are very rarely shattered by everyday macroscopic phenomena millions of years after they evolved. And that fact in itself, I suspect, puts them in a set of measure zero in the space of all possible biases. And 99% or more of all species that have ever lived are extinct. There's plenty of "biases" that didn't pan out over the long term. Keeping this in mind may help prevent cases of Panglossianism.   Quote     Quote As yet unobserved conditions or stimuli (as in the "ue" of "grue") are also unavailable to natural selection; why would anybody imagine that natural selection could develop systems corresponding to "grue-bleenism" prospectively? It seems like the lack of clarity in my initial post has claimed another victim. I hope the response I wrote to Keith makes things a little clearer. The point I was trying to make was that "grue" and "green" are really on the same footing evolutionarily. In particular, "grue" does not involve unobserved conditions or stimuli any more than "green" does. Sure it does. It requires an observation that color is temporally unreliable. And then there was the other consideration about such "potential biases"...   Quote To suppose otherwise is to assume an asymmetry between the predicates that can only be justified by our inductive bias. And it is the emergence of that very bias that we're trying to explain. Note that the temporally disjunctive aspect of grue and bleen is merely an artifact of their representation in our blue-green basis. If we try to represent blue or green in a grue-bleen basis, then they would appear temporally disjunctive. "Keiths" already pointed out the issue of simpler representations, a consideration that grounds "an asymmetry between the predicates" and has nothing to do with "inductive biases", making that claim of yours a false one, too. Look up the "universal distribution". This is stuff from algorithmic information theory, if that will help your search. Something you apparently overlooked from the prior exchange:   Quote   Quote Now what confuses me is that it seems that it is basically impossible to come up with an evolutionary explanation for this apparent design. Since the "apparent design" claim seems to be based on a false premise, it doesn't look like there is a problem in the offing. The demonstration that "inductive biases" are, in fact, imperfect leads directly to the diminution of the force of the claim that preternatural effectiveness obtains. -------------- "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,13:38    Sweet. My own thread. Thanks for all the responses, guys. A lot to think about, so you'll forgive me if I don't address every point made just yet. But I do think there's still a hint of circularity in some of the arguments I'm seeing. To boil it down a little, my initial point was that it's hard to come up with an objective notion of simplicity on which blue-green is a simpler set of predicates than grue-bleen. The obvious suggestion would be that grue-bleen is computationally more complex than grue-bleen. To put it crudely, a fully consistent grue-bleen program (one that also gruified other relevant scientific predicates, such as wavelength) would be a lot longer than a blue-green program. But of course, the algorithmic complexity of a particular problem depends crucially on the structure of the computer. One could construct computers for which the string 1010101010101010.... is simple and predictable. In fact, we ourselves are such computers. But we could also construct weird computers for which this string is quite complex, and the string 110001001000110101011.... is simple. It all depends on what the "natural language" is for the computer, and that depends on how the computer is constructed. Similarly for blue-green and grue-bleen. We happen to be blue-green computers. For us, these are natural and projectible predicates. The world will be simple if blue things stay blue; it will be less simple if blue things change to green at some arbitrary time. But grue-bleen computers, for which the exact opposite is true, are not inconceivable. So a syntactic notion of simplicity doesn't settle the matter. [I should note here that I tend to prefer an ecological/embodied approach to cognition, so when I refer to humans as computers, I'm not just referring to what goes on in the head, but to a whole host of bodily mechanisms.] It seems that some of you (keith, Bill, Zachriel) want to move the discussion up a level and talk about the complexity of the computer itself. You argue that while a grue-bleen computer may be possible, it would be far more complex than a blue-green computer and therefore more expensive to construct. Here is where I smell the vicious circle (or its slightly less dreadful cousin, the infinite regress). If we describe things using our own natural predicates, then it is only to be expected that blue-green computers will turn out to be simpler than grue-bleen computers. After all, we ourselves are blue-green computers. The question is whether there's an objective sense in which blue-green computers are simpler than grue-bleen ones. Here's one suggestion: It takes fewer resources for a Universal Turing Machine to emulate a blue-green computer than a grue-bleen computer. Unfortunately, this doesn't work for the same reasons as before: it depends on the construction of the UTM. We can construct UTMs for which grue-bleen is more natural (and more easily emulated) than blue-green. Again it depends on our choice of description language. It seems to me that every problem that arises when trying to adjudicate the complexity of the predicates themselves also arises when we move up a level to consider the computers that use the predicates. I hear you saying that grue-bleen systems are complex and more expensive because they require multi-year timers. But of course that is only under the assumptions that our inductive biases are right, that blue/green really are the natural and simplest predicates, that the giant evolutionary UTM is set up to more easily emulate blue-green computers than grue-bleen ones. From a grue-bleen perspective, none of these statements are true. According to them, it is us, the blue-greeners, who require multi-year timers to detect when grue switches to bleen. We are the ones who are more complex. What I think is needed is a way to break this symmetry without surreptitiously sneaking in our own inductive biases in describing the situation.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,13:58    One small correction: In describing the two binary strings, I shouldn't have put ellipses at the end suggesting they're infinitely long. If they were, then it might well be the case that there is no UTM for which the second string is algorithmically simpler than the first one. Imagine the ellipses merely indicate that the strings are a billion digits long.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,14:11    Wesley, Thanks for referring me to the Solomonoff stuff. This may be the kind I'm looking for. Excuse me for a little while I look through it.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,14:12    And by "kind" I mean "kind of thing".

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,14:40    MSB, You're making this way more difficult than it needs to be. Forget predicates and Turing machines.  Let's look again at a simple organism that distinguishes green light from blue, and its counterpart that distinguishes grue light from bleen. The first organism contains a black box with an opening through which light enters and two signal outputs, G and B.  When the organism points the opening at a green object, the G output fires and the B output does not. When it points the opening at a blue object, the B output fires and the G output does not.  When it points the opening at a red object, neither output fires. The second organism has a similar black box, but the outputs are labeled G' and B'.  The G' output fires when the black box is pointed at a grue object.  The B' output fires when the box is pointed at a bleen object.  Neither output fires when the box is pointed at a red object. Supposing that each of the boxes has the simplest and cheapest possible implementation, what do you find when you look inside the boxes? The first box (the green/blue box) has a detector (in reality, a pigment) that is tuned to respond to wavelengths in the green range.  Its output is connected to the G output of the box.  Likewise, there is a second detector tuned to respond to wavelengths in the blue range.  Its output is connected to the B output of the box.  That's it.  Pretty simple, no? Now open up the grue/bleen box.  The simplest implementation that I can come up with for this box employs the same two wavelength detectors, but it needs three additional components:  a multi-year timer and two multiplexers. The multiyear timer has an output T that is inactive before the year 2012 and active thereafter.  The multiplexers are arranged so that when T is inactive, the green detector's output is routed to the G' output of the  box and the blue detector's output is routed to the B' output.  When T is active, the routing is reversed. Unless you can come up with a simpler design for the grue/bleen box, you have to concede that the blue/green box has on objectively simpler design.  Agreed? One possible gambit would be to use grue and bleen wavelength detectors in place of the blue and green detectors.  If you did that, then the high-level designs would be symmetrical:  the grue detector would connect to the G' output, and the bleen detector would connect to the B' output. But all that accomplishes is to push the complexity into the wavelength detectors themselves.  Now each detector has its own multi-year timer and mux.  The decrease in complexity at the top level is more than offset by the increase in complexity of the wavelength detectors. So again, can you come up with a design for the grue/bleen box that matches the simplicity of the blue/green box?  If not, do you concede that the blue/green box is objectively simpler? If you do, can you see how the problem of sensing grue and bleen is analogous to the problem of maintaining concepts of grue and bleen? To return to the computer model, the complexity has to reside somewhere -- either in the program or in the computer itself.  Grue and bleen are conceptually more expensive than blue and green.  Predicates have a cost. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,14:54    As I see it, the logic of selection itself breaks this symmetry independent of inductive biases. In your scenario, green-blue and grue-bleen sensory biases are equally adaptive prior to 2012. Both are adept at responding to the pre-2012 blue green world. Moreover, given how crucial vision is to survival, both mechanisms would be sustained over generations by brutal normalizing selection. Prior to 2012, however, only the components of the grue-bleen system that enable functioning in the pre 2012 blue-green world would be subject to that normalizing selection. Those components and/or computational resources - however simple - that would enable continued success after 2012 would not be subject to normalizing selection prior to 2012 and, absent that selection, would deteriorate and become non-functional. Ultimately, in a blue-green world, only creatures with blue-green sensory functioning are predicted by current evolutionary theory. This solution does not require a potentially arbitrary "complexity" metric with the potential for contamination from our inductive biases. Selection doen't "care about" complexity. A more fundamental problem with your scenario is your characterization of inductive bias as "forward looking." Evolution is ever and always backward looking: organisms possess the features they do because those features were selected in the past. They were not selected "for" future survival and reproduction; they were selected BY past survival and reproduction. Inductive biases are present because they worked in the past, not because they will work in the future. Once you really wrap your head around this notion, puzzles like this evaporate. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,14:54    Quote (Zachriel @ Dec. 20 2008,10:18) But, Missing Shade of Blue, let's take it one step further. There could conceivably be such a timer in the genomes of organisms. The Theory of Evolution would *predict* that no such timer would exist. By finding such a timer, you could overturn the Theory of Evolution. Do you consider this a reasonable career choice for a budding biologist? Or do you think that further investigation, based on all we know of biology, would mean this search would in all likelihood be futile? Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,13:38) What I think is needed is a way to break this symmetry without surreptitiously sneaking in our own inductive biases in describing the situation. In science, the way we test for bias is by making empirical predictions that are entailed in our hypothesis. If the predictions for a blue universe and a bleen universe are identical, then your claim is scientifically vacuous. If they are not, then you can make empirical predictions to distinguish between the two views. Otherwise, your argument has nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution except that it's an argument about scientific induction. If you want to make that argument, then you should first dispense with the distraction about biology. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,15:02    Wesley, Based on a preliminary review, I dont think Solomonoff induction addresses my concern here. If I'm correct, Solomonoff induction begins by assuming a particular description language for sequences. It then applies Occam's razor based on this description language: programs with lower algorithmic complexity when written in the chosen language are assigned a higher prior probability. In general, I think approaches that are based on Kolmogorov complexity will have to start with an assumption about the description language. They don't provide a language-independent notion of simplicity. The question I had is logically prior to this whole process. Which is the appropriate language according to which we conduct our judgments of simplicity? Presumably there is at least one such language that is "natural". This would be the language according to which Occam's razor actually works, i.e. the simplest hypothesis in this language will actually be projectible. [Incidentally, this is what I meant by the uniformity of nature: Not that every single one of predicates is projectible, which would be equivalent to saying that nothing changes, but that a large cluster of our most basic observational and theoretical predicates are projectible, at least in our immediate environment, thus allowing for a myriad of successful inductions.] Now it might turn out that our predicates aren't actually the most natural ones. Come 2012 we might discover that the universe actually prefers grue-bleen. While I admit this as a theoretical possibility, I am confident this will not happen. What is bothering me (and I guess I'm not able to communicate this concern adequately, but I'll try again) is that I can't give a non-question-begging justification for why I am confident the grue-bleeners will be proved wrong. And by the same token, evolution has no non-question-begging justification (apologies for the excessive anthropomorphization) for its choice of blue-green over grue-bleen or 1912 grue-bleen or 1812 grue-bleen or an infinite number of other possible inductive biases. I see two sorts of responses here: 1) There is such a non-question-begging justification that involves the greater simplicity of blue-green, or of blue-green computers (humans) or of blue-green computer computers (the evolutionary process itself). In a previous post I said why I don't think this is satisfactory. 2) Our inductive biases are not particularly successful, and in so far as they are, it's just a lucky accident. Think of all the other species that went extinct due to bad inductive biases (the dodo, for instance). I don't find this satisfactory either. While evolution has no doubt sampled a large number of different sorts of inductive biases, and many have proved unsuccessful, it is also true that the number of biases sampled is an infinitesimally small proportion of the total number of possible biases. And yet it managed to hit on ones that have allowed a number of species to survive for millions of years after the respective biases evolved. This seems too improbable to be explicable as a lucky accident. So we should expect that the sampling wasn't random. There was some kind of search mechanism that looked for biases that more or less match the natural structure of the world. What I have been arguing is that this search mechanism could not have been natural selection, because when you lack information beyond a certain point in time, it radically underdetermines your judgments about which predicates are natural.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,15:09    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,15:02) What I have been arguing is that this search mechanism could not have been natural selection, because when you lack information beyond a certain point in time, it radically underdetermines your judgments about which predicates are natural. No. What you've been arguing is the lack of a solid foundation for induction. Evolution by Natural Selection is just a type of inductive learning. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,15:25    Zachriel, Quote In science, the way we test for bias is by making empirical predictions that are entailed in our hypothesis. If the predictions for a blue universe and a bleen universe are identical, then your claim is scientifically vacuous. If they are not, then you can make empirical predictions to distinguish between the two views. I agree. Grue and green universes are not empirically equivalent. They are just empirically equivalent up to 2012. But gruers and greeners will make different predictions about what happens after that. Greeners will predict that emeralds discovered post-2012 will be green, which means they will not be grue. Gruers will predict that these emeralds will be grue, which means they will not be grue. Quote Otherwise, your argument has nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution except that it's an argument about scientific induction. If you want to make that argument, then you should first dispense with the distraction about biology. Ultimately, my argument is about scientific induction, viz. that our inductive biases are to a certain degree arbitrary and unjustifiable. But I don't think biology is a distraction here. Our inductive biases serve a certain purpose. They allow us to make inductive inferences well enough to get by. There are many other biases which would, at some point or another, fail at this task. A vast number of them would have failed before now. So here we have a crucial functional aspect of our biology, and usually I look for adaptive explanations for such features of our biology. But for the same sorts of reasons that I think the biases are arbitrary and unjustifiable, I can't see that any adaptive explanation could account for the continued functionality of this bias. I think natural selection is a beautiful theory that accounts (or can potentially account) for every other apparently designed feature of our biology, so this one holdout bothers me.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,15:36    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,15:25) Quote Zachriel: In science, the way we test for bias is by making empirical predictions that are entailed in our hypothesis. If the predictions for a blue universe and a bleen universe are identical, then your claim is scientifically vacuous. If they are not, then you can make empirical predictions to distinguish between the two views. I agree. Grue and green universes are not empirically equivalent. They are just empirically equivalent up to 2012. But gruers and greeners will make different predictions about what happens after that. Greeners will predict that emeralds discovered post-2012 will be green, which means they will not be grue. Gruers will predict that these emeralds will be grue, which means they will not be grue. Or the year 2525. Or 3535. Or 6565. There are an infinitude of equivalent claims. In other words, it is scientifically vacuous. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,15:25)     Quote Zachriel: Otherwise, your argument has nothing to do with the Theory of Evolution except that it's an argument about scientific induction. If you want to make that argument, then you should first dispense with the distraction about biology. Ultimately, my argument is about scientific induction, viz. that our inductive biases are to a certain degree arbitrary and unjustifiable.   Your argument is entirely about induction. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,15:25) I think natural selection is a beautiful theory that accounts (or can potentially account) for every other apparently designed feature of our biology, so this one holdout bothers me. If you accept scientific induction, then we can reasonably say that a bleen universe is a vacuous concept, and we can substantiate the Theory of Evolution. If you reject induction, then we have to start with that. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,16:25    Keith, A few thoughts: 1. You'll forgive me if I occasionally continue to use "predicate" and "Turing Machine". It makes things clearer for me to follow. This might be one of the reasons I'm having trouble seeing the arguments here. I might be a bit too inured to thinking in terms of language and representation. 2. Your wavelength detector example is useful. The suggestion seems to be that a blue-green computer is simpler than a grue-bleen computer not on some syntactic notion of simplicity, but according to a simple physical notion of simplicity. A blue-green detector can be constructed with fewer physical parts than a grue-bleen one. Maybe not just fewer. Maybe it's the case that for any grue-bleen detector, one could construct a blue-green detector using a proper subset of the grue-bleen's physical parts. Here's my response. I'll have to think about the issue some more to figure out what I really think, but here's what I'm thinking right now: Let's say you describe the physically simplest color discrimination device, say a pigment in a box, and claim its a blue-green detector. The grue-bleener might agree that this device is the simplest, but disagree that it's a blue-green detector. They say it must be a grue-bleen detector. Recall that you and the grue-bleener have different theories of the world, and that's going to affect how you predict this detector will behave post-2012. The blue-greener claims the pigment distinguishes grue and bleen, not blue and green. Now you can use all sorts of physical arguments to try to convince the grue-bleener that the pigment detects blue and green. The grue-bleener will just claim that your arguments are tainted by your use of bizarrely gerrymandered concepts (such as wavelength in nm). He has exactly symmetrical arguments for why the pigment detects grue. Both of your scientific theories are empirically equivalent up to 2012, but they disagree after that. Before 2012 there is no way to decide who's right without reference to our inductive bias. Now comes the crucial part. We have the detector but we can't establish in a non-question-begging way whether it detects blue-green or grue-bleen. Your choice in this matter will affect how you think the device ought to behave once it has made the detection. If you think blue and green are the natural predicates, you set up the device to say "blue" when it detects 450 nm light. But if you're a grue-bleener you set up the device to say "bleen" under the same circumstances. Importantly, the detection part of these devices are identical. The only thing that differs is the response. Now one of these devices will get things wrong after 2012, depending on which set of predicates is projectible. But until 2012, we cannot say (without consulting our biases) which device is going to get things wrong. If we had a choice between setting up the blue response or the bleen response, we would have no non-biased rational basis to make it. This is roughly the situation evolution was a long long time ago. Let's say the simplest sort of wavelength (or possible grue-wavelength) detecting machine has been constructed. There is a further decision to be made about the machine's response to these detection events, and this is where the inductive bias of the machine is set. Evolution chose (seemingly arbitrarily) for the responses to be blue-type rather than bleen-type, and this has worked pretty well so far. This is the puzzle. In the previous discussion physical simplicity is not even a factor, because there is no difference in the detection mechanism. Inductive bias becomes relevant when constructing the response mechanism, and it is not at all obvious to me that blue-type response systems are more easily constructed than bleen-type systems.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,16:32    Zachriel, While I agree that the worry is a general one about inductive learning, I focus on evolution because it is, in our world at least, the mother of all inductive learning systems. When I construct a learning machine, I endow it with a certain inductive bias. When asked to justify this decision, I can refer back to my own inductive biases. When asked to justify those, I can refer back to evolution's inductive bias. When asked to justify that, I can...?

