Mind Projection Fallacy

Rationality: From AI to Zombies

by Eliezer Yudkowsky  · 11 Mar 2015  · 1,737pp  · 491,616 words

187. Perpetual Motion Beliefs 188. Searching for Bayes-Structure P. Reductionism 101 189. Dissolving the Question 190. Wrong Questions 191. Righting a Wrong Question 192. Mind Projection Fallacy 193. Probability is in the Mind 194. The Quotation is Not the Referent 195. Qualitatively Confused 196. Think Like Reality 197. Chaotic Inversion 198. Reductionism

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identified; the meaning feels like an intrinsic property of the word itself. The cognoscenti will recognize this as a case of E. T. Jaynes’s “Mind Projection Fallacy.” It feels like a word has a meaning, as a property of the word itself; just like how redness is a property of a red

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187. Perpetual Motion Beliefs 188. Searching for Bayes-Structure P. Reductionism 101 189. Dissolving the Question 190. Wrong Questions 191. Righting a Wrong Question 192. Mind Projection Fallacy 193. Probability is in the Mind 194. The Quotation is Not the Referent 195. Qualitatively Confused 196. Think Like Reality 197. Chaotic Inversion 198. Reductionism

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idea that cognitive science is not so lofty and glorious as metaphysics is simply wrong. Some readers are beginning to notice this, I hope. * 192 Mind Projection Fallacy In the dawn days of science fiction, alien invaders would occasionally kidnap a girl in a torn dress and carry her off for intended ravishing

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the woman. Since the woman is attractive, the alien monster will be attracted to her—isn’t that logical? E. T. Jaynes used the term Mind Projection Fallacy to denote the error of projecting your own mind’s properties into the external world. Jaynes, as a late grand master of the Bayesian Conspiracy

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the mistreatment of probabilities as inherent properties of objects, rather than states of partial knowledge in some particular mind. More about this shortly. But the Mind Projection Fallacy generalizes as an error. It is in the argument over the real meaning of the word sound, and in the magazine cover of the monster

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in a delicate chiffon dress. Just thought I’d mention that.) * 193 Probability is in the Mind In the previous essay I spoke of the Mind Projection Fallacy, giving the example of the alien monster who carries off a girl in a torn dress for intended ravishing—a mistake which I imputed to

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herself, Woman.sexiness, rather than something that exists in the mind of an observer, and probably wouldn’t exist in an alien mind. The term “Mind Projection Fallacy” was coined by the late great Bayesian Master E. T. Jaynes, as part of his long and hard-fought battle against the accursèd frequentists. Jaynes

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. So if your internal representations of belief, and belief about belief, are dissimilar, then you are less likely to mix them up and commit the Mind Projection Fallacy—I hope. When you think in probabilities, your beliefs, and your beliefs about your beliefs, will hopefully not be represented similarly enough that you mix

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, and structure their time accordingly. And it occurred to me for the first time that I might have been committing that damned old chestnut the Mind Projection Fallacy, right out there in my ordinary everyday life instead of high abstraction. Maybe it wasn’t that my productivity was unusually chaotic; maybe I was

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, because I looked at the request and deemed it legitimate, but I knew I couldn’t do that topic until I’d started on the Mind Projection Fallacy sequence, which wouldn’t be for a while . . . But now it’s time to begin addressing this question. And while I haven’t yet come

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heap of history. And reductionism is not so much a positive hypothesis, as the absence of belief—in particular, disbelief in a form of the Mind Projection Fallacy. I once met a fellow who claimed that he had experience as a Navy gunner, and he said, “When you fire artillery shells, you’ve

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haunts and gnomes? Several things are going on simultaneously. But for now let’s focus on the basic idea introduced in a previous essay: The Mind Projection Fallacy between a multi-level map and a mono-level territory. (I.e.: There’s no way you can model a 747 quark-by-quark, so

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the same to Keats. Scientists didn’t do anything to gnomes, only to “gnomes.” The quotation is not the referent. But if you commit the Mind Projection Fallacy—and by default, our beliefs just feel like the way the world is—then at time T = 0, the mines (apparently) contain gnomes; at time

