I don’t quite get what happens. Does imagining two and two together give same mental image as imagining two and one together? Does putting two and two earplugs together give same result as putting two and one earplug together? If it does, then I take 4 earplugs, put two and one together and put other into my ear, then two and one are same as two and two together, so I should be able to separate it into two and two, and and then I have two earplugs on my hands, two in a box, and one in my ear. I do it the second time and I can’t hear anything, but I have all the earplugs I had in the box. This would be some very cool magic.
If it does not, I don’t get what actually changed. I would suspect lesion in lexical region of the brain that makes me confused and makes me misunderstand the world from then on, interpreting 4 as 3 every time, but not when fetching from memory. Alternatively, a failure during fetching from memory is possible. That is plausible, and might even have happened to someone. The probability that i did screw up in the past would have gone up maybe from 0.001 to 0.01 (number just to illustrate) but wouldn’t go any higher. The probabilities for fancy alternative world stuff would go from maybe 1E-9 to 1E-8 , edit: scratch that, conspiracies and gods messing with simulator i won’t consider due to it’s lack of predictive value and hence zero expected utility from considering it.
edit: to clarify. 2+2=3 is an ill defined statement that means nothing to me until it is specified what exactly 2, 3, +, = mean, in such a way that I can at least evaluate truth of 2+2 = 2+1 and a couple other statements (such as separating 3 into 2 and 2). I could just as well reply to you in Chinese (and if reply is not very long and you have no access to the sufficient body of Chinese texts, it will be entirely impossible for you to understand it)
I don’t quite get what happens. Does imagining two and two together give same mental image as imagining two and one together? Does putting two and two earplugs together give same result as putting two and one earplug together? If it does, then I take 4 earplugs, put two and one together and put other into my ear, then two and one are same as two and two together, so I should be able to separate it into two and two, and and then I have two earplugs on my hands, two in a box, and one in my ear. I do it the second time and I can’t hear anything, but I have all the earplugs I had in the box. This would be some very cool magic.
If it does not, I don’t get what actually changed. I would suspect lesion in lexical region of the brain that makes me confused and makes me misunderstand the world from then on, interpreting 4 as 3 every time, but not when fetching from memory. Alternatively, a failure during fetching from memory is possible. That is plausible, and might even have happened to someone. The probability that i did screw up in the past would have gone up maybe from 0.001 to 0.01 (number just to illustrate) but wouldn’t go any higher. The probabilities for fancy alternative world stuff would go from maybe 1E-9 to 1E-8 , edit: scratch that, conspiracies and gods messing with simulator i won’t consider due to it’s lack of predictive value and hence zero expected utility from considering it.
edit: to clarify. 2+2=3 is an ill defined statement that means nothing to me until it is specified what exactly 2, 3, +, = mean, in such a way that I can at least evaluate truth of 2+2 = 2+1 and a couple other statements (such as separating 3 into 2 and 2). I could just as well reply to you in Chinese (and if reply is not very long and you have no access to the sufficient body of Chinese texts, it will be entirely impossible for you to understand it)