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,16:44    On further reflection on keith's argument, it might be the case that there are systems with blue-type responses that are physically simpler than any bleen-type response system. So maybe evolution's particular inductive bias is attributable to the fact that it is easier (given, say, how organic chemistry works) to construct blue-type response systems. But of course, this is not a search strategy, so prima facie it provides no explanation for why the inductive biases embedded in these responses actually match the world into the future. BTW, it seems like some people still harbor the suspicion that I'm some sort of ID fifth columnist. Maybe I should make it clear that even if my concern is valid and unanswerable (a huge if), this would not mean evolutionary biology should be consigned to the scrapheap of history. It would not affect the fact that natural selection is the best explanation for the majority of our functional traits. It would, however, suggest that the evolutionary story is incomplete if one of our most functional traits, our ability to make more or less accurate inductive inferences, lacks explanation. Perhaps this is just one of those places where explanation bottoms out, but to me it's a peculiarly unsatisfactory bottom...

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:04    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,16:32) Zachriel, While I agree that the worry is a general one about inductive learning, I focus on evolution because it is, in our world at least, the mother of all inductive learning systems. Science assumes basic induction. You can't discuss the nature of biological evolution without agreeing to the axioms of induction. There is no absolute foundation for induction. The world may simply end tomorrow. But if you accept the existence of memory (or that we can make and read records), then we can define inductive learning axiomatically. We can even provide a level of "confidence" based in statistics. You don't have to really think induction is meaningful. Just that when we talk, we agree to the meanings of our words. So, if I say the Sun rises every day in the East, you understand this is a generalization with a high level of confidence (even if you think to yourself that we don't know with certainty that it will continue to do so in the future). The rest is merely details. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:04    Zachriel, Quote Or the year 2525. Or 3535. Or 6565. There are an infinitude of equivalent claims. In other words, it is scientifically vacuous. Hold on. I agree that the difference between two theories is scientifically vacuous if that difference has no observable consequences. But that doesn't seem to be the notion of vacuity you're using here. What you're doing here is saying that if there are an infinity of empirically distinguishable theories that are all produced using the same sort of schema, then the difference between them is scientifically vacuous. This I don't agree with at all. The theories make radically different predictions. They are not "equivalent claims" and I don't see why their infinitude matters. What notion of scientific vacuity are you using here? I will say this. I agree that it is perfectly acceptable for scientists to use their inductive biases to eliminate hypotheses. I'm not challenging the use of Occam's razor in science. Without it, we would constantly be confronted with an infinitude of equally successful hypotheses. I am definitely not attacking this aspect of the scientific method. I agree: "All emeralds are green" is a good theory and "All emeralds are grue" is a bad one. But there is one area of inquiry in which scientists cannot take their inductive biases as granted. This is when they consider themselves as cognitive systems and attempt to explain their own inductive predilections. It is only in this peculiarly reflexive case that I'm questioning the straightforward use of Occam's razor.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:09    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,16:44) On further reflection on keith's argument, it might be the case that there are systems with blue-type responses that are physically simpler than any bleen-type response system. So maybe evolution's particular inductive bias is attributable to the fact that it is easier (given, say, how organic chemistry works) to construct blue-type response systems. But of course, this is not a search strategy, so prima facie it provides no explanation for why the inductive biases embedded in these responses actually match the world into the future. Induction doesn't work for one time events. As I mentioned, if the world alternated between blue and bleen, then evolution might be able to adapt, just as it adapts to night and day. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,16:44) It would, however, suggest that the evolutionary story is incomplete if one of our most functional traits, our ability to make more or less accurate inductive inferences, lacks explanation. Nothing you have said would indicate that the evolutionary story is incomplete. If we somehow knew that the world was going to bleen tomorrow, it wouldn't change the Theory of Evolution. Unless you could show that organisms had somehow anticipated this one time event. I mentioned this above too. Do you accept induction? -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:19    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,17:04) Quote Zachriel: Or the year 2525. Or 3535. Or 6565. There are an infinitude of equivalent claims. In other words, it is scientifically vacuous. Hold on. I agree that the difference between two theories is scientifically vacuous if that difference has no observable consequences. But that doesn't seem to be the notion of vacuity you're using here. What you're doing here is saying that if there are an infinity of empirically distinguishable theories that are all produced using the same sort of schema, then the difference between them is scientifically vacuous. This I don't agree with at all. Proposing an infinitude of extraneous possibilities without any empirical justification is scientifically vacuous. It's not a valid induction. By the way, stop by Callisto on this date in 3535. That's when my invisible pink unicorn becomes visible. It's unicorn mating season, you know. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,17:04) But there is one area of inquiry in which scientists cannot take their inductive biases as granted. This is when they consider themselves as cognitive systems and attempt to explain their own inductive predilections. It is only in this peculiarly reflexive case that I'm questioning the straightforward use of Occam's razor. Naïve induction may sometimes have that problem. That's why we have developed the scientific method. But as far as I can tell, we're still stuck on simple induction. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:26    Quote Science assumes basic induction. You can't discuss the nature of biological evolution without agreeing to the axioms of induction. There is no absolute foundation for induction. The world may simply end tomorrow. But if you accept the existence of memory (or that we can make and read records), then we can define inductive learning axiomatically. We can even provide a level of "confidence" based in statistics. You don't have to really think induction is meaningful. Just that when we talk, we agree to the meanings of our words. So, if I say the Sun rises every day in the East, you understand this is a generalization with a high level of confidence (even if you think to yourself that we don't know with certainty that it will continue to do so in the future). The rest is merely details. Fair enough. I was hoping my question was a bit more localized than the problem of induction, but on reflection maybe it isn't. Doesn't that leave you with a deep and unsatisfying worry, though? After all, we are just contingent products of a gradual evolutionary process. In so far as we display ostensibly purposive or functional behavior it should be traceable to non-teleological causes. And when I say "it" I mean not just the behavior itself but its apparent purposiveness (excepting exaptations for the moment). In the case of inductive inference the behavior itself may have a non-teleological causal explanation (basically just a record of the particular series of biological changes that led to this set of inductive biases), but the apparent purposivity of the behavior has (and can have) no such explanation. To think otherwise would be tantamount to solving the problem of induction. This is a troubling state of affairs for me. I guess ultimately we must think our continued ability to make inductive inferences is an exaptation, not an adaptation. If that's the case, what a whopper of a spandrel it is...

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:29    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,14:38) Sweet. My own thread. Thanks for all the responses, guys. No problem, William Dembski Missing Shade of Blue.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:32    Quote Naïve induction may sometimes have that problem. That's why we have developed the scientific method. But as far as I can tell, we're still stuck on simple induction. Wait what? Are you suggesting that there is some scientific notion of induction that doesn't suffer from the same sorts of foundational problems as naive induction? Or are you just saying (a la Popper) that the scientific method isn't inductive at all? In both cases, I disagree. I think the best formalization of scientific belief revision would be along Bayesian lines, rather than Popper's hypothetico-deductive approach. And Bayesian reasoning has foundational issues regarding the choice of priors that are basically just technical versions of the problem of induction.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:42    Quote Nothing you have said would indicate that the evolutionary story is incomplete. If we somehow knew that the world was going to bleen tomorrow, it wouldn't change the Theory of Evolution. Unless you could show that organisms had somehow anticipated this one time event. I mentioned this above too. Do you accept induction? What you regard as a relevant "event" that needs anticipation is conditioned by your inductive bias. Incidentally, the fact that you talk about the world "going to bleen" suggests a minor misunderstanding. The sky is either bleen or blue. If it is bleen it will go from blue to green. If it is blue it will go from bleen to grue. But in the particular example I used it makes no sense to talk of the world going from blue to bleen. Anyway, here's a way to rephrase your point. I haven't showed that evolution anticipated a switch (or lack thereof) in 2012. True enough. It might not have. What I'm pointing out is that evolution has aparently anticipated an infinitude of events that occurred prior to the present. These events are the lack of switch in color properties at times before now. You may not think a lack of switch is an event, but of course this is only a lack of switch when considered in a particular basis. The fact remains that evolution prepared us not to expect a switch in 1912 or 1812 or 1712... And in each of these cases the evolutionary prediction has panned out.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,17:52    Quote No problem, William Dembski Missing Shade of Blue. Curses. Foiled again. In all seriousness though, I am definitely not Dembski, and I hope my rhetorical style has not been Dembskiesque (trans: arrogant, dishonest, dismissive and liberally sprinkled with fart jokes). I get the sense that I'm getting on peoples' nerves here. If that is the case, please let me know and I'll stop it. I don't want to be a troll. I have an honest problem wrapping my head around the origin of inductive bias. My experience talking to theists in the past has been that many of them have explanatory itches that atheists just do not feel compelled to scratch. For instance, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" I just don't see that as something that needs explanation. Maybe the line of inquiry I'm pursuing here is a similar phenomenon. Maybe there's an explanatory itch here that I find annoying, but this is just an idiosyncratic feature of my psychology. And in a further pathetic attempt to bolster my non-ID credentials, you should check out my comments at UD. I've been posting there (sparsely) under the pseudonym Sotto Voce. You will notice that all my comments there have been critical. If I am a Dembski sockpuppet, this is quite an elaborate ruse I've got going.

