On 11/8/07, Edward W. Porter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > ED ########>> Most importantly you say my alleged confusion between > subjective and objective maps into my difficulty to grasp the significance > of Solomonoff induction. If you could do so, please explain what you mean.
Given our significantly disjoint backgrounds, the best I hoped for was to point out where you're not going to get a good answer because you're not asking a good question. In contrast to my "unfriendly" negative approach, there's plenty of positive literature available on the web, and the more you poke at, the more it'll tend to fit into place. > I would really like to better understand why so many smart people seem the > think its the bee's knees. I wouldn't call it the "bee's knees" because it doesn't actually tell us how to build a practical machine intelligence, but it does tell us about the nature of the problem, and practical efforts must be consistent with this theory. This discussion seems very similar to a previous futile discussion over the significance of the Principle of Indifference to probabilistic inference. When will I learn? ;-) > You say "'sensation is never received' by any system" and yet the word is > commonly used to describe information received by the brain from sensory > organs, not just in common parlance but also in brain science literature. The sensory organs may act to transduce, filter, encode and participate in the transfer of stimuli, but stimulus is not sensation. > I don't think your strictly limited usage is the most common. That's my frequent burden, that what I find most interesting tends to be the least common, and thus generally misunderstood. But that's why I find it interesting. As a hobby, I collect paradoxes. <snipped a bunch of text showing that Edward understands the word "subjective"> <reinserted the following text relevant to my use of the word "subjective"> > > MY COMMENT>>>> At Dragon System, then one of the world's leading > > speech recognition companies, I was repeatedly told by our in-house > > PhD in statistics that "likelihood" is the measure of a hypothesis > > matching, or being supported by, evidence. Dragon selected speech > > recognition word candidates based on the likelihood that the > > probability distribution of their model matched the acoustic evidence > > provided by an event, i.e., a spoken utterance. > > If you said Dragon selected word candidates based on their probability > distribution relative to the likelihood function supported by the evidence > provided by acoustic events I'd be with you there. As it is, when you say > "based on the likelihood that the probability..." it seems you are confusing > the subjective with the objective and, for me, meaning goes out the door. Edward, can you explain what you might have meant by "based on the likelihood that the probability..."? To expand on my previous response, likelihood is simply the probability of some data, given all the relevant parameters. "Given all the relevant parameters" is key, and implies objectivity. Without all the relevant parameters of the likelihood function, you are left with probability, which is inherently subjective. When you said "based on the likelihood that the probability", it seemed that you were somehow (?) confusing the subjective with the objective, which in my opinion, is a theme running through this entire thread. How does this map onto your difficulty grasping the significance of Solomonoff induction? Solomonoff induction is an idealized description of learning by a subjective agent interacting with an "objective" (actually "consistent" might be more accurate here) reality. - Jef ----- This list is sponsored by AGIRI: http://www.agiri.org/email To unsubscribe or change your options, please go to: http://v2.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=63580789-28c095
