I would suggest but one fundamental statement which we can accept without circular or infinite reasoning: The things which I observe reflect reality in some consistent and knowable way. (This exact wording has some problems, I ask you to ignore them)
This statement can be untrue, but if it was it would be reasonable to say that we are completely uncertain on the state of reality. Thus we can create two possible mindsets, based on whether the claim is true:
(1): We have no idea what is going on
(2): The mindset that we generally take(too long to describe)
It’s clear that (1) is completely useless at predicting the one thing that we care about: Moving towards pleasure and away from pain. Even if the claim is false, (1) will not be more effective at predicting pain than (2)(On average). If the claim has some arbitrarily small chance of being true, we expect a higher return on acting as if it is correct than if we act any other way. Thus, we should always act as if the claim is true and use the mindset (2).
I would suggest but one fundamental statement which we can accept without circular or infinite reasoning: The things which I observe reflect reality in some consistent and knowable way. (This exact wording has some problems, I ask you to ignore them) This statement can be untrue, but if it was it would be reasonable to say that we are completely uncertain on the state of reality. Thus we can create two possible mindsets, based on whether the claim is true: (1): We have no idea what is going on (2): The mindset that we generally take(too long to describe) It’s clear that (1) is completely useless at predicting the one thing that we care about: Moving towards pleasure and away from pain. Even if the claim is false, (1) will not be more effective at predicting pain than (2)(On average). If the claim has some arbitrarily small chance of being true, we expect a higher return on acting as if it is correct than if we act any other way. Thus, we should always act as if the claim is true and use the mindset (2).