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,18:01    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,18:52) Quote No problem, William Dembski Missing Shade of Blue. Curses. Foiled again. In all seriousness though, I am definitely not Dembski, and I hope my rhetorical style has not been Dembskiesque (trans: arrogant, dishonest, dismissive and liberally sprinkled with fart jokes). I get the sense that I'm getting on peoples' nerves here. If that is the case, please let me know and I'll stop it. I don't want to be a troll. Feel free to talk here even if you are Dembski. We don't ban people here. Actually, I only 50% think you are Dembski. I'd be sure you were Dembski if you acted like a bratty 13-year-old. But you haven't done that here, you've been rather pleasant, so it's up in the air. Carry on.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,19:05    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,17:26)   Quote Science assumes basic induction. You can't discuss the nature of biological evolution without agreeing to the axioms of induction. There is no absolute foundation for induction. The world may simply end tomorrow. But if you accept the existence of memory (or that we can make and read records), then we can define inductive learning axiomatically. We can even provide a level of "confidence" based in statistics. You don't have to really think induction is meaningful. Just that when we talk, we agree to the meanings of our words. So, if I say the Sun rises every day in the East, you understand this is a generalization with a high level of confidence (even if you think to yourself that we don't know with certainty that it will continue to do so in the future). The rest is merely details. Fair enough. I was hoping my question was a bit more localized than the problem of induction, but on reflection maybe it isn't. Doesn't that leave you with a deep and unsatisfying worry, though? No. Confidence doesn't require certainty. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,19:11    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,17:32) Quote Missing Shade of Blue: But there is one area of inquiry in which scientists cannot take their inductive biases as granted. This is when they consider themselves as cognitive systems and attempt to explain their own inductive predilections. It is only in this peculiarly reflexive case that I'm questioning the straightforward use of Occam's razor. Zachriel: Naïve induction may sometimes have that problem. That's why we have developed the scientific method. But as far as I can tell, we're still stuck on simple induction. Wait what? Are you suggesting that there is some scientific notion of induction that doesn't suffer from the same sorts of foundational problems as naive induction? No, I'm saying the scientific method was developed to minimize the role of bias, such as through the use of multiple observers and other objective measures. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,19:19    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,17:52) I have an honest problem wrapping my head around the origin of inductive bias. I think we have to distinguish between the problem of induction and the problem of inductive bias. Can we accept induction for the purposes of further discussion? -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,19:28    Zachriel, The concern I'm raising here is not epistemological. I'm not asking how we can justify inductive inference. I'm perfectly willing to grant that induction works. To put it another way, I'm not disputing that our inductive biases are the right ones. What I'm asking is how we ended up with the right inductive biases. So let's take it for granted in this argument that our inductive biases match the world. It is true that all emeralds are (and will be) green. It is false that all emeralds are grue. Hope this makes things less murky.

Reed Posts: 274 Joined: Feb. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,19:33    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,13:02) 2) Our inductive biases are not particularly successful, and in so far as they are, it's just a lucky accident. Think of all the other species that went extinct due to bad inductive biases (the dodo, for instance). I don't find this satisfactory either. While evolution has no doubt sampled a large number of different sorts of inductive biases, and many have proved unsuccessful, it is also true that the number of biases sampled is an infinitesimally small proportion of the total number of possible biases. And yet it managed to hit on ones that have allowed a number of species to survive for millions of years after the respective biases evolved. This seems too improbable to be explicable as a lucky accident. So we should expect that the sampling wasn't random. There was some kind of search mechanism that looked for biases that more or less match the natural structure of the world. What I have been arguing is that this search mechanism could not have been natural selection, because when you lack information beyond a certain point in time, it radically underdetermines your judgments about which predicates are natural. This seems to boil down to an argument from personal incredulity. You find it unsatisfying or extremely unlikely, but can you back that dissatisfaction up with a specific, real world example of where evolution is insufficient ? The grue/bleen example definitely fails the real world criteria, at multiple levels. We appear to live in a universe that is consistent enough for induction to be useful. If you accept that, then evolution producing creatures which successfully use induction should be completely unsurprising. Successfully approximating the future can help you reproduce, and biochemical processes can produce such approximations. If the inductive biases of our early hominid ancestors gave them an advantage, it was because those biases in some way reflected the real world. In a relatively consistent universe, it follows that their successful descendants would tend to inherent biases that reflected the real world they lived in. Your argument that evolution needs to predict certain things (picking the "right" biases millions of years in advance) looks like it can be rephrased as a statement that the pace of change of our environment has been sufficiently low to avoid complete extinction. Looking at the actual characteristics of our planet and biology, this does not seem especially remarkable. If you are going to claim that it is beyond the reach of observed mechanism, you'd better come up with some specific data.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,19:43    Quote No, I'm saying the scientific method was developed to minimize the role of bias, such as through the use of multiple observers and other objective measures. Oh, no doubt the scientific method is set up to minimize (and ideally, perhaps, eliminate) all sorts of biases. And perhaps to some degree scientists try to remove certain types of inductive bias. But inductive bias is unlike many other types of systematic bias in that eliminating it altogether is undesirable. After all, without an inductive bias, learning is impossible. In fact, specific inductive biases are integral elements of the scientific method. Occam's razor and it's technical statistical counterparts, for instance. Without these tools for deciding which hypotheses are simple, every dataset would be compatible with an infinity of hypotheses with no means of deciding between them. Thank god for inductive bias. But of course, the fact that we couldn't do science without an inductive bias means the sort of foundational issues raised by the problem of induction are ineliminable. So I question your claim that the problem of induction is more of a problem for naive induction than for the scientific method. It is, in fact, a problem for any learning algorithm. Still, I am with you that the epistemological issues aren't important here and should be set aside.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,20:00    Quote If the inductive biases of our early hominid ancestors gave them an advantage, it was because those biases in some way reflected the real world. In a relatively consistent universe, it follows that their successful descendants would tend to inherent biases that reflected the real world they lived in. But what does it mean to say that their biases "reflected the real world." What it is for an inductive bias to reflect the real world is for the bias to allow predictions that match the real world. So the way to check whether a bias reflects the real world or not is to let the organism make a prediction and then wait to see whether the prediction comes true or not. Then maybe eliminate all the organisms whose predictions were false and repeat the process again with the remaining ones, and so on. Now this explicitly did not happen with homonids. A very small number of possible biases were sampled. One of them was basically selected over the others something like 5 million years ago, and there has been no further selection along this parameter since then. But the one that was selected has worked throughout those 5 million years. Now I agree with you that this would work if we assumed that the pace of change in the environment would be slow, and maybe evolution had some reason for making that assumption (apologies again for the anthropomorphization). But actually we need to know more than that. A change that is gradual or non-existent under a blue-green representation is radical and discontinuous under a grue-bleen basis. So we need to assume not just that the pace of change is slow, but that the pace of change under this representation rather than that one is slow. And this just returns us to the problem of selecting the appropriate inductive bias.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,20:20    Reed, Picture yourself in the role of evolution. You are presented with a particular phenotype, you look at it, look at the environment in which it lives and decide how fit it's going to be. Its 5 million BC and you're presented with six different types of hominids: blue-green, 1612 grue-bleen, 1712 grue-bleen, 1812 grue-bleen, 1912 grue-bleen and 2012 grue-bleen. Now you look at their environment and assign fitness values to them. You think, "Ah, blue-green should be pretty fit because its picking up on a stable set of properties." Then you look at 1612 grue-bleen and you go, "Oh crap, this looks like a stable set of properties too. At least, given the information I have right now. I'd have to wait till 1612 to figure out which one of them is right. So I guess given what I know now, I should assign this guy the same fitness as blue-green." And exactly similarly for all the others. Of course, successfully approximating the future helps you reproduce, and effects your fitness, but all of these different inductive agents are equally good at successfully approximating the future in their immediate environment. You have no basis for considering one fitter than the other right now. Come 1612, of course, you say "Ah, now I know 1612 grue-bleen isn't a stable set of properties, so I can reduce the fitness of this guy." But you can only say that in 1612. But of course, this didn't actually happen. What actually happened is that evolution chose blue-green 5 mya and stuck with it. But if the story I've told above is on the right track, then there is something arbitrary about this choice. It could just as well have chosen 1612 grue-bleen or 1712 grue-bleen or... (if these variations had been available, of course, which they weren't, but that's beside the point). And if it had chosen any of those other traits, that particular lineage of homonids would have been screwed by now. But no, evolution fortuitously bet on the phenotype that has remained unscrewed for all these years.

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,20:49    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,21:20) Reed, Picture yourself in the role of evolution. You are presented with a particular phenotype, you look at it, look at the environment in which it lives and decide how fit it's going to be. Its 5 million BC and you're presented with six different types of hominids: blue-green, 1612 grue-bleen, 1712 grue-bleen, 1812 grue-bleen, 1912 grue-bleen and 2012 grue-bleen. Now you look at their environment and assign fitness values to them. You think, "Ah, blue-green should be pretty fit because its picking up on a stable set of properties." Then you look at 1612 grue-bleen and you go, "Oh crap, this looks like a stable set of properties too. At least, given the information I have right now. I'd have to wait till 1612 to figure out which one of them is right. So I guess given what I know now, I should assign this guy the same fitness as blue-green." And exactly similarly for all the others. Of course, successfully approximating the future helps you reproduce, and effects your fitness, but all of these different inductive agents are equally good at successfully approximating the future in their immediate environment. You have no basis for considering one fitter than the other right now. Come 1612, of course, you say "Ah, now I know 1612 grue-bleen isn't a stable set of properties, so I can reduce the fitness of this guy." But you can only say that in 1612. But of course, this didn't actually happen. What actually happened is that evolution chose blue-green 5 mya and stuck with it. But if the story I've told above is on the right track... The story you have told isn't on the right track. Your parable, once again, portrays selection as forward looking and in some sense representational, when it is in fact backward looking and does not represent at all. Absent those properties, your problem evaporates. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,21:02    How does my parable represent selection as forward-looking? I was trying to deliberately avoid that. In fact my whole point is that the success of our inductive bias cannot be explained adaptively because selection is not forward-looking.

Reed Posts: 274 Joined: Feb. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,22:29    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,18:20) Picture yourself in the role of evolution. You are presented with a particular phenotype, you look at it, look at the environment in which it lives and decide how fit it's going to be. This is a terrible way of thinking about it. Evolution doesn't think, doesn't plan, doesn't care how many species go extinct. It's not striving toward some specific goal. It just tinkers and kills. Your burden, if you are going to claim that this is insufficient, is to come up with a specific case where it is demonstrably insufficient. Not a contrived example with no connection to the real world. To belabor the point:   Quote Now I agree with you that this would work if we assumed that the pace of change in the environment would be slow, and maybe evolution had some reason for making that assumption (apologies again for the anthropomorphization). Don't apologize, just don't do it. Evolution doesn't make assumptions. We observe that the pace of change is slow enough that life has been able to adapt to it so far. Based on this observation, evolution appears to be a sufficient explanation. If you want to claim this is not so, come up with some specifics. The whole grue/bleen analogy doesn't cut it. I thought you already acknowledged this, but it appears not. 1) Vision (like most traits of living creatures) is sloppy. A good fraction of humans are dichromats, a few are monochromats, and some may even be tetrachromats. Trichromats appear to be favored, but one can easily imagine a slightly different history where we ended up dichromat, like many other successful species. Evolution didn't pick some single right answer in advance, it just rolled the dice and we adapted to the result. If the dice landed differently, we would have adapted differently, or gone extinct. 2) The hypothetical case of the world suddenly strongly favoring grue/bleen is fantasy. Evolution doesn't account for it, which is fine, because it hasn't happened. 3) If it did happen, the sloppiness in 1) suggests that it wouldn't necessarily be fatal. If were fatal... so what ? The vast majority of species that have existed are extinct, precisely because they faced contingencies that evolution didn't "plan" for. The same could happen to us at any moment. We are, in essence, the descendants of a long line of lottery winners. That sounds unlikely (or maybe a sign of outside interference, as the ID camp would like to claim), until you realize that everyone with a losing ticket has been shot, and the winners have had enough children to replace them. edot for tipoes!

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,22:45    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,22:02) In fact my whole point is that the success of our inductive bias cannot be explained adaptively because selection is not forward-looking. Perhaps it is more accurate to say that something misleading lurks in a characterization of the problem "solved" by evolution as "success of our inductive bias." This appears to be a problem for selection, which is not forward looking, because "success of inductive bias" appears to require a look-ahead of which selection is not capable. But the success of an inductive bias, as is the case with all adaptations, inheres in its previous effectiveness in furthering survival and reproduction, not as an arrangement "for" future successes. They behave "as if" they anticipate future environments, but that is a mischaracterization. (One can argue that it is an easy mischaracterization to make, given that one of our inductive biases may be to see purpose and agency in complex functioning. Hence it reflects a failure of one of our inductive biases.) They're adaptive until they aren't. Hominid vision will be adaptive until it isn't. As I observed earlier, 99.99% of species are extinct because their adaptive bets were rendered obsolete by environmental changes. The primate run has not been particularly long, and does not require special explanation. BTW, I don't see that perceptual inductive biases are different in kind than other adaptations. How did embryological bird wings come to anticipate the aerodynamic demands of the current atmosphere? How is it that avian flight evolved tens of millions of years ago in such a way that it anticipated the demands of current atmospheric systems? The answer is that neither did either. I don't see that the evolution of inductive biases, and their success over long periods of time, present a challenge differing in kind from these adaptations. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

Nerull Posts: 317 Joined: June 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,23:00    Given the way color vision works, blue-green would almost be required to evolve before grue-breen. The eye works by filtering light through different colored pigments, much in the same way digital cameras work - consumer grade cameras have built in filters, like our eyes, scientific grade cameras usually place filters in front of the entire sensor, but still work in a similar manner. Too add in a timer that swaps around colors at a certain date requires adding on to the existing color vision mechanism. This means that, in order to spread through the population, there needs to be some reason why grue-breen is selected over blue-green. The more complicated something is, the easier it is to break, so this seems unlikely. -------------- To rebut creationism you pretty much have to be a biologist, chemist, geologist, philosopher, lawyer and historian all rolled into one. While to advocate creationism, you just have to be an idiot. -- tommorris

