The spirit of the Fun Criterion
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With an account, you can revise, criticize, and comment on ideas.Another problem with the term ‘statement’ is that not every statement encodes knowledge. Only some statements do.
Recall Deutsch’s definitions of knowledge (paraphrasing from memory): information with causal power; information which, once instantiated, causes itself to remain instantiated.
The sentence ‘nice weather we’re having’ is a statement but doesn’t meet those definitions of knowledge.
Interesting, I hadn’t thought of that angle before. I’ve always taken a fairly broad view of “information with causal power,” assuming that any explicit statement from a human mind qualifies. Even the simple remark “Nice weather we’re having” can have causal power—it might prompt the listener to respond, or push the speaker to continue if the comment goes unacknowledged. In that sense, almost any statement can be read and potentially inspire another universal explainer. Even when fed into an LLM, the statement can still be parsed and worked with. In contrast, mere “information” in the form of gibberish, a made-up language, or a nonsensical string of random words would not be parsable, and therefore would not exert causal power on the parser.
I also recall Deutsch often saying that knowledge is information that tends to remain instantiated once it appears. I always understood that as a form of causal power, rather than as a separate criterion. I’m not sure he has ever been fully explicit on this point. But if he does mean it as a strict demarcation—that knowledge is only what causes itself to persist—then I’d agree with your criticism.
You make a good point. Maybe the definition ‘information with causal power’ on its own isn’t very good since virtually any statement can have causal power yet presumably even Deutsch would agree that merely saying ‘hi’ isn’t knowledge even though it can have causal power (eg prompting someone to say ‘hi’ back).