Welcome to The Nonlinear Library, where we use Text-to-Speech software to convert the best writing from the Rationalist and EA communities into audio. This is: Non-directed conceptual founding, published by Tsvi Benson-Tilsen on January 15, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

[Metadata: crossposted from. Written 13 June 2022. I'm fairly likely to not respond to comments promptly. If you're especially interested in chatting, my gmail address is: tsvibtcontact ]

In trying to understand minds-in-general, we sometimes ask questions that talk about "big" things (taking "big" to ambiguously mean any of large, complex, abstract, vague, important, touches many things, applies to many contexts, "high-level"). E.g.:

What is it for a mind to have thoughts or to care about stuff? How does care and thought relate?

What is it to believe a proposition?

Why do agents use abstractions?

These "big" things such as thought, caring, propositions, beliefs, agents, abstractions, and so on, have to be analyzed and re-understood in clearer terms in order to get anywhere useful. When others make statements about these things, I'm pulled to pause their flow of thoughts and instead try to get clear on meanings. In part, that pull is because the more your thoughts use descriptions that aren't founded on words with clear meaning, the more leeway is given to your words to point at different things in different instances.[1]

Main claim

From talking with Sam, I've come to think that there's an important thing I hadn't seen sufficiently clearly:

A description of Y that uses terms that are only as "foundational" as Y or even "less foundational" than Y, can still be useful and doesn't have to be harmful. For analyzing "big" things, such descriptions are necessary.

Circular founding

A description is a proposition of the form "Y is a ...". A description is founded on X if it assumes that X exists, e.g. by mentioning X, or by mentioning Z which mentions X, or by relying on X to be in the background.[2]

Some descriptions of Y might be founded on Y, or on X where X is itself founded on Y. A description like that could be called circular, or in general non-directed.

The circularity could be harmful. E.g., you could trick yourself into thinking you're talking about anything coherently, when really you're not: whenever you ask "Wait, what's Y?" you respond "Oh it's XZ", and you say "Z is YX", and you say "X is YZ", and you never do the work of connecting XYZ to stuff that matters, so it's all hot air. Or, you might have "Y" more densely connected to its neighbors, but not beholden to anything outside of its neighbors, so "Y" and its neighbors might drift under their own collaborative inertia and drag other ideas with them away from reality. There are probably other problems with circular founding, so, there's reason to be suspicious. But:

(A) Non-directed founding can elucidate relevant structure;

(B) For "big" things, it's more likely to be feasible to found somewhat-non-directedly, and especially somewhat-circularly, and less likely to be feasible to found strictly in a certain direction;

and therefore

(C) For analyzing and understanding "big" things, non-directed and circular founding are likely to be best-in-class among the available tools.

(A): "Thing = Nexus" as a circular, non-directed, useful founding

As an example, take the description of a thing as an inductive nexus of reference (more specifically, the claim that nexusness points essentially [see below] at the nexus of thingness). This description makes use of a pre-theoretic notion of the "stuff" between which there may be relations of reference, and defines "reference" in terms of what minds in general do. So the definition of nexus is founded on "stuff", which is pre-theoretically on a similar footing to "thing", making the definition of nexus somewhat circularly founded. And, the definition of nexus is founded on "mind", which is a "bigger" concept than "thing", making the definition of nexus founded on so...