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 20 2008,23:56    Quote This is a terrible way of thinking about it. Evolution doesn't think, doesn't plan, doesn't care how many species go extinct. It's not striving toward some specific goal. It just tinkers and kills. Your burden, if you are going to claim that this is insufficient, is to come up with a specific case where it is demonstrably insufficient. Not a contrived example with no connection to the real world. OK, I'll admit that I should try to avoid using language that suggests natural selection is an intentional agent. But the point I was trying to make didn't rely on those ill-advised rhetorical flourishes. I really don't understand what you mean when you ask for a specific case where evolution is demonstrably insufficient. I think there is only a specific case where this is true - inductive bias. As far as I'm aware, natural selection is perfectly capable of explaining all other functional traits. The example I used may be a bit simplified, but is a real world example. The fact that you think otherwise suggests to me that there is something about the example you do not understand. So let me try one more time: 1. Humans have certain inductive biases (in the real world, not some contrived hypothetical world). A particular example is the tendency to think of the color properties of many sorts of surfaces observed under normal circumstances as projectible. My jacket is blue and I confidently project that my jacket will be blue tomorrow. I also confidently project that the next emerald to be found will be green. 2. These biases, considered collectively, are highly functional. They support inferences which allow us to plan and learn about the world successfully. 3. These traits were selected a long long time ago and have remained more or less fixed in humans for at least, say, the past 100,000 years. There have not been significant selective forces altering our most basic inductive biases for at least that long. 4. So biases that were selected for their immediate projectibility over 100,000 years ago remain projectible today. This is by no means unsurprising. There are a vast number of other potential inductive biases that would have been just as fit as the current one 100,000 years ago, but would not continue to track the structure of the world for the ensuing 100,000 years. Somehow, humans ended up with a set of biases that are quite extraordinarily functional. 5. Here are some hypotheses about why we ended up with biases that work today: (a) Natural Selection. This can't be the answer. By 3, there has not been significant selection for these traits (because there has not been significant variation) in at least the past 100,000 years. So if there was selection for the biases, it happened more than 100,000 years ago. But, like I said, there are a vast number of possible biases that would have been just as fit 100,000 years ago as our actual biases, but would not have been as successful over the next 100,000 years. Natural selection cannot account for why we ended up with our particular bias rather than one of these less functional biases. But perhaps you disagree that these alternate biases would have been as fit 100,000 years ago. Even though they were as predictively successful as the blue-green bias in that environment, perhaps the argument is that they were not as simple as the blue-green bias, and so imposed extra resource costs on organisms that adhered to them. This is the sort of argument keith was making earlier. See my responses to him and to Wesley on the previous page about how such judgments of simplicity already presume a certain inductive bias. There is, as far as I know, no bias-independent conception of simplicity on which blue-green is the simplest bias. In fact, there is no bias-independent conception of simplicity at all. Finally, one could respond (as you did) that natural selection selected for the inductive biases that reflect the structure of the world. But selection could only have used information about the environment at that particular time, viz. 100,000 years ago (plus information about past environments stored in the organism's genome). And, like I said, there were a vast number of different biases which reflected the structure of the world at that time but would not have continued to reflect that structure as time went on. None of these biases were selected. The one that was selected is the one that continued to work reliably for the next 100,000 years. (b) Morphological/Developmental Constraints. Perhaps biochemistry sets constraints on the sorts of inductive agents that can develop, and that explains why we ended up with this particular set of inductive biases rather than some other set. This might well be true, but it does not answer the question. The question is "Why do our inductive biases work so well today?" The answer can't be "Because they are one of the few sets of morphologically feasible biases." That doesn't address the question at all. © Trivial. This is the response that basically rejects that the question is problematic at all. It's along the lines of "The world is blue and green, damnit, not grue and bleen like in your fantasy scenario. The organisms that evolve will be the ones who see things in blue and green." I hope it's clear now why this sort of response doesn't get to the issue I'm concerned with. I'm not questioning the fact that blue and green are natural predicates. I'm not postulating (as you suggest) some bizarre hypothetical world in which colors change. I'm saying, granted that blue and green are natural projectible predicates, what explains the evolution of organisms (like us) that know this, that have by and large the right sorts of inductive biases. It's a question about the evolution of an actual observable trait in the actual world, accompanied by an argument as to why this question is particularly problematic.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,00:00    Nerull, Quote Given the way color vision works, blue-green would almost be required to evolve before grue-breen. The eye works by filtering light through different colored pigments, much in the same way digital cameras work - consumer grade cameras have built in filters, like our eyes, scientific grade cameras usually place filters in front of the entire sensor, but still work in a similar manner. Too add in a timer that swaps around colors at a certain date requires adding on to the existing color vision mechanism. This means that, in order to spread through the population, there needs to be some reason why grue-breen is selected over blue-green. The more complicated something is, the easier it is to break, so this seems unlikely. I think this is basically the same sort of worry keith had. I wrote a response to him here. Look it over and see if it works.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,00:21    Quote BTW, I don't see that perceptual inductive biases are different in kind than other adaptations. How did embryological bird wings come to anticipate the aerodynamic demands of the current atmosphere? How is it that avian flight evolved tens of millions of years ago in such a way that it anticipated the demands of current atmospheric systems? The answer is that neither did either. I don't see that the evolution of inductive biases, and their success over long periods of time, present a challenge differing in kind from these adaptations. Hmmm... I see what you are saying. This is sort of like the No Free Lunch stuff. (Hey, maybe I am Dembski!) For natural selection to be a successful search strategy, we already assume that the fitness landscape has certain features, specifically the sort of features that enable NS's own inductive bias to work fairly well (and one of the requisites is probably some sort of cross-temporal smoothness). The case of the evolution of our own inductive bias is really no different. Yes, we have to appeal to evolution's bias to justify our own bias, but that's true for every single adaptation. That's really helpful. Thanks Bill. I guess I was making a pretty simple mistake. When you put it that way, the explanatory itch kind of goes away. I see nothing problematic about assuming a certain structure to the fitness landscape when discussing other traits, so why this one? Anyway, I'll have to think about it some more, but for the moment I'm satisfied. Apologies for any aggravation, people.

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,07:30    Quote Borges' Animals In "The Analytical Language of John Wilkins," Borges describes 'a certain Chinese Encyclopedia,' the Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, in which it is written that animals are divided into: those that belong to the Emperor, embalmed ones, those that are trained, suckling pigs, mermaids, fabulous ones, stray dogs, those included in the present classification, those that tremble as if they were mad, innumerable ones, those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, others, those that have just broken a flower vase, those that from a long way off look like flies. Now that we're done with grue/bleen, shall we talk about why nobody (besides certain mutant Chinese encyclopedists) classifies animals this way?  How did natural selection rule out this perfectly sensible scheme?   -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,08:40    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,19:28) I'm perfectly willing to grant that induction works. Good. Let's see if we can keep to that. Simple induction is sufficient to determine that the universe is not random, but exhibits various types of order. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,19:43) But of course, the fact that we couldn't do science without an inductive bias means the sort of foundational issues raised by the problem of induction are ineliminable. I didn't say they could be eliminated, ... Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,19:43) So I question your claim that the problem of induction is more of a problem for naive induction than for the scientific method. It is, in fact, a problem for any learning algorithm. I said they could be minimized. It's a practical difference, like a lever. Simple induction means we are confident that the Sun will still be there if we blink. Science allows us to be confident that the Earth moves. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,20:00)   Quote If the inductive biases of our early hominid ancestors gave them an advantage, it was because those biases in some way reflected the real world. In a relatively consistent universe, it follows that their successful descendants would tend to inherent biases that reflected the real world they lived in. But what does it mean to say that their biases "reflected the real world." What it is for an inductive bias to reflect the real world is for the bias to allow predictions that match the real world. So the way to check whether a bias reflects the real world or not is to let the organism make a prediction and then wait to see whether the prediction comes true or not. You just said you accepted induction, and therefore we can agree that there are aspects of order in the world. Now, it's a question of the details ... -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,08:55    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,20:20) Picture yourself in the role of evolution. You are presented with a particular phenotype, you look at it, look at the environment in which it lives and decide how fit it's going to be. Its 5 million BC and you're presented with six different types of hominids: blue-green, 1612 grue-bleen, 1712 grue-bleen, 1812 grue-bleen, 1912 grue-bleen and 2012 grue-bleen. Now you look at their environment and assign fitness values to them. Grue-bleen takes some sort of complex timer. It wouldn't evolve in the first place. But let's accept that for argument's sake. Blue-green is most fit. It simpler, lighter, and less likely to break and cause embarrassing, premature grue. Also, without the constraint of natural selection, grue-bleen systems will tend to be slowly degraded and lost. It's excess baggage. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 20 2008,20:20) What actually happened is that evolution chose blue-green 5 mya and stuck with it. But if the story I've told above is on the right track, then there is something arbitrary about this choice. Of course. Why would you expect otherwise? Even if you *knew* that the world would turn grue-bleen, you wouldn't expect organisms to be adapted for that. Indeed, that would contradict the Theory of Evolution. I mentioned that before. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 21 2008,00:21) For natural selection to be a successful search strategy, we already assume that the fitness landscape has certain features, specifically the sort of features that enable NS's own inductive bias to work fairly well (and one of the requisites is probably some sort of cross-temporal smoothness). Actually, we *observe* that the world appears to exhibit consistency. It happens to be such a world conducive to evolutionary processes. Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 21 2008,00:21) Anyway, I'll have to think about it some more, but for the moment I'm satisfied. Oops. I should have read ahead. Anyway, thanks for the discussion. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,09:06    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 21 2008,00:21) The case of the evolution of our own inductive bias is really no different. Yes, we have to appeal to evolution's bias to justify our own bias, but that's true for every single adaptation. That's actually an interesting point. Humans certainly have biases. Evolution doesn't work to provide the best possible adaptation, but adaptations that are just good enough (or at least somewhat better than the other guy). And adaptations in one environment might be maladaptive in another, so life muddles along. So there certainly are biases in humans. One important bias is anthropomorphisizing, that is, attributing human-like characteristics to non-human objects. Another is allowing subjectivity to lead to egoism. After all, an astronomer can make many careful measurements and determine that the universe revolves around him. Still another is allowing abstractions to confuse rather than enlighten, such as by conflating a categorization with the thing itself. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

RupertG Posts: 80 Joined: Nov. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,10:29    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 21 2008,00:21) Quote BTW, I don't see that perceptual inductive biases are different in kind than other adaptations. How did embryological bird wings come to anticipate the aerodynamic demands of the current atmosphere? How is it that avian flight evolved tens of millions of years ago in such a way that it anticipated the demands of current atmospheric systems? The answer is that neither did either. I don't see that the evolution of inductive biases, and their success over long periods of time, present a challenge differing in kind from these adaptations. Hmmm... I see what you are saying. This is sort of like the No Free Lunch stuff. (Hey, maybe I am Dembski!) For natural selection to be a successful search strategy, we already assume that the fitness landscape has certain features, specifically the sort of features that enable NS's own inductive bias to work fairly well (and one of the requisites is probably some sort of cross-temporal smoothness). The case of the evolution of our own inductive bias is really no different. Yes, we have to appeal to evolution's bias to justify our own bias, but that's true for every single adaptation. That's really helpful. Thanks Bill. I guess I was making a pretty simple mistake. When you put it that way, the explanatory itch kind of goes away. I see nothing problematic about assuming a certain structure to the fitness landscape when discussing other traits, so why this one? Anyway, I'll have to think about it some more, but for the moment I'm satisfied. Apologies for any aggravation, people. You can think up plenty of explanations for most sorts of human behaviour, belief systems, prejudices and cognitive quirks if you approach the problem of how the species would best survive in our best-guess prehistoric scenarios, given our physical characteristics. Which is far from saying that evolutionary psychology is always or even mostly right, in its current state. It itself is particularly prone to the sort of inductive biasses that Hom. sap. exhibits when gazing at its own navel. But it is a rich and thought-provoking field, with a great deal of potential, and there is indeed no reason to think that the particulars of our personal and social psychologies are exempt from evolutionary pressures. Rather radically otherwise, in fact, when you consider we've still got thousands of nukes pointing at our own heads. R -------------- Uncle Joe and Aunty Mabel Fainted at the breakfast table Children, let this be a warning Never do it in the morning -- Ralph Vaughan Williams

Wesley R. Elsberry Posts: 4966 Joined: May 2002 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,21:53    I specified a particular work that expands upon the ideas of Solomonoff and addresses inductive inference. MSOB:   Quote They don't provide a language-independent notion of simplicity. Wrong.   Quote Furthermore, an important result called the Invariance Theorem states, roughly speaking, that the Kolmogorov complexity of a string x relative to one programming language P1 is equal to the complexity relative to another language P2 , up to a ?xed additive constant that depends only on P1 and P2. Trimming at the point where your reliance on a false premise invalidates further argument does shorten things up by quite a bit. Yeah, option (1) is the correct one, and, no, your personal dissatisfaction doesn't disturb me. MSOB:   Quote This seems too improbable to be explicable as a lucky accident. Good thing evolutionary science includes processes that aren't simply random chance, then. The universal distribution explains why, a priori, the shortest explanations are also the most likely explanations. No preternatural aids to search required. I've seen an apparent dearth of consistency in your argumentation. There was the obviously false bit about there never having been any radical contradiction of human inductive biases followed by the assertion that you hadn't actually meant that claim. You say that you don't find consideration of extinct species a good argument, but it certainly puts paid to your claim:   Quote But our folk inductive assumptions about medium-sized dry goods (stuff like shape, sensory properties, causal properties, etc.) works well enough to allow us (and all kinds of other animals) to get by pretty well. In my estimation, you have been long on assertion and short on argument. You dismiss arguments without legitimate justification. Life is short. We may simply need to agree to disagree. -------------- "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,22:53    Wesley, 1. I am aware of the invariance theorem. You will note that on page 1 I made a post specifically mentioning that if we have two infinite strings, there may well be a language-independent sense in which one is simpler than the other. However, I think it's true that for any two finite strings there is no language-independent way to make qualitative comparisons of algorithmic complexity between them. And that is perfectly consistent with the invariance theorem. Is that wrong? Perhaps I should not have written the sloppy sentence you quote, suggesting that there is no language-independent sense of simplicity simpliciter, but I do think if you had read my other contributions to the discussion you would have recognized that I wasn't making the specific mistake you charge. I will look at that universal distribution paper you mention. 2. Also, I don't think my argument was inconsistent (at least, not in that regard). I agreed that our inductive biases are not optimal, but I maintained that it is surprising enough that they are as functional as they are. The fact that you think they have been selected suggests that you agree that they are functional enough to require some sort of explanation I didn't just dismiss the point about extinction. I mentioned (in a number of posts) that a superexponentially vast number of possible inductive biases were never even sampled. Sure, a large number of species have gone extinct due to bad inductive biases. But that number is still miniscule in comparison to the number of possible biases. In the absence of a plausible search strategy like NS (at least that's what I thought at the time, but see below) I suggested it was very unlikely to hit upon functional biases in so few tries (relatively speaking). 3. We don't have to agree to disagree. At least, not about the larger point of whether or not our inductive biases could be selected. I have already conceded that my question was misguided. This discussion has cleared up the issue for me and I no longer have a problem with evolutionary explanations of our biases. I suspect you haven't been reading all my posts. I don't blame you, considering how garrulous I am. But still, I would hope you would have read everything I wrote before saying, for instance, that I am long on assertion but short on argument.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 21 2008,22:59    Quote However, I think it's true that for any two finite strings there is no language-independent way to make qualitative comparisons of algorithmic complexity between them. And that is perfectly consistent with the invariance theorem. Is that wrong? I should qualify this. I haven't yet read the universal distribution paper, and maybe it's the case that it shows that my claim is false. If that's the case I'd be very surprised, though. Don't think I'll get the chance to read it tonight, but I'll definitely look at it tomorrow. However, I do think that my claim is consistent with the invariance theorem.

