On Tue, Oct 28, 2008 at 10:00 AM, Pei Wang <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> Ben, > > Thanks. So the other people now see that I'm not attacking a straw man. > > My solution to Hume's problem, as embedded in the experience-grounded > semantics, is to assume no predictability, but to justify induction as > adaptation. However, it is a separate topic which I've explained in my > other publications. Right, but justifying induction as adaptation only works if the environment is assumed to have certain regularities which can be adapted to. In a random environment, adaptation won't work. So, still, to justify induction as adaptation you have to make *some* assumptions about the world. The Occam prior gives one such assumption: that (to give just one form) sets of observations in the world tend to be producible by short computer programs. For adaptation to successfully carry out induction, *some* vaguely comparable property to this must hold, and I'm not sure if you have articulated which one you assume, or if you leave this open. In effect, you implicitly assume something like an Occam prior, because you're saying that a system with finite resources can successfully adapt to the world ... which means that sets of observations in the world *must* be approximately summarizable via subprograms that can be executed within this system. So I argue that, even though it's not your preferred way to think about it, your own approach to AI theory and practice implicitly assumes some variant of the Occam prior holds in the real world. > > > Here I just want to point out that the original and basic meaning of > Occam's Razor and those two common (mis)usages of it are not > necessarily the same. I fully agree with the former, but not the > latter, and I haven't seen any convincing justification of the latter. > Instead, they are often taken as granted, under the name of Occam's > Razor. I agree that the notion of an Occam prior is a significant conceptual beyond the original "Occam's Razor" precept enounced long ago. Also, I note that, for those who posit the Occam prior as a **prior assumption**, there is not supposed to be any convincing justification for it. The idea is simply that: one must make *some* assumption (explicitly or implicitly) if one wants to do induction, and this is the assumption that some people choose to make. -- Ben G ------------------------------------------- agi Archives: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/303/=now RSS Feed: https://www.listbox.com/member/archive/rss/303/ Modify Your Subscription: https://www.listbox.com/member/?member_id=8660244&id_secret=117534816-b15a34 Powered by Listbox: http://www.listbox.com
