Regardless of the exact starting point, seekers of “True Names” quickly find themselves recursing into a search for “True Names” of lower-level components of agency, like:
Optimization
Goals
World models
Abstraction
This is the big missing piece for me. Could you elaborate on how you go from trying to find the True Names of human values to things like what is an agent, abstraction, and embeddedness?
Goals makes sense, but the rest are not obvious why they'd be important or relevant. I feel like this reasoning would lead you to thinking about meta-ethics or... (read more)
Imagine it's 1665 and we're trying to figure out the True Name of physical force - i.e. how hard it feels like something is pushing or pulling.
One of the first steps is to go through our everyday experience, paying attention to what causes stronger/weaker sensations of pushing and pulling, or what effects stronger/weaker sensations have downstream. We might notice, for instance, that heavier objects take more force to push, or that a stronger push accelerates things faster. So, we might expect to find some robust relationship between the True Names of forc... (read more)
This is the big missing piece for me. Could you elaborate on how you go from trying to find the True Names of human values to things like what is an agent, abstraction, and embeddedness?
Goals makes sense, but the rest are not obvious why they'd be important or relevant. I feel like this reasoning would lead you to thinking about meta-ethics or... (read more)
Imagine it's 1665 and we're trying to figure out the True Name of physical force - i.e. how hard it feels like something is pushing or pulling.
One of the first steps is to go through our everyday experience, paying attention to what causes stronger/weaker sensations of pushing and pulling, or what effects stronger/weaker sensations have downstream. We might notice, for instance, that heavier objects take more force to push, or that a stronger push accelerates things faster. So, we might expect to find some robust relationship between the True Names of forc... (read more)