Wesley R. Elsberry Posts: 4966 Joined: May 2002 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,00:13    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 21 2008,22:59)       Quote However, I think it's true that for any two finite strings there is no language-independent way to make qualitative comparisons of algorithmic complexity between them. And that is perfectly consistent with the invariance theorem. Is that wrong? I should qualify this. I haven't yet read the universal distribution paper, and maybe it's the case that it shows that my claim is false. If that's the case I'd be very surprised, though. Don't think I'll get the chance to read it tonight, but I'll definitely look at it tomorrow. However, I do think that my claim is consistent with the invariance theorem. Let's see.     Quote But of course, the algorithmic complexity of a particular problem depends crucially on the structure of the computer. One could construct computers for which the string 1010101010101010.... is simple and predictable. In fact, we ourselves are such computers. But we could also construct weird computers for which this string is quite complex, and the string 110001001000110101011.... is simple. It all depends on what the "natural language" is for the computer, and that depends on how the computer is constructed. Similarly for blue-green and grue-bleen. We happen to be blue-green computers. For us, these are natural and projectible predicates. The world will be simple if blue things stay blue; it will be less simple if blue things change to green at some arbitrary time. But grue-bleen computers, for which the exact opposite is true, are not inconceivable. So a syntactic notion of simplicity doesn't settle the matter.     Quote In describing the two binary strings, I shouldn't have put ellipses at the end suggesting they're infinitely long. If they were, then it might well be the case that there is no UTM for which the second string is algorithmically simpler than the first one. Imagine the ellipses merely indicate that the strings are a billion digits long. The Invariance Theorem, and all of algorithmic information theory, is about quantitative, not qualitative differences. And if we take the last sentence quoted as an indication that you are positing the comparison of two bit strings of the same length, why, yes, the Universal Distribution does permit you to compare them quantitatively. The Invariance Theorem says that they each can be generated by a UTM program with at most an additive constant's difference from an implementation in a different language, and any such constant is likely to be small relative to the program size for any non-trivial length program (and a billion bits certainly qualifies). The lengths of the shortest UTM programs generating each string (or computable approximation thereof) can be used via the Universal Distribution and does yield a language-independent, quantitative, a priori comparison of complexity. In short: yes, it is wrong to say that no quantitative comparison is possible between two finite bit strings. The Invariance Theorem alone may not show that, but certainly the whole of algorithmic information theory is capable of showing that to be wrong.     Quote Perhaps I should not have written the sloppy sentence you quote, suggesting that there is no language-independent sense of simplicity simpliciter, but I do think if you had read my other contributions to the discussion you would have recognized that I wasn't making the specific mistake you charge. The problem with arguing with someone who is inconsistent is that they may state incorrect things at one time, and correct things at another. The quotes above are sufficient to show that you did make the mistake I indicated; that is, the mistake does exist in stuff that you have written here. I've pretty much limited myself to our exchanges rather than the whole of the thread, so if you managed to get it right elsewhere, that would be good, but it doesn't get you a pass when you do demonstrably get it wrong.   Quote But of course, the algorithmic complexity of a particular problem depends crucially on the structure of the computer. The argument that different computers can reduce the size of input data needed to emit a bit string doesn't comport with familiarity with algorithmic information theory, where the computational complexity is defined as the minimal size of input and program that emits a particular string. In the case of the two example strings, a computer program that privileges the second string will be longer than the minimal computer program to emit the first string. That dog won't hunt, in other words. Shifting the complexity from the input to the program (or "computer structure") doesn't -- and can't -- make the complexity go away. -------------- "You can't teach an old dogma new tricks." - Dorothy Parker

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,02:02    Wesley, Thanks for pointing me to the universal distribution. It sounds very interesting and I will certainly look into it. I don't want to pretend to have more than a layperson's familiarity with algorithmic information theory. I was aware of the invariance theorem, but I had not heard of the universal distribution before. I still don't think I've been inconsistent, at least not in a dishonest way. I am probably guilty of qualifying statements I've made in one post in some other post, and also of being sloppy on occasion. I was trying to rapidly respond to a number of different people, and unfortunately rigor was a casualty. I hesitate to carry this discussion further because (a) I feel like my initial question has been adequately answered and (b) you would undoubtedly mop the floor with me if we argued about information theory. But I do take issue with your response to one of my points: Quote The argument that different computers can reduce the size of input data needed to emit a bit string doesn't comport with familiarity with algorithmic information theory, where the computational complexity is defined as the minimal size of input and program that emits a particular string. In the case of the two example strings, a computer program that privileges the second string will be longer than the minimal computer program to emit the first string. That dog won't hunt, in other words. Shifting the complexity from the input to the program (or "computer structure") doesn't -- and can't -- make the complexity go away. By "computer" I didn't mean the program but the UTM on which the program is run. For any particular pair of finite strings A and B, I can construct a UTM for which the minimal program to output A will be shorter than the program to output B, and I can construct another UTM for which the B program will be shorter than the A program. This is what I was claiming and I still think it must be true. Now maybe one of these UTMs is far more unlikely than the other (assuming some sort of probability measure over the ensemble of all UTMs). But for any two finite strings one could in principle construct a UTM that favored either one of them. Is this wrong?

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,02:05    Sloppy again. Instead of "Maybe one of these UTMs..." read "Maybe one of these types of UTMs..."

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,07:08    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,02:02) By "computer" I didn't mean the program but the UTM on which the program is run. For any particular pair of finite strings A and B, I can construct a UTM for which the minimal program to output A will be shorter than the program to output B, and I can construct another UTM for which the B program will be shorter than the A program. This is what I was claiming and I still think it must be true. Now maybe one of these UTMs is far more unlikely than the other (assuming some sort of probability measure over the ensemble of all UTMs). It's true that no search algorithm is better than any other, on average, on an arbitrary landscape. But we're not talking about an arbitrarily chaotic universe. One simple feature of the universe is the locality of patterns. So, if we look at a point in space and see water, then nearby points will be much more likely, on average, to be water. A similar aspect of this is the idea of surfaces, interiors, directions.  This is a universe that consists of what we call "objects". Our search algorithm consists of replicators, objects that exist *within* this space full of other objects, all of which are bound by the laws of energy and matter. And this is the type of space that is amenable to evolutionary search. -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Zachriel Posts: 2722 Joined: Sep. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,07:20    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,02:02) But for any two finite strings one could in principle construct a UTM that favored either one of them. Is this wrong? Now, let's consider an organism that creates a model of the universe. We might give this model a name, "mind". In the case of humans, there are all sorts of questionable assumptions built into the model. As I mentioned before, anthropomorphization, egoism and over-abstraction. Though the model may not be an exact simulacrum of the actual universe, because it is the result of the evolutionary process leading up to "mind" we expect it to be a reasonably close facsimile. It is not completely detached from the world because then it would no longer be adaptive. "Mind" is not *arbitrary*. But even in cases where we might recognize an 'error', such as anthropomorphizing the weather, people mold these aspects of thought to the world. They 'map' one chaotic system to another. So the weather is angry, but anger never lasts forever. Because humans are a cultural organism, sometimes even strange thoughts can help the group (though obviously some thoughts can be considered maladaptive, such as when they do become completely detached from the world). -------------- You never step on the same tard twice—for it's not the same tard and you're not the same person.

Quack Posts: 1961 Joined: May 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,10:16    OK, so he isn't Dembski. But do we know that he can't be "Mike Gene"? I see too little of what I'd expect to see as background? Popping out of the blue, a full fledged blog/newsgroup junkie? -------------- Rocks have no biology.               Robert Byers.

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,10:35    I don't know. But so far, MSOB's acting like he has a brain, which is more than you can say for Davetard, BarryA, Bradford, Salvador, Casey, etc.

k.e.. Posts: 5427 Joined: May 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,11:17    Quote (Quack @ Dec. 22 2008,18:16) OK, so he isn't Dembski. But do we know that he can't be "Mike Gene"? I see too little of what I'd expect to see as background? Popping out of the blue, a full fledged blog/newsgroup junkie? Our amateur sleuth Hercule Poirot hot on the trail of Sacrébleu posts a notice on the wall asking if anyone has seen his ghost. I'm sure while ..or whilst he is "looking into" .....yawn ...."whateva" as a sloppy layman his deduction will be more than the sum product of the infinite deposit nonlinear reductions equaling a binary number bigger than ...er really huge..thus quizzing or at least begging an answer to the age old cunundrum "Which is the longest path between two race courses?" Given that the Hagurland equation has only ever been seen in a red dress thus proving blue is sky except at night then the whole problem of god being dissatisfied with Darwin takes on a whole new meaning n'est pa? But you see Freud is dead and my mother is not, so can there really be any meaning to any of his statements regarding boys looking at their own reflections and falling in love with their mothers even though most of them have a hairy helper? Never in the history of the world has so little been known by people 2000 plus years ago. I suggest a call to Miss Marple and some afternoon tea with cake for Mr Poirot. -------------- "I get a strong breeze from my monitor every time k.e. puts on his clown DaveTard suit" dogdidit "ID is deader than Lenny Flanks granmaws dildo batteries" Erasmus "I'm busy studying scientist level science papers" Galloping Gary Gaulin

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,12:08    Quote (stevestory @ Dec. 22 2008,16:35) I don't know. But so far, MSOB's acting like he has a brain, which is more than you can say for Davetard, BarryA, Bradford, Salvador, Casey, etc. Come on guys, give the blue lad/ladette a break. Thus far he/she's been everything we could ask for: intelligent and polite. So he/she disagrees with/has some questions about evolutionary biology, hardly the end of the universe. It is at least possible he/she has arrived at this point honestly. I'm all for giving him/her the benefit of the doubt until such a time as he/she proves to be a turd, if indeed this happens. I know I'm resident Ultra-Meanie and purveyor of poor quality tasteless jokes, but dudes and dudettes, it's Christmas.... {runs and hides} Louis -------------- Bye.

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,12:08    Quote (Quack @ Dec. 22 2008,08:16) OK, so he isn't Dembski. But do we know that he can't be "Mike Gene"? From long experience commenting at Telic Thoughts, I can pretty much guarantee that it's not Mike Gene.  Mike is philosophically naive and less articulate than MSB. On a more intuitive level, MSB doesn't sound like Mike Gene to me.  His diction and prose style are just too different. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,12:35    Quote (Louis @ Dec. 22 2008,10:08)   Quote (stevestory @ Dec. 22 2008,16:35) I don't know. But so far, MSOB's acting like he has a brain, which is more than you can say for Davetard, BarryA, Bradford, Salvador, Casey, etc. Come on guys, give the blue lad/ladette a break. Thus far he/she's been everything we could ask for: intelligent and polite. So he/she disagrees with/has some questions about evolutionary biology, hardly the end of the universe. It is at least possible he/she has arrived at this point honestly. I'm all for giving him/her the benefit of the doubt until such a time as he/she proves to be a turd, if indeed this happens. I know I'm resident Ultra-Meanie and purveyor of poor quality tasteless jokes, but dudes and dudettes, it's Christmas.... {runs and hides} Louis We're just curious, Louis.  Nobody's trying to run MSB out of town.  We've engaged him and responded to his arguments. Even if he were Mike Gene or Dembski, I'd be happy to have him around as long as he followed our very minimal rules. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,12:54    Quote It's true that no search algorithm is better than any other, on average, on an arbitrary landscape. But we're not talking about an arbitrarily chaotic universe. Zachriel, you're right. Bill helped me realize that my question was much broader than I initially thought. It's something along the lines of "Why does the evolutionary learning algorithm have the sorts of inductive biases that allow it to be an efficient search strategy over the sorts of fitness landscapes we see in this world?" And while that question is interesting and may be worth pursuing, it's not the sort of showstopper I thought it was. What troubled me earlier was that one particular functional trait was apparently not explicable by selection. But that's just because I was perversely refusing to allow, in this particular case, that we could assume that our fitness landscape has certain properties that enable natural selection to perform better than say random search. I now recognize my perversity, and I'm in full agreement with everything you said in your post.

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,13:19    Quote (keiths @ Dec. 22 2008,18:35) Quote (Louis @ Dec. 22 2008,10:08)   Quote (stevestory @ Dec. 22 2008,16:35) I don't know. But so far, MSOB's acting like he has a brain, which is more than you can say for Davetard, BarryA, Bradford, Salvador, Casey, etc. Come on guys, give the blue lad/ladette a break. Thus far he/she's been everything we could ask for: intelligent and polite. So he/she disagrees with/has some questions about evolutionary biology, hardly the end of the universe. It is at least possible he/she has arrived at this point honestly. I'm all for giving him/her the benefit of the doubt until such a time as he/she proves to be a turd, if indeed this happens. I know I'm resident Ultra-Meanie and purveyor of poor quality tasteless jokes, but dudes and dudettes, it's Christmas.... {runs and hides} Louis We're just curious, Louis.  Nobody's trying to run MSB out of town.  We've engaged him and responded to his arguments. Even if he were Mike Gene or Dembski, I'd be happy to have him around as long as he followed our very minimal rules. Oh sorry, didn't the "come on guys, it's Christmas" give the tongue in cheekiness away. I was only 50% serious. Louis P.S. The serious point was that he/she might not be an "old friend" he/she could be an entirely new friend. -------------- Bye.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,13:20    Zachriel, The idea that the search algorithm and the landscape are matched because ultimately they're made of the same stuff following the same fundamental laws is interesting. I hadn't thought about it that way before.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,13:29    The speculation about my secret identity is amusing. I don't know whether to be flattered or insulted. I guess I should be flattered that the prime suspects are Dembski and Mike Gene and not, say, Denyse O'Leary or bornagain77. So thanks for the compliments, and have a great Christmas!

