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Ontological Crisis in Humans — LessWrong

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Imagine a robot that was designed to find and collect spare change around its owner's house. It had a world model where macroscopic everyday objects are ontologically primitive and ruled by high-school-like physics and (for humans and their pets) rudimentary psychology and animal behavior. Its goals were expressed as a utility function over this world model, which was sufficient for its designed purpose. All went well until one day, a prankster decided to "upgrade" the robot's world model to be based on modern particle physics. This unfortunately caused the robot's utility function to instantly throw a domain error exception (since its inputs are no longer the expected list of macroscopic objects and associated properties like shape and color), thus crashing the controlling AI. According to Peter de Blanc, who used the phrase "ontological crisis" to describe this kind of problem, Human beings also confront ontological crises. We should find out what cognitive algorithms humans use to s

x Ontological Crisis in Humans — LessWrong Ontological Crisis Ethics & Morality Human Values Moral uncertainty Motivations Philosophy Frontpage 113 Ontological Crisis in Humans by Wei Dai 18th Dec 2012 5 min read 70 113 Imagine a robot that was designed to find and collect spare change around its owner's house. It had a world model where macroscopic everyday objects are ontologically primitive and ruled by high-school-like physics and (for humans and their pets) rudimentary psychology and animal behavior. Its goals were expressed as a utility function over this world model, which was sufficien

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