Though my argument that the reward interpretation of a signal is always internal to an agent still holds, Ana pointed out that the existance of the signal could be either external or internal. A reasonable distinction based on the source of the signal could differentiate between external and internal reward.
According to Wikipedia: A category mistake, or category error, is a semantic or ontological error by which a property is ascribed to a thing that could not possibly have that property. I encountered an interesting (and I hope uncontroversial) example of a category error in a meeting of the UTCS reinforcement learning group today. Richard [...]
And yet, aside from several barbed references, there is no sign of any real contact between the new atheists and theology at all, let alone studious investigation. This circumvention is comparable to creationists rejecting evolution without ever having taken a course in biology. They just know there’s something wrong with those crazy Darwinian fantasies. So [...]
Basically, one is dealing here with a community of people who, by common standards, are quite intelligent and imaginative, and certainly diligent enough to carve out large areas of discourse for themselves wherein their assumptions and modes of analysis remain in the saddle for decades at a time. This is not a trivial achievement, think [...]
A talk on why beauty is such a good selection criteria for discovering correct physical law. A quote: Life can emerge from physics and chemistry plus a lot of accidents. I will say that mathematical beauty is in part self fulfilling, since theories which are beautiful (simple) are more likely to be discovered before grossly [...]
I’ve been reading a lot of Searle recently. Searle bashing seems to be a popular pastime among young graduate students in AI, but I admit to a certain sympathy with his argument. I recently read about analogue computing in The New Turing Omnibus which reminded me of one of Searle’s central claims, that the locus [...]
On the bus ride to work this morning, I found myself daydreaming about what it might have been like to be a juror in the OJ Simpson murder trial. I know this is a fairly ridiculous thing to be daydreaming about, but it exemplifies the kind of random inner narrative that often occupies me in [...]
In the tradition of meta-posting, I’ll take the opportunity to announce that my efforts to transform this activity into something “academic” have failed. Introspection has revealed that: I am not yet knowledgeable enough to contribute ideas that are both interesting and accessible. I’m actually more self-conscious about how silly blogging is when I’m trying to [...]
Deconstruction is parasitic in that rather than espousing yet another grand narrative, or theory about the nature of the world in which we partake, it restricts itself to distorting already existing narratives, and to revealing the dualistic hierarchies they conceal. Semiotics, semiotic studies, or semiology is the study of signs and symbols, both individually and [...]
Hilarious. And now for some philosophy: …the real issue, for philosophers, is so-called pessimistic metainduction – the notion that since theories of science in the past have been proven wrong, there are no grounds for assuming that the same will not happen to current theories in the future. That might be bad enough for those [...]