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,13:51    And to allay your curiosity a little bit, I am but a humble grad student with a non-professional interest in both the scientific and cultural aspects of the evolution/ID debate. My degree is in physics, so I admit I am not even close to an expert on evolution, machine learning or information theory. I have studied philosophy of science quite a bit, so I feel slightly more comfortable pontificating in that area. I'm an atheist. I think common descent and evolution via natural selection are the best explanations for the origin, diversity and apparent design of species (and, thanks to you guys, that includes inductive biases ;) ). I think all ID hypotheses offered so far are untenable, but I don't think the ID project is deserving of the blanket scorn I sometimes see on this forum (although given the behavior of some of the ID adherents, I can see why one would be scornful). I like Thai food, mountain biking and noise music. Turn-offs include rudeness and scabies.

Lou FCD Posts: 5452 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,13:57    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,14:51) And to allay your curiosity a little bit, I am but a humble grad student with a non-professional interest in both the scientific and cultural aspects of the evolution/ID debate. My degree is in physics, so I admit I am not even close to an expert on evolution, machine learning or information theory. I have studied philosophy of science quite a bit, so I feel slightly more comfortable pontificating in that area. I'm an atheist. I think common descent and evolution via natural selection are the best explanations for the origin, diversity and apparent design of species (and, thanks to you guys, that includes inductive biases ;) ). I think all ID hypotheses offered so far are untenable, but I don't think the ID project is deserving of the blanket scorn I sometimes see on this forum (although given the behavior of some of the ID adherents, I can see why one would be scornful). I like Thai food, mountain biking and noise music. Turn-offs include rudeness and scabies. Yes, but what is your shoe size? -------------- “Why do creationists have such a hard time with commas? Linky“. ~ Steve Story, Legend

jeffox Posts: 671 Joined: Oct. 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,14:09    Louis wrote: Quote Come on guys, give the blue lad/ladette a break. Thus far he/she's been everything we could ask for: intelligent and polite. So he/she disagrees with/has some questions about evolutionary biology, hardly the end of the universe. It is at least possible he/she has arrived at this point honestly. I'm all for giving him/her the benefit of the doubt until such a time as he/she proves to be a turd, if indeed this happens. I know I'm resident Ultra-Meanie and purveyor of poor quality tasteless jokes, but dudes and dudettes, it's Christmas.... {runs and hides} Louis I concur.  Compare & contrast with, say, Daniel Smith.  Blue appears willing to read the literature and recognize if/when he's logically incorrect.  And he still has yet to quote TARDavison.   If nobody else has written so already, (and if I can take the place of doing so) welcome to ATBC, MSB. Who's your football team?

Sealawr Posts: 54 Joined: Feb. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,14:16    [quote=Missing Shade of Blue,Dec. 22 2008,12:54] Quote I now recognize my perversity, and I'm in full agreement with everything you said in your post. Now, how do you expect to survive on teh internets by admitting error!  Dembski woudl never stoop so low and Behe had to be cornered like a rat before he caved. Rational discussion and analysis--what a concept! -------------- DS: "The explantory filter is as robust as the data that is used with it." David Klinghoffer: ""I'm an IDiot"

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,14:24    Quote (jeffox @ Dec. 22 2008,15:09) I concur.  Compare & contrast with, say, Daniel Smith.  Blue appears willing to read the literature and recognize if/when he's logically incorrect.  And he still has yet to quote TARDavison.  :) Even Daniel has conceded that important elements of his position are not tenable. Must be the season. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

jeffox Posts: 671 Joined: Oct. 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,14:50    R. Bill wrote: Quote Even Daniel has conceded that important elements of his position are not tenable. Must be the season. Ya ya, I just saw that.  I still think his "watered down" query is philosopical "fluff", but at least he was good enough to apologize for acting like a child. There may be hope for him, yet!

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,14:51    Quote Yes, but what is your shoe size? There is a reason I didn't mention this. I'm ashamed. I'm a size 18, which means I can only wear clown shoes. On the bright side, though, you know what they say about guys with big feet... That's right, if our arms fall off, we can still pick our noses.

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,15:48    Are you now, or have you ever been, affiliated with this sweater Just kidding. I don't think you're Dembski anymore. You seem to have some maturity and no obvious psychological issues. Edited by stevestory on Dec. 22 2008,16:48

stevestory Posts: 13407 Joined: Oct. 2005 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,15:54    Quote (stevestory @ Dec. 22 2008,16:48) :angry: Are you now, or have you ever been, affiliated with this sweater Just kidding. I don't think you're Dembski anymore. You seem to have some maturity and no obvious psychological issues. God, that sweater is so ghastly. It's so horrible it's good. I want to track down the corrupt Korean factory where it was made, by enslaved blind children, and order like 10 of them. I'm not sure we'll be able to recreate that haircut, though, since we're not sure what brand of rusty pocket-knife it was performed with.

Quack Posts: 1961 Joined: May 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,16:11    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,14:51)     Quote Yes, but what is your shoe size? There is a reason I didn't mention this. I'm ashamed. I'm a size 18, which means I can only wear clown shoes. On the bright side, though, you know what they say about guys with big feet... That's right, if our arms fall off, we can still pick our noses. My oh my, you even got humour! That bodes good, too bad I am too lazy or too dense to engage in the debate. A belated happy solstice to you too! -------------- Rocks have no biology.               Robert Byers.

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,16:47    Quote (Sealawr @ Dec. 22 2008,20:16) [quote=Missing Shade of Blue,Dec. 22 2008,12:54]   Quote I now recognize my perversity, and I'm in full agreement with everything you said in your post. Now, how do you expect to survive on teh internets by admitting error!  Dembski woudl never stoop so low and Behe had to be cornered like a rat before he caved. Rational discussion and analysis--what a concept! Frankly I'm disgusted. Rational discussion of a technical topic? Whatever next? Consensus? Conviviality? Oh there will be amicable banter and debate next. It's this like this what cause unrest. Darn you Blue person, darn you directly to heck! {shakes fist} Louis -------------- Bye.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,18:41    Wesley, I read the paper you cited. Thanks for pointing me to it. It was clear and informative. But I still don't see how the universal distribution shows I am wrong. I said that for any two finite strings, there is no language-independent means of determining which has the greater Kolmogorov complexity. Let's take strings s1 = 1010101010.... and s2 = 1000110111.... (where the ellipses indicate the strings are a billion digits long). I can construct a UTM for which the program to produce s1 will be shorter than the program to produce s2. In fact, my laptop is one such UTM. But I can also construct a UTM for which s2 can be produced by a shorter program. I merely make it part of the UTMs hardware that if the input begins with a 0, it immediately prints out s2 and halts. If its input begins with a 1 it moves on to the next symbol on the tape and proceeds to responds to the rest of the input the same way my laptop does. For this UTM s2 is less complex than s1. This is a completely general scheme. I can do it with any two finite strings. And it doesn't violate the Invariance Theorem. Now you suggested that the Universal Distribution would actually provide a language-independent way of deciding whether s1 is simpler than s2 or vice versa. But I don't see how this can be true. According to the paper you cited, the Universal Distribution assigns higher probabilities to strings with lower Kolmogorov complexities. So prior to figuring out what the Distribution will look like, we need to figure out what the complexities of the individual strings are. And there's no language-independent way to do that. Depending on what UTM we use to make our judgments about complexity, the Universal Distribution will look different. If we use my laptop, s1 will have a higher probability than s2. If we use the baroque computer I constructed, s2 will have a higher probability. Isn't this right? How does the Universal Distribution help me figure out whether s1 is simpler than s2 independent of the UTM used? I guess I was imagining some way of assigning a distribution not over the strings, but over the ensemble of all possible UTMs. Maybe if we moved up to that level, we can come up with some sense in which one of the strings is simpler (because its complexity is lower on "more" UTMs as determined by our measure). But that's not what the Universal Distribution is. Anyway, it strikes me that the correct way to approach this problem is not to attempt to articulate a language-independent notion of simplicity but to acknowledge that the particular inductive bias of the evolutionary process sets a natural language. It happens to be a language that works well for the kinds of fitness landscapes we see in nature. Maybe we can come up with a deeper reason for this match between learning algorithm and fitness landscape (I think Zachriel was suggesting that it has something to do with them being made of the same stuff) but I don't even know if that's the kind of thing that needs special explanation. I feel the same way about this phenomenon as I do about the alleged fine tuning of our fundamental constants: "What are the alternatives and how in the world did you get a probability measure over them?" So, as I said before, I'm satisfied.

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,19:51    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,16:41) But I can also construct a UTM for which s2 can be produced by a shorter program. I merely make it part of the UTMs hardware that if the input begins with a 0, it immediately prints out s2 and halts. Then you haven't reduced the complexity, you've simply shifted it from the software to the hardware.  They're fungible, after all. How do you think this helps you, particularly if you're trying to establish an analogy with natural selection? -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,20:35    Quote Then you haven't reduced the complexity, you've simply shifted it from the software to the hardware. But this just begs the question. In what sense is the second UTM more complex than the first one? Is this sense language-independent? Quote How do you think this helps you, particularly if you're trying to establish an analogy with natural selection? I wasn't trying to argue from analogy here. I was trying to argue that in principle there is no description language-independent notion of simplicity. This was supposed to be an argument against those who were saying that green really is simpler than grue in some objective sense. I moved the discussion up to the complexity of the computers themselves in the first post I made on this thread. This was in response to those who were suggesting that although green may not be simpler than grue in purely linguistic terms, green-computers would be simpler than grue-computers.

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,22:05    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,18:35) [In what sense is the second UTM more complex than the first one? In terms of the number of two-input NAND expressions required to describe a minimal Boolean implementation. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,22:43    Quote In terms of the number of two-input NAND expressions required to describe a minimal Boolean implementation. OK, what you've done there is chosen a specific description language. I agree that once you do that you can straightforwardly quantify the complexity of your computer/string/whatever. But then this quantification isn't language-independent. It's relative to a choice of natural predicates. Maybe this is leading back to what you were initially arguing: we shouldn't be restricting ourselves to purely syntactic notions of complexity because there's a natural physical notion of simplicity when we're considering material objects. I offered a response to that on the first page and I still stand by most of that response more or less. Just to be clear though, I'm no longer interested in defending my argument about how inductive biases couldn't evolve. That argument is flawed. In so far as it's valid, I think it just collapses into a general Humean inductive skepticism, and that way leads to pointlessness. So yeah, nothing I say here from now on should be construed as a criticism of evolutionary biology. I do still stand by the claims I was making about the lack of a language-independent syntactic notion of simplicity. Wesley apparently disagrees. He suggested that the Universal Distribution provides such a notion. I don't see how that can work. Appealing to a measure of simplicity that relies upon a particular way of describing a UTM (the number of NAND expressions, in your case) is no help.

Nerull Posts: 317 Joined: June 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,22:51    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,21:35) Quote Then you haven't reduced the complexity, you've simply shifted it from the software to the hardware. But this just begs the question. In what sense is the second UTM more complex than the first one? Is this sense language-independent? Quote How do you think this helps you, particularly if you're trying to establish an analogy with natural selection? I wasn't trying to argue from analogy here. I was trying to argue that in principle there is no description language-independent notion of simplicity. This was supposed to be an argument against those who were saying that green really is simpler than grue in some objective sense. I moved the discussion up to the complexity of the computers themselves in the first post I made on this thread. This was in response to those who were suggesting that although green may not be simpler than grue in purely linguistic terms, green-computers would be simpler than grue-computers. It seems to me you are falling subject to the "spherical cow" story - abstracting to the point there it becomes a hindrance and not a help. You are using binary sequences to claim that a color filter and a photon detector is not simpler than a color filter, a photon detector, a biological timer that is set to go off at some distant point in the future, and an input inverter. Think about it. -------------- To rebut creationism you pretty much have to be a biologist, chemist, geologist, philosopher, lawyer and historian all rolled into one. While to advocate creationism, you just have to be an idiot. -- tommorris

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,23:01    Keith, I made it sound in the last post that there is no workable notion of physical simplicity. But I don't think that's true. I think some things are made out of more basic parts (and types of parts) than other things. But whether or not the syntactic simplicity of our descriptions tracks the physical simplicity of objects depends on whether our language (more generally, our set of inductive biases) carves nature at the joints. While I'm usually happy to assume that it does, I was resisting the idea that we can make this assumption when we're trying to account for the origin of those biases themselves. This was why I thought your physical simplicity proposal was question-begging. Since then, I have come to accept that there's no special problem with assuming our inductive biases are accurate when attempting to explain them. So I no longer think your proposal is question-begging. However, the context of this discussion with Wesley is different. Here I'm responding specifically to his charge that I was wrong when I said that algorithmic information theory does not have the resources to adjudicate the relative simplicity of two finite strings without first assuming a natural language (which amounts to assuming a particular construction for the UTM). Appealing to the actual physical structure of the world we live in in order to privilege one sort of UTM over the other transcends algorithmic information theory, which is a purely syntactic measure of complexity.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 22 2008,23:13    Nerull, If you look at my response to Keith here, you'll notice that I am not arguing that: Quote a color filter and a photon detector is not simpler than a color filter, a photon detector, a biological timer that is set to go off at some distant point in the future, and an input inverter What I was arguing in that post was that to assume that a grue detector would need that more elaborate construction is already to assume the correctness of your inductive biases. Without appealing to those biases, you do not know if a simple device made up of a filter and a photon detector detects green or grue. So the enhanced physical complexity of a grue detector is a red herring. A grue detector would only need to be more physically complex if grue were not a projectible predicate. But that is just to assume what needs to be proved. I find myself in the oddly schizophrenic position of going back and defending the few valid pieces of my argument which I now recognize is globally invalid. I think I still agree with most of what I wrote above except the last bit: "But that is just to assume what needs to be proved." In the context of the inductive bias discussion, I no longer think its out of bounds to begin with the assumption that green is projectible and grue isn't. I do however still object to the notion (if anybody is defending it) that one can show green to be projectible without taking for granted our (or, more appropriately, evolution's) inductive biases.

