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: Teleosemantics!, published by abramdemski on February 23, 2023 on LessWrong.

I wanted to write a long, detailed, analytic post about this, somewhat like my Radical Probabilism post (to me, this is a similarly large update). However, I haven't gotten around to it for a long while. And perhaps it is better as a short, informal post in any case.

I think my biggest update over the past year has been a conversion to teleosemantics. Teleosemantics is a theory of semantics -- that is, "meaning" or "aboutness" or "reference".

To briefly state the punchline: Teleosemantics identifies the semantics of a symbolic construct as what the symbolic construct has been optimized to accurately reflect.

Previously, something seemed mysterious about the map/territory relationship. What could possibly imbue 'symbols' with 'meaning'? The map/territory analogy seems inadequate to answer this question. Indeed, to analogize "belief" with "map" and "the subject of belief" with "territory" commits a homunculus fallacy! The meaning-makers are the map-readers and map-writers; but they can only make meaning by virtue of the beliefs within their own heads. So the map/territory analogy seems to suggest that an infinite regress of meaning-makers would be required.

You probably won't believe me at first. Perhaps you'll say that the lesson of the map/territory analogy is the correspondence between the map and the territory, which exists independently of the map-reader who uses the correspondence to evaluate the map.

I have several objections.

If it's a probabilistic correspondence, where the map contains information about the territory, these are subjective notions, which require some viewpoint.

If it's a correspondence based on some sort of ontology, where pieces of the map line up with "pieces of reality", I would also say the ontology is in itself a subjective perspective.

You might think you can define the map/territory correspondence without invoking a map-maker or map-reader by objectively defining the "fit" of a correspondence (so that the meaning of a symbol is based on the best-fitting correspondence, or perhaps, the cloud of well-fitting correspondences). But well-fitting correspondence will include many examples of accidental correspondence, which seem to have little to do with aboutness. Moreover, I think theories like this will fail to adequately account for false belief, which screws up the fit.

But my point here isn't to denounce the map/territory picture! I still think it is a good framework. Rather, I wanted to gesture at how I still felt confused, despite having the map/territory picture.

I needed a different analogy, something more like a self-drawing map, to get rid of the homunculus. A picture which included the meaning-maker, rather than just meaning come from nowhere.

Teleosemantics reduces meaning-making to optimization. Aboutness becomes a type of purpose a thing can have.

One advantage of this over map-territory correspondence is that it explains the asymmetry between map and territory. Mutual information is symmetric. So why is the map about the territory, but not the other way around? Because the map has been optimized to fit the territory, not the other way around. ("Fit" in the sense of carrying high mutual information, which can be decoded via some specific intended correspondence - a symbolic language.)

What does it mean to optimize for the map to fit the territory, but not the other way around? (After all: we can improve fit between map and territory by changing either map or territory.) Maybe it's complicated, but primarily what it means is that the map is the part that's being selected in the optimization. When communicating, I'm not using my full agency to make my claims true; rather, I'm specifically selecting the claims to be true.

I take Teleosemantics to be the s...