Thursday, March 9, 2017

Multiple levels of multiple realizability

We could have sophisticated beings who reason about the world via numerical Bayesian credences. But we could also have sophisticated beings who reason in some other way—indeed, we are such beings. And there is one sophisticated being who reasons about the world via omniscience. This suggests that reasoning and agency are multiply realizable at multiple levels, including:

  1. brain/mind architecture

  2. algorithms implementing general reasoning and representation strategy

  3. general reasoning and representation strategy.

Each level is an abstraction from the previous. So now we have a very deep question: Is there a fourth level that abstracts from the third, to get the concept of reasoning as such? Or are the various general reasoning and representation strategies unified analogically, say by similarity to some primary case? And if so, what is the primary case? Omniscience? Logical omniscience plus numerical Bayesianism?

2 comments:

KhanhTrinh said...

то это лишь гипотетические предположения

Alexander R Pruss said...

That's true. But they are still plausible.