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,06:34    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,00:13) What I was arguing in that post was that to assume that a grue detector would need that more elaborate construction is already to assume the correctness of your inductive biases. Without appealing to those biases, you do not know if a simple device made up of a filter and a photon detector detects green or grue. So the enhanced physical complexity of a grue detector is a red herring. A grue detector would only need to be more physically complex if grue were not a projectible predicate. But that is just to assume what needs to be proved. MSB, I'm interested in hearing your response to this previous comment (very slightly modified for clarity): In your scenario, green-blue and grue-bleen sensory biases are equally adaptive prior to 2012. Both are adept at responding to the pre-2012 blue green world. Moreover, given how crucial vision is to survival, both mechanisms would be sustained over generations by brutal normalizing selection. Prior to 2012, however, only the components of the grue-bleen system that enable functioning in the pre 2012 blue-green world would be subject to that normalizing selection. Those components and/or computational resources - however simple the final system - that permit grue-bleen perception and hence enable continued success after 2012 would not be subject to normalizing selection prior to 2012 and, absent that selection, would deteriorate and become non-functional. Ultimately, in either world (blue-green or grue-bleen), only creatures with blue-green sensory functioning are predicted by current evolutionary theory. This solution does not require a potentially arbitrary "complexity" metric that can contain hidden assumptions regarding the "correctness" of a given inductive bias. And this solution does not require evolution to have been prescient regarding unprecedented future events (in the event that the world proves to be blue-green). -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,12:52    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 22 2008,21:01) Appealing to the actual physical structure of the world we live in in order to privilege one sort of UTM over the other transcends algorithmic information theory, which is a purely syntactic measure of complexity. My metric -- the number of two-input NAND expressions required for a minimal implementation of a particular UTM -- does not depend on the physical structure of the world.  It depends only on Boolean logic. Please tell me you're not asking us to consider worlds where Boolean logic doesn't hold. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,13:11    Bill, Your argument already assumes a particular inductive bias. You say that the grue-bleen perceptual system would have to have at least two components: one that allows it to detect blue-green in the current environment and another that somehow anticipates a switch in 2012. The first component would be subject to normalizing selection before 2012 but the second wouldn't and so it would become non-functional, leaving regular blue-green systems with no switch mechanism. The assumption here is that grue-bleen has to have this multi-component structure but blue-green does not. Why? Because grue-bleen involves a switch to different properties but blue-green does not. But that is only true in the blue-green basis. If you represent the situation using grue and bleen as natural predicates, then it is the blue-green system that is preparing for a switch. Prior to 2012 both systems are subject to normalizing selection to ensure that they can adequately track grue and bleen (and remember, in this basis, grue and bleen are not weird cross-temporal disjunctive properties but merely the properties things have at a particular time), but the blue-green system has an extra component that anticipates the switch in 2012 from grue to bleen and vice versa. This component is not subject to selection and will deteriorate. So the idea that grue-bleen is temporally disjunctive while blue-green isn't (which lead to the idea that grue-bleen requires multiple components, including some kind of timer) assumes that prior to 2012 evolution naturally works in the blue-green rather than the grue-bleen basis. And this is an appeal to a particular inductive bias. But again, I no longer thing appealing to evolution's own inductive bias in this matter is problematic, so your analysis does work. However, it would not work if we were actually refraining from privileging any particular inductive bias.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,13:33    Quote My metric -- the number of two-input NAND expressions required for a minimal implementation of a particular UTM -- does not depend on the physical structure of the world.  It depends only on Boolean logic. Please tell me you're not asking us to consider worlds where Boolean logic doesn't hold. You misunderstand me. I was not suggesting that you needed to refer to the physical world to justify your appeal to Boolean logic. But you chose a specific basis in which to express Boolean expressions: the NAND basis. On this basis computer 1 will turn out to be simpler than computer 2. However, the NAND basis is not the only one that spans Boolean space. Or, to put it differently, the NAND gate is not the only universal logic gate. Trivially, there's also the NOR gate. So your choice to represent the implementation in terms of NAND rather than NOR (or for that matter, in terms of AND, OR and NOT) is a choice of description language. You might say, "So what? Computer 1 will be simpler on these other representations as well." But NAND and NOR are not the only two universal gates. They are merely the simplest ones (relative to our inductive biases). One could construct universal gates (or sets of non-universal gates that collectively span Boolean space) that would look extremely elaborate when translated into NAND representation. Can you guarantee that computer 1 is simpler in every one of these bases? I would be very surprised if it were. For instance, consider the entire Boolean description of computer 2. It might turn out that this whole description is a universal gate (unlikely, maybe, but not impossible). If that were the case, then on that representation computer 2 would be simpler than computer 1. So the choice of NAND as the preferred representation is a choice of a particular language. I assumed you were trying to justify the choice of NAND over NOR or the even more grotesque universal gates by appealing to the physical simplicity of constructing a NAND gate as opposed to one of these others. That's why I brought physical simplicity into the discussion. But as long as we're talking purely formally, I don't see why one should prefer NAND to one of the many other possible Boolean representations.

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,13:43    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,14:11) The assumption here is that grue-bleen has to have this multi-component structure but blue-green does not. Why? Because grue-bleen involves a switch to different properties but blue-green does not. But that is only true in the blue-green basis. If you represent the situation using grue and bleen as natural predicates, then it is the blue-green system that is preparing for a switch. Prior to 2012 both systems are subject to normalizing selection to ensure that they can adequately track grue and bleen (and remember, in this basis, grue and bleen are not weird cross-temporal disjunctive properties but merely the properties things have at a particular time), but the blue-green system has an extra component that anticipates the switch in 2012 from grue to bleen and vice versa. This component is not subject to selection and will deteriorate. I've only a moment, but think about what you have predicted: You've predicted that just one of these variants will be evident.   Not because of evolutionary prescience, but because of the action of selection. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,13:53    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,11:11) The assumption here is that grue-bleen has to have this multi-component structure but blue-green does not. Why? Because grue-bleen involves a switch to different properties but blue-green does not. But that is only true in the blue-green basis. If you represent the situation using grue and bleen as natural predicates, then it is the blue-green system that is preparing for a switch. MSB, First you asked us how it was possible for natural selection to settle on a blue/green inductive bias when, according to you, a grue/bleen bias would have been equally valid. Now you're telling us that the choice of inductive bias makes no difference.  In a grue/bleen world, a grue/bleen detector has exactly the same structure as a blue/green detector in a blue/green world.  Natural selection gets it right either way by producing the simpler design. That renders your initial question nonsensical, because it means that natural selection didn't have to single out one bias or the other. It chose both. ETA:  Looks like R. Bill beat me by a few minutes. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

dvunkannon Posts: 1377 Joined: June 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,14:01    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,00:13) So the enhanced physical complexity of a grue detector is a red herring. A grue detector would only need to be more physically complex if grue were not a projectible predicate. But that is just to assume what needs to be proved. OK, I'll admit to following the discussion to this point without knowing what you mean by projectible. From nosing around on the internet, I can't find a definition of "projectible" that sounds different than "useful for induction". Is that how you mean it? Just to help me out on the whole grue/bleen thing, let's say it's a short time before time 't' and I have an emerald with a light shining on it. The reflected light passes through a beam splitter and one half goes through a long piece of fiber optic cable. Time 't' passes. If the photons exiting the cable are compared to the photons coming directly from the emerald, is there a short time when a machine or a human could detect that one stream was grue and the other was bleen? Are we discussing labels that humans put on their mental states, the perception of color by a species of primates, or dramatic changes in the real world? A good part of this discussion feels like "after 2012, we have always been at war with Eastasia." -------------- I’m referring to evolution, not changes in allele frequencies. - Cornelius Hunter I’m not an evolutionist, I’m a change in allele frequentist! - Nakashima

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,14:03    Quote I've only a moment, but think about what you have predicted: You've predicted that just one of these variants will be evident.   Not because of evolutionary prescience, but because of the action of selection. I'm really not sure what you're saying here. But let me try to clarify my view. In crude terms, there are two aspects to the blue-green (or grue-bleen) inductive system. There's the detection system and there's the response system. Now the supposition is that the detection system is identical for blue-green and grue-bleen creatures. It's not that one of them has a more elaborate system made up of multiple filters and timers or whatever. No, they both have the same detection system. Now if we are being truly neutral with respect to these inductive biases, we must concede that we do not know if this detection system detects grue or green (i.e. we do not know whether the detector gives stable output when presented with grue or green input). Given its performance so far, it could be either one. We'll only find out for sure in 2012. Now where the creatures differ is in their response systems. The blue-green creatures respond to particular detections with green-type expectations about the future. The grue-bleen creatures respond to the same detections with grue type expectations about the future. Given that their detection systems are identical, one of these creatures is going to be surprised come 2012 because its expectation system does not match its detection system. Its expectations will diverge from its detections. Again, without assuming an inductive bias ourselves, we cannot predict which creature will be surprised. Now my claims were that: (a) These creatures are, ceteris paribus, equally fit prior to 2012. (b) There's no obvious sense in which one creature has all the components of the other plus some more. They have the same detection system and different response systems. Both of these systems will be subject to selection (against other such systems) prior to 2012, but they remain neutral relative to each other until 2012. There is no exploitable asymmetry here until 2012. So given this description, in what sense have I predicted that "just one of these variants will be evident"?

midwifetoad Posts: 4003 Joined: Mar. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,14:16    I haven't seen any discussion of learning in this discussion. Since any discussion of detection and interpretation necessarily assumes at least a rudimentary nervous system, we are discussion systems that respond to changing contingencies much more rapidly than biological evolution. We know, for example, that when the image focused on the human retina is optically inverted, that a person can adapt within a week, and perform complex tasks such as riding a motorcycle. The chief benefit of nervous systems is that they contribute a layer of adaptive evolution that responds much faster than changes to the genome. -------------- Any version of ID consistent with all the evidence is indistinguishable from evolution.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,14:21    Quote First you asked us how it was possible for natural selection to settle on a blue/green inductive bias when, according to you, a grue/bleen bias would have been equally valid. Now you're telling us that the choice of inductive bias makes no difference.  In a grue/bleen world, a grue/bleen detector has exactly the same structure as a blue/green detector in a blue/green world.  Natural selection gets it right either way by producing the simpler design. Keith, See my response to Bill. I think the crucial point here is that there is a difference between inductive biases and the perceptual system. These are two different cognitive capacities. Saying the detectors have the same structure is to say that the perceptual system is the same. But the inductive biases can still be difference. So the choice of inductive bias makes a difference, but it makes a difference to what the organism expects/predicts, not to what it detects.

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,15:32    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,12:03) Now the supposition is that the detection system is identical for blue-green and grue-bleen creatures. It's not that one of them has a more elaborate system made up of multiple filters and timers or whatever. No, they both have the same detection system... Now where the creatures differ is in their response systems. The blue-green creatures respond to particular detections with green-type expectations about the future. The grue-bleen creatures respond to the same detections with grue type expectations about the future. If you posit different response systems, then Bill's point applies all over again -- but with respect to response instead of perception: Quote In your scenario, green-blue and grue-bleen sensory biases are equally adaptive prior to 2012. Both are adept at responding to the pre-2012 blue green world. Moreover, given how crucial vision is to survival, both mechanisms would be sustained over generations by brutal normalizing selection. Prior to 2012, however, only the components of the grue-bleen system that enable functioning in the pre 2012 blue-green world would be subject to that normalizing selection. Those components and/or computational resources - however simple the final system - that permit grue-bleen perception and hence enable continued success after 2012 would not be subject to normalizing selection prior to 2012 and, absent that selection, would deteriorate and become non-functional. Dude, you're reacting to our comments without thinking things through. Slow down and mull it over for a while. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,15:55    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,15:03) Now where the creatures differ is in their response systems... Now my claims were that: (a) These creatures are, ceteris paribus, equally fit prior to 2012. (b) There's no obvious sense in which one creature has all the components of the other plus some more. They have the same detection system and different response systems. Both of these systems will be subject to selection (against other such systems) prior to 2012, but they remain neutral relative to each other until 2012. There is no exploitable asymmetry here until 2012. So given this description, in what sense have I predicted that "just one of these variants will be evident"? You predicted it here:                   Quote ...but the blue-green system has an extra component that anticipates the switch in 2012 from grue to bleen and vice versa. This component is not subject to selection and will deteriorate. In short, having swapped which system projects the most natural predicates, your result is the same. Prior to 2012, one of these variants (by virtue of your starting assumptions) carries features that would enable success post 2012 that the other lacks, but have no impact upon fitness prior to 2012. I'll stipulate that it isn't possible to determine by any metric, prior to that date, which will be more adaptive subsequent to that date, as such efforts will simply re-introduce our biases. However, built into the structure of your thought experiment is the notion that these systems differ in some way that, subsequent to 2012, may result in a marked difference in fitness (and doesn't matter if it is a perceptual or a behavioral difference). Whatever those features are, normalizing selection, prior to 2012, cannot "see" those differentiating features, and therefore cannot sustain them. So the prediction remains that by the time 2012 arrives, either all variants that remain will be able to cope (because there is no actual disjunction, and normalizing selection has sustained those features required to cope with the ongoing, non-disjunct environment) or no variant will cope (because the features required to cope with the disjunction were either never there or have deteriorated). Neither result requires or suggests evolutionary prescience. I don't see that parsing these structures into perceptual and response (behavioral) components and locating the differences in the latter changes this in the least. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,17:28    Keith and Bill, My understanding of Bill's point is that he thinks the grue-bleen inductive agent must have all the same components as the blue-green agent plus something extra. This extra something is not subject to normative selection, so it will eventually deteriorate, leaving a regular blue-green agent. If we redescribe the situation in grue-bleen terms, then the verdict just reverses. Now it is the blue-green agent who has the something extra, and so she will eventually be whittled down to the grue-bleen agent (well, not literally her, but her descendants). In either case, we will end up with the same sort of agent. Anything that could distinguish blue-green agents from grue-bleen ones must be some kind of idle non-adaptive dangler prior to 2012, so its going to disappear. Is this an accurate paraphrase of your argument, Bill? Now I hope you'll bear with me. The next section is kind of long, but I wanted to make sure the issues involved are clear. I feel like all of us are talking past each other a little bit. -- Now I think that there is no reason to think the response systems of the two agents must be additively related in this way. Let me give an example of a really simple blue-green inductive agent. When it sees a bunch of emeralds (pre-2012) it forms the belief "Emeralds are green." What I mean by "forms a belief" in this context is cashed out completely in terms of the following stimulus-response behavior. The agent can bet a certain amount of resources for or against certain questions posed to it by some external tester (a proxy for the environment). Here are the responses to some questions: "Will emerald x be green?" - Bet on yes. "Will emerald x be blue?" - Bet on no. "Will emerald x be grue?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on yes, else bet on no. "Will emerald x be bleen?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on no, else bet on yes. Now we have a grue-bleen agent. When faced with the exact same initial set of data as the first agent it forms the belief "Emeralds are grue," cashed out in terms of this response table: "Will emerald x be grue?" - Bet on yes. "Will emerald x be bleen?" - Bet on no. "Will emerald x be green?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on yes, else bet on no. "Will emerald x be blue?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on no, else bet on yes. Note that both these agents are formally identical, but they differ in their semantic properties: they respond differently to different external stimuli. One of them will start losing resources in 2012. Now if Bill is right, one/both of these agents has an idle dangler in its response system that will deteriorate before 2012. In this case, the formal identity of both agents means that if one of them has this dangler the other will too (there's no reasonable sense in which the response system of one of these agents is a proper sub-part of the response system of the other). And the plausible candidate for the dangler is the difference in their responses to grue and green questions. This difference will only manifest after 2012, so prior to that it is not subject to normative selection (on Bill's story). This difference in the responses will be whittled away until we are left with creatures who are neutral with respect to these inductive biases, which means they either: (a) make inconsistent bets post-2012 (betting yes on both green and grue for instance), (b) refuse to bet on post-2012 emeralds, or © develop some sort of probabilistic betting strategy that weighs both biases equally (so maybe half the population bets on green and the other half on grue). But all of this relies on a premise: The part of the inductive bias that has to do with grue/green differences is purely additive. Removing it doesn't affect the functioning of the rest of the system. This is a big big assumption, though. It is quite possible that the cheapest sort of response system does distinguish grue and green. In other words, the cheapest way to buy inductive success in the present might involve committing the system to one particular inductive bias in the future. And it might be the case that while the cost of both the blue-green and grue-bleen inductive systems is equivalent prior to 2012 (by hypothesis), they are both cheaper than the sort of inductive system that does not choose between the biases. Now even if you accept all this, you might say, "OK, so maybe it is possible that it's cheaper to have an post-2012 inductive bias rather than none at all. But it's still going to be the case that only one of these biases will survive. By hypothesis, the grue-bleen trait is neutral relative to the blue-green one, so we expect one of them to go to fixation just by random drift." But this is only relevant if the blue-green and grue-bleen populations interbreed. I agree that we should expect a uniform inductive bias within a breeding sub-population.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,17:32    A quick correction: In the previous post when I was considering the two simple agents I said that the difference between them will only be manifest post-2012. I should have said that the difference between them will only have adaptive consequences post-2012. There will be observable differences between them before then. They'll both make different predictions about what will happen after 2012, for instance.