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: “You are now a novice of the Bayesian Conspiracy.” * Part R Physicalism 201 214 Hand vs. Fingers Back to our original topic: Reductionism and the Mind Projection Fallacy. There can be emotional problems in accepting reductionism, if you think that things have to be fundamental to be fun. But this position commits us

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bridging laws, the laws could have been conceivably different, and so are not in any sense necessary facts, etc. All of these are cases of Mind Projection Fallacy, and what I call “naive philosophical realism”—the confusion of philosophical intuitions for direct, veridical information about reality. Your inability to imagine something is just

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governs at low speeds, and a “bridging law” that smooths the interface. Reality itself has only a single level, Einsteinian gravity. It is only the Mind Projection Fallacy that makes some people talk as if the higher levels could have a separate existence—different levels of organization can have separate representations in human

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maps, but the territory itself is a single unified low-level mathematical object. Suppose this were wrong. Suppose that the Mind Projection Fallacy was not a fallacy, but simply true. Suppose that a 747 had a fundamental physical existence apart from the quarks making up the 747. What

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constant vigilance to maintain your perception of yourself as an entity within physics. This vigilance is one of the great keys to philosophy, like the Mind Projection Fallacy. You will recall that it is this point which I nominated as having tripped up the quantum physicists who failed to imagine macroscopic decoherence; they

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each class. Of course, it is a severe error to say that a phenomenon is precise or vague, a case of what Jaynes calls the Mind Projection Fallacy.7 Precision or vagueness is a property of maps, not territories. Rather we should ask if the price in the supermarket stays constant or shifts

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relevant. When you think about a two-place function as though it were a one-place function, you end up with a Variable Question Fallacy / Mind Projection Fallacy. Like trying to determine whether a building is intrinsically on the left or on the right side of the road, independent of anyone’s travel

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, like making beliefs pay rent and curiosity stoppers—have excellent historical examples in vitalism and phlogiston. Non-existence of ontologically fundamental mental things—apply the Mind Projection Fallacy to probability, move on to reductionism versus holism, then brains and cognitive science. The many sub-arts of Crisis of Faith—though you’d better

Logically Fallacious: The Ultimate Collection of Over 300 Logical Fallacies (Academic Edition)

by Bo Bennett  · 29 May 2017

Intentional Fallacy Invincible Ignorance Fallacy Knights and Knaves Lack of Proportion Latino Fallacy* Lies (Misrepresentation) Lip Service Lump of Labor Fallacy (Lump of Jobs Fallacy) Mind Projection Fallacy Monopolizing the Question Norm of Reciprocity Not Invented Here Outdated Information Packing the House Paralogism Paralysis of Analysis (Procrastination) Pigeonholing Pious Fraud Pragmatic Fallacy Preacher

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contention that the amount of work available to laborers is fixed. This can be debatable, depending on the economist asked. • Mind Projection Fallacy: Coined by physicist and bayesian philosopher E.T. Jaynes, the mind projection fallacy occurs when one believes with certainty that the way he sees the world reflects the way the world really is

Global Catastrophic Risks

by Nick Bostrom and Milan M. Cirkovic  · 2 Jul 2008

1 This is a case of a deep, confusing, and extraordinarily common mistake that E.T. Jaynes named the mind projection fallacy (Jaynes and Bretthorst, 2003). Jaynes, a physicist and theorist of Bayesian probability, coined 'mind projection fallacy' to refer to the error of confusing states of knowledge with properties of objects. For example, the phrase

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-3 techno-millenialism 79-81 utopianism 77-8 Millenia/ism, Utopianism, and Progress, Olson, T. 86 Millennium Bug 82-3, 340 M illerism 74-5 mind projection fallacy 3 1 0 mini-black holes 349-50 minimal standard model 354 Minuteman ballistic missiles 382 consequences of strike 389 mistakes, as cause of nuclear

Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies

by Nick Bostrom  · 3 Jun 2014  · 574pp  · 164,509 words

reputation and appearance. Figure 12 Results of anthropomorphizing alien motivation. Least likely hypothesis: space aliens prefer blondes. More likely hypothesis: the illustrators succumbed to the “mind projection fallacy.” Most likely hypothesis: the publisher wanted a cover that would entice the target demographic. An AI, by contrast, need not care intrinsically about any of