So even if God knew everything that every possible human knew and could know about cottage cheese, that knowledge cannot add up to a definition sufficient to eliminate all edge cases?
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Yes. As in the chapter cited, there is no particular minimal integer number of hairs you can have and still not be bald, which God could determine but we don’t (yet) know.
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So, even with perfect knowledge the best one can do is to say whether or not a given person is bald, but one can never give a complete account of how this was determined?
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Well, there are many people who you’d say “I guess he’s bald-*ish*” or “somewhat bald” or something. There’s a “gray area.”
This is not a matter of incomplete knowledge; you could inspect him as closely as you like and it wouldn’t make a difference. It’s in the world, not map.
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So the problem isn’t a lack of knowledge, or of perception, cognition, computation or reasoning. There just are people whose baldness is indeterminable. Even assuming a metaphysical being without human constraints doesn’t get around this problem.
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Yes, exactly. That’s what “nebulous” means. It’s “an ontological term, not an epistemological one.”
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Would you go the other extreme to Donald Hoffman’s position that ontology is entirely a matter of perceptual adaptive fit and that entities only exist in relation to fitness to survival purposes? Ie reality is one big nebulous blob that we carve up in ways that help us survive?
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No… tbc, I am not doing philosophy and I’m not doing physics, so it’s not about those sorts of questions. But: culture is in some sense somewhat independent of biological evolution, and it’s much of what goes into ontology.
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In that case, since the boundaries among those 3 things are themselves nebulous, I think you need an argument as to why culture exists as an independent nebulous phenomenological domain at all, distinct from language-as-social-biological-instinct.
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Mmm, yeah, this is again not the sort of project I’m attempting. I’m not trying to prove anything or do science or philosophy. I’m pointing out common-sense features of everyday life and their overlooked implications for everyday life.
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Sounds like the reason you have conflicts with rationalists and strong AGIers is that they believe “everyday life” can be unrecognizably transformed in ways you believe are impossible because it would mean eliminating nebulosity, which you believe is irreducible. Right?
I don’t think so… and the rationalism part and the AGI part are (I think?) entirely separate.
I don’t have a strong opinion about AGI. All I can say is currently it doesn’t look like we have any clue about how to make it. That suggests it won’t happen very soon, but only weakly
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