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,17:57    BTW, I apologize to all the people I haven't yet responded to. It's not that I'm ignoring your posts because I think they're stupid (or, conversely, unanswerable). I'm posting stuff on here in between bouts of trying to get a chapter of my dissertation ready. I'm already spending way more time on here than I probably should, so you'll excuse me for shying away from becoming embroiled in more than one discussion at a time. Although so far I haven't done such a great job in the shying away department.

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,19:18    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,18:28) Let me give an example of a really simple blue-green inductive agent. When it sees a bunch of emeralds (pre-2012) it forms the belief "Emeralds are green." What I mean by "forms a belief" in this context is cashed out completely in terms of the following stimulus-response behavior. The agent can bet a certain amount of resources for or against certain questions posed to it by some external tester (a proxy for the environment). Here are the responses to some questions: "Will emerald x be green?" - Bet on yes. "Will emerald x be blue?" - Bet on no. "Will emerald x be grue?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on yes, else bet on no. "Will emerald x be bleen?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on no, else bet on yes. Now we have a grue-bleen agent. When faced with the exact same initial set of data as the first agent it forms the belief "Emeralds are grue," cashed out in terms of this response table: "Will emerald x be grue?" - Bet on yes. "Will emerald x be bleen?" - Bet on no. "Will emerald x be green?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on yes, else bet on no. "Will emerald x be blue?" - If x is discovered prior to 2012 bet on no, else bet on yes. Note that both these agents are formally identical, but they differ in their semantic properties: they respond differently to different external stimuli. One of them will start losing resources in 2012. Your first paragraph does accurately describe my position. Otherwise, I don't follow. Using your scheme of question and response (which I don't much like), the blue-green agent would be represented thusly: "Will emerald x be green?" - Bet on yes. "Will emerald x be blue?" - Bet on no. "Will emerald x be grue?" - No meaning to a system with blue-green predicates. "Will emerald x be bleen?" - No meaning to a system with blue-green predicates. The simplest possible blue-green system shaped by "experience" (selection) in an exclusively blue-green world would lack the facilities to make the "if date < 2012 then predict green else predict blue" decisions you describe. Hence it is not formally equivalent to the grue-bleen system you subsequently describe, does does need something equivalent to an if-then-else decision logic that tests the date prior to every prediction. Which facilities are the very "dangler" you describe, features that must be lost even in a grue-bleen world because invisible to normalizing selection prior to 2012. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,21:57    Quote The simplest possible blue-green system shaped by "experience" (selection) in an exclusively blue-green world would lack the facilities to make the "if date < 2012 then predict green else predict blue" decisions you describe. Hence it is not formally equivalent to the grue-bleen system you subsequently describe, does does need something equivalent to an if-then-else decision logic that tests the date prior to every prediction. Which facilities are the very "dangler" you describe, features that must be lost even in a grue-bleen world because invisible to normalizing selection prior to 2012. This is the part I disagree with. You think that there is something about the world being blue-green that will make blue-green inductive agents simpler than grue-bleen ones, prior to 2012 (grue-bleen agents would need an extra dangler). Presumably you also agree that if the world were actually grue-bleen then grue-bleen agents would be simpler than blue-green ones prior to 2012. But what does it mean for the world to be blue-green vs. grue-bleen? It just means that "blue" remains a stable and lawlike predicate (and mutatis mutandis for grue). Things that are naturally blue do not change their color discontinuously and without cause. But if this is all it means for a world to be blue-green, then we could change a blue-green world to a grue-bleen world without changing anything that happens before 2012. Just switching the colors of objects post-2012 without touching anything before 2012 should give us a grue-bleen world. In other words, we can have a grue-bleen world and a blue-green world that look just like each other up to 2012 and only differ afterwards. Right? Seems right to me. But you say it's wrong. According to you, you can't change a blue-green world to a grue-bleen one without changing some stuff prior to 2012. Namely, you have to change the construction of inductive agents, because you don't think we could end up with simpler grue-bleen creatures in a blue-green world and vice versa. Which means you think that information about the natural structure of the world (whether its blue-green or grue-bleen) is available prior to 2012. I don't see how this could be the case (if we don't assume the correctness of our or evolution's inductive biases). Properties don't come tagged with labels reading "this is natural". The naturalness (at least, the projectibility) of green vs. grue consists solely in how objects behave after 2012. In a naturally green world they stay green, while in a grue world they switch to blue. So it seems to me that you must either maintain that green creatures must be simpler than grue ones independently of the structure of the world (its blue-greenness or grue-bleenness), in which case we're back to the question of a language-independent notion of simplicity. Or you should agree that there is no obvious reason to think that blue-green creatures will be simpler even in an exclusively blue-green world. [Here's where I go schizophrenic again. While I think its wrong to say that blue-green creatures will be favored in a naturally blue-green world, it is correct to say blue-green creatures will be favored in a world where the evolutionary algorithm has a blue-green inductive bias. There's no non-biased reason to thing the bias of the algorithm must track the structure of the world, but that's just the general Humean problem of induction, which is why I abandoned that line of inquiry.]

Missing Shade of Blue Posts: 62 Joined: Dec. 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 23 2008,22:09    I note with dismay that we've crossed 100 posts on this thread. I've really been posting way too much so I'm going to try to cut back and get some actual work done. I'm going to read what people have to say and I might be irresistibly drawn to respond, but this is my official request not to be offended if I don't reply for a while. Discussing this has certainly been illuminating and enjoyable for me, and I appreciate y'all being gentle. I came in to this deeply puzzled and I leave significantly less puzzled. That's a lot more than you can reasonably expect from your usual internet forum discussion. Have a great holiday season, everybody. I hope baby Jesus brings you lots of presents.

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,03:50    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 24 2008,04:09) [SNIP] I hope baby Jesus brings you lots of presents. Wait, does this mean Santa's not real? Louis -------------- Bye.

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,03:55    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,19:57) According to you, you can't change a blue-green world to a grue-bleen one without changing some stuff prior to 2012. Namely, you have to change the construction of inductive agents, because you don't think we could end up with simpler grue-bleen creatures in a blue-green world and vice versa. Which means you think that information about the natural structure of the world (whether its blue-green or grue-bleen) is available prior to 2012. I don't see how this could be the case (if we don't assume the correctness of our or evolution's inductive biases). MSB, That's not what Bill is saying. I think I see the source of the confusion.  You've been talking about changing the wavelength of light reflected by emeralds in 2012 but also about changing the wavelength of light responded to by the detectors in 2012. The confusion will go away if you carefully define what you mean by a "grue-bleen world". In a grue/bleen world: 1a. What wavelength of light will an emerald reflect before 2012? 1b. What wavelength of light will an emerald reflect after 2012? 2a. What wavelength of light will detector A respond to before 2012? 2b. What wavelength of light will detector A respond to after 2012? 3a. What wavelength of light will detector B respond to before 2012? 3b. What wavelength of light will detector B respond to after 2012? If the answers to the a's match the answers to the corresponding b's in all cases, then you obviously have a blue/green world, because nothing changes in 2012. If the answers to the a's differ from the answers to the b's in all cases, then you have a world that is indistinguishable from a blue/green world (neglecting the possibility of direct or indirect wavelength measurements which we are not considering here). Everything changes in 2012, but the changes cancel out so that nobody notices. Let's call this a "quasi-blue/green world". In a true grue/bleen world, either the answers to 1a vs. 1b will differ, or the answers to 2a vs. 2b and 3a vs. 3b will differ. When 2012 arrives, the change will be obvious to the inhabitants of the world. The confusion stems from not consistently talking about a true grue/bleen world. Part of the time you've been talking about the quasi-blue/green world instead. If you ponder this carefully, I think you'll see that evolution will select the simpler detector and the simpler response in all of the possible worlds, and that no prescience is involved. The simple solution is favored because it is simple while being equally adaptive. Natural selection is not "guessing" the correct inductive bias for our (presumably) blue/green world, and so the mystery that you raised in the beginning of this discussion is not a mystery at all. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,04:04    Quote (Louis @ Dec. 24 2008,01:50)   Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 24 2008,04:09) [SNIP] I hope baby Jesus brings you lots of presents. Wait, does this mean Santa's not real? Of course Santa is real, dear.  Now run along, Louis, the grownups are talking. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

Louis Posts: 6436 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,05:01    Quote (keiths @ Dec. 24 2008,10:04) Quote (Louis @ Dec. 24 2008,01:50)   Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 24 2008,04:09) [SNIP] I hope baby Jesus brings you lots of presents. Wait, does this mean Santa's not real? Of course Santa is real, dear.  Now run along, Louis, the grownups are talking. Harsh and unfair! Well done. Louis -------------- Bye.

Patashu Posts: 6 Joined: Oct. 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,05:16    Okay, just butting in quickly. Hm... If we lived in a universe where bleen, grue and their respective sensors were the norm, and blue/green sensors as we know it were the ones that required an adjustment from grue/bleen sensors (presumably by a timer to reverse it out)...I'm pretty sure it'd be functionally equivalent to our universe, since the normal people would see the same colours before and after and the deviants would be the ones seeing them change. Am I in the wrong here?

Reciprocating Bill Posts: 4265 Joined: Oct. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,05:48    Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 23 2008,22:57) You think that there is something about the world being blue-green that will make blue-green inductive agents simpler than grue-bleen ones, prior to 2012 (grue-bleen agents would need an extra dangler). Presumably you also agree that if the world were actually grue-bleen then grue-bleen agents would be simpler than blue-green ones prior to 2012. No, I've saying something quite different. I'm saying that a blue-green world and an actual grue-bleen world prior to 2012 subject both agents to identical normalizing selection prior to 2012, selection that sustains blue-green predication but fails to support grue-bleen predication were it present at the outset. This doesn't make blue-green inductive agents simpler than grue-bleen ones; rather, it renders grue-bleen agents functionally similar to blue-blue green ones, in that they inevitably become capable of blue-green predication only. Note that I am asserting exactly the same selection pressures (prior to 2012) in both worlds. This predicts that, come 2012, either all agents succeed because there is no disjunction, or all fail because there is a disjunction but no agents remain that can cope with it - either they were always blue-green agents, or they were orginally grue-bleen agents that have come to functionally resemble blue-green agents. Neither outcome suggests evolutionary prescience. -------------- Myth: Something that never was true, and always will be. "The truth will set you free. But not until it is finished with you." - David Foster Wallace "Here’s a clue. Snarky banalities are not a substitute for saying something intelligent. Write that down." - Barry Arrington

Quack Posts: 1961 Joined: May 2007 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,09:26    FWIMBW: Let's assume that it is true that evolution works by extinction of the less fit. In the absence of predators, poisons, dangers - and abundant supply of food, mating partners and so on +++ - everyone is fit to survive. Until disaster strikes or the inevitable bottleneck occurs. Isn't that what the records show? -------------- Rocks have no biology.               Robert Byers.

keiths Posts: 2195 Joined: Jan. 2006 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,09:38    Quote (Patashu @ Dec. 24 2008,03:16) Okay, just butting in quickly. Hm... If we lived in a universe where bleen, grue and their respective sensors were the norm, and blue/green sensors as we know it were the ones that required an adjustment from grue/bleen sensors (presumably by a timer to reverse it out)...I'm pretty sure it'd be functionally equivalent to our universe, since the normal people would see the same colours before and after and the deviants would be the ones seeing them change. Am I in the wrong here? Patashu, That's what I referred to as the "quasi-blue/green world" in this comment. -------------- And the set of natural numbers is also the set that starts at 0 and goes to the largest number. -- Joe G Please stop putting words into my mouth that don't belong there and thoughts into my mind that don't belong there. -- KF

dvunkannon Posts: 1377 Joined: June 2008 (Permalink) Posted: Dec. 24 2008,09:48    Quote (Louis @ Dec. 24 2008,04:50) Quote (Missing Shade of Blue @ Dec. 24 2008,04:09) [SNIP] I hope baby Jesus brings you lots of presents. Wait, does this mean Santa's not real? Louis childhood Xmas induction FAIL -------------- I’m referring to evolution, not changes in allele frequencies. - Cornelius Hunter I’m not an evolutionist, I’m a change in allele frequentist! - Nakashima