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: Provisionality, published by Tsvi Benson-Tilsen on June 19, 2023 on The AI Alignment Forum.

[Metadata: crossposted from. First completed March 7, 2023.]

A mental element has to be open to revision, and so it has to be treated as though it might be revised.

Thanks to Sam Eisenstat for relevant conversations and for the basic notion of provisionality.

Terms

Provisionality

A mental element E is provisional when it is suitable to treat E as open to revision, i.e. as though it might be suitable to revise E in the future. Provisionality is the state of being provisional.

Many elements are provisional: they have yet to be fully grasped, made explicit, connected to what they should be connected to, had all their components implemented, carved at the joints, made available for use, indexed, suitably redescribed in other terms.

An element is essentially provisional when it is, in its essence, provisional. That is, an essentially provisional element is, by its nature and by its role in the mind, provisional: in all (or a great range of) possible worlds the element is always provisional, even after more explicitizing and correcting has happened.

Provisionality is normative

Provisionality isn't how a mind actually treats the element. A mind might treat an element as-if-provisionally even though really the element is not provisional (i.e., really it ought to be treated as finalized), and a mind might treat an element not as-if-provisionally even though the element really is provisional.

Provisionality is also not whether the element will actually be revised.

So, provisionality is normative (it describes "right" behavior, and so is an imperative for an agent behaving "rightly"), while as-if-provisionality is descriptive (describes actual behavior). Revision of an element is a kind of witness to its prior provisionality, since probably if the element actually gets revised, it should have been treated as though it will be revised.

Openness

An element E is open when it is suitable to treat E as non-closed, non-circumscribed, open to novel relations; that is, as though it might in the future be suitable to relate E to more elements than it currently relates to. Openness is the state of being open. Openness could also be called noncontainedness.

As with provisionality, openness is normative.

Openness is a subclass of provisionality. If an element E is open then E is also provisional in that way, because a novel relation with E is a kind of revision of E. Updating a probability distribution can be a substantial revision that's not (much of) a novel relation, witnessing provisionality but not openness. (On the other hand, to deduce consequences of a hypothesis witnesses openness, because it brings more kinds of evidence to bear on the hypothesis.)

Essentiality

Essentiality is when a property holds of a thing by the nature of that thing: in all (or a great range of) possible worlds, the property holds of the thing.

An example is essentially undecidable logical theories: theories which can't be consistently extended to a decidable theory.

A class of examples comes from logical implication, i.e. analyticity, as in "Pediatricians are essentially doctors.". (The concept of analytic is problematic because it relies somewhat circularly on notions of logical rules and implication, see Quine's "Two Dogmas of Empiricism", but relative analyticity (or enthymemic analyticity, understood to always be relative to unstated premises) seems less problematic.)

In terms of a thing as an inductive nexus of reference, essentiality means centrality or eventual permanence. A thing is essentially P if, following the reference of the thing however deep into its nexus, whatever structure is there will satisfy property P.

Quoting from "Rootedness" about essential provisionality and essential openness:

The novelty c...