Correct me if I’m wrong, but from a Bayesian perspective the only difference between first-hand knowledge and N-th hand knowledge (where N>1) are the numbers. There is nothing special about first-hand.
Suppose you see a dog in the street, and formulate this knowledge to yourself. What just happened? Photons from the sun (or other light sources) hit the dog, bounced, hit your eye, initiated a chemical reaction, etc. Your knowledge is neither special nor trivial, but is a chain of physical events.
Now, what happens when your friend tells you he sees a dog? He had to form the knowledge in his head. Then he vocalized it, sound waves moved through the air, hit your ear drum, initiated chemical reactions… supposing he is a truth-sayer, the impact on you, evidence-wise, is almost exactly the same. Simply, the chain of events leading to your own knowledge is longer, but that’s the only difference. Once again, there is no magic here. Your friend is just another physical link in the chain.
(A corollary is that introspection in humans is broken. Often we honestly say we want X, but do Y. The various manifestations of this phenomenon have been talked about extensively on OB. It is conceivable that in the future scientists would be able to predict our behavior better than ourselves, by studying our brains directly. So we don’t really have any special authority over ourselves.)
If there was an agent known to be a perfect pipe of evidence, we should treat its words as direct observations. People are not perfect pipes of evidence, so that complicates issues. However, some things are pretty clear even though I have no first-hand knowledge of them:
Los Angeles exists. (Note that I’ve never been to the Americas.)
It is now night-time in Los Angeles. (About 2 AM, to be precise.)
In 2006, the city of Los Angeles had a population of approximately 3.8 million.
And so on, until:
Modern evolutionary theory is generally true.
There is no God.
And if I am wrong, it is simply because I failed my math, not because I lack in “authority”. So there, I said it. Your turn :-)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but from a Bayesian perspective the only difference between first-hand knowledge and N-th hand knowledge (where N>1) are the numbers. There is nothing special about first-hand.
Suppose you see a dog in the street, and formulate this knowledge to yourself. What just happened? Photons from the sun (or other light sources) hit the dog, bounced, hit your eye, initiated a chemical reaction, etc. Your knowledge is neither special nor trivial, but is a chain of physical events.
Now, what happens when your friend tells you he sees a dog? He had to form the knowledge in his head. Then he vocalized it, sound waves moved through the air, hit your ear drum, initiated chemical reactions… supposing he is a truth-sayer, the impact on you, evidence-wise, is almost exactly the same. Simply, the chain of events leading to your own knowledge is longer, but that’s the only difference. Once again, there is no magic here. Your friend is just another physical link in the chain.
(A corollary is that introspection in humans is broken. Often we honestly say we want X, but do Y. The various manifestations of this phenomenon have been talked about extensively on OB. It is conceivable that in the future scientists would be able to predict our behavior better than ourselves, by studying our brains directly. So we don’t really have any special authority over ourselves.)
If there was an agent known to be a perfect pipe of evidence, we should treat its words as direct observations. People are not perfect pipes of evidence, so that complicates issues. However, some things are pretty clear even though I have no first-hand knowledge of them:
Los Angeles exists. (Note that I’ve never been to the Americas.) It is now night-time in Los Angeles. (About 2 AM, to be precise.) In 2006, the city of Los Angeles had a population of approximately 3.8 million.
And so on, until:
Modern evolutionary theory is generally true. There is no God.
And if I am wrong, it is simply because I failed my math, not because I lack in “authority”. So there, I said it. Your turn :-)
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