What if each instant were independent from the last?
At first sight, this situation, which from now on I will call BLEAK, might seem hopelessly bleak in an epistemological sense. For example: in the real world, a stock quote is probably going to be just a little higher or lower than its previous value, but if BLEAK were true, it would be no more probable that Gamestop remains less valuable than Tesla at the next instant than the contrary. In fact, both companies might not even exist in the next instant. If anyone truly believed that we have no reason to think that BLEAK is false, that one moment affects the next one, he should be paralyzed by uncertainty. But no one is. Therefore, radical sceptics don’t even believe what they preach.
And yet, they probably think they do. They wouldn’t all be lying, right? Well, I think they are probably just confused.
However, I intend to show that BLEAK might not be quite as epistemologically bleak as it seems:
Suppose that you throw some dice a huge number of times. You’ll notice that they all fall with some number between 1 and 6 face up. Actually that’s not a very good example because if you wanted to see what numbers you could get, you would just look around each face of the die. So let’s use a black box random number generator instead. Literally just a black box with a screen and a button. When you press the button, a random number between 1 and 6 shows up. So Bob comes across this box and doesn’t know what it’s for. He messes with it for a bit and notices that a number shows up in the screen every time he presses the button. He becomes obsessed with it and spends whole days and nights pressing it numerous times for the rest of his life. He will soon become used to seeing the same numbers on it. By the end of his life, a seven or an eight will (rightly) seem very unlikely to appear on it.
Now, if BLEAK were true, we could model our experience as this box. Our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, (and this is crucial) our memories are what is shown on the screen. So, given that each instant is independent from the next (remember: we are pretending for a second that BLEAK is true), how did we never notice it? Is my whole life just a (very) lucky streak of random feelings and thoughts and perceptions, like seeing the whole Bee Movie appear in the TV static by sheer coincidence?
It could be, but it’s very unlikely.
It’s more reasonable to infer that the total population of possible experiences from which each instant in my life is a random sample is either only made up of experiences that seem coherent, just like our normal day to day life, or heavily biased toward these experiences, in the same way that if Bob spent his whole life taking samples from our RNG black box, it’s reasonable for him to assume that the probability distribution he was sampling from was at least heavily biased towards numbers between 1 and 6, or maybe even consisted entirely of them.
So, if I suddenly discovered that BLEAK is true, I shouldn’t immediately disregard the past observed regularity as a mere lucky streak, just as one might disregard the fact that the last thousand times he threw a die it landed on a six as a huge coincidence, if he knew for a fact that it was a fair die. No. Even if each instant were independent, I should expect that they would probably continue to appear dependent.
But I confess I’m not sure what to make of the past instants. If all the regularity I ever observed is just a general feature of possible experience and the instants themselves are related by no such regularity, then woudn’t this make the regularity of the past memories an illusion, and thus the memories themselves illusory? In this case, I would have no right to look upon my past experience as a huge sample of past instants. I would just have the single current instantaneous experience as my only sample, and my memories would just be a feature of it. It would be as if, instead of Bob spending his whole life pressing the button in the black box countless times, he pressed it only once, saw the resulting number on the screen, and had no more data. Now, this would be a really bleak scenario. But I’m not quite sure about this last step of my reasoning.
Problem of Induction: What if Instants Were Independent
At first sight, this situation, which from now on I will call BLEAK, might seem hopelessly bleak in an epistemological sense. For example: in the real world, a stock quote is probably going to be just a little higher or lower than its previous value, but if BLEAK were true, it would be no more probable that Gamestop remains less valuable than Tesla at the next instant than the contrary. In fact, both companies might not even exist in the next instant. If anyone truly believed that we have no reason to think that BLEAK is false, that one moment affects the next one, he should be paralyzed by uncertainty. But no one is. Therefore, radical sceptics don’t even believe what they preach.
And yet, they probably think they do. They wouldn’t all be lying, right? Well, I think they are probably just confused.
However, I intend to show that BLEAK might not be quite as epistemologically bleak as it seems:
Suppose that you throw some dice a huge number of times. You’ll notice that they all fall with some number between 1 and 6 face up. Actually that’s not a very good example because if you wanted to see what numbers you could get, you would just look around each face of the die. So let’s use a black box random number generator instead. Literally just a black box with a screen and a button. When you press the button, a random number between 1 and 6 shows up. So Bob comes across this box and doesn’t know what it’s for. He messes with it for a bit and notices that a number shows up in the screen every time he presses the button. He becomes obsessed with it and spends whole days and nights pressing it numerous times for the rest of his life. He will soon become used to seeing the same numbers on it. By the end of his life, a seven or an eight will (rightly) seem very unlikely to appear on it.
Now, if BLEAK were true, we could model our experience as this box. Our thoughts, our feelings, our perceptions, (and this is crucial) our memories are what is shown on the screen. So, given that each instant is independent from the next (remember: we are pretending for a second that BLEAK is true), how did we never notice it? Is my whole life just a (very) lucky streak of random feelings and thoughts and perceptions, like seeing the whole Bee Movie appear in the TV static by sheer coincidence?
It could be, but it’s very unlikely.
It’s more reasonable to infer that the total population of possible experiences from which each instant in my life is a random sample is either only made up of experiences that seem coherent, just like our normal day to day life, or heavily biased toward these experiences, in the same way that if Bob spent his whole life taking samples from our RNG black box, it’s reasonable for him to assume that the probability distribution he was sampling from was at least heavily biased towards numbers between 1 and 6, or maybe even consisted entirely of them.
So, if I suddenly discovered that BLEAK is true, I shouldn’t immediately disregard the past observed regularity as a mere lucky streak, just as one might disregard the fact that the last thousand times he threw a die it landed on a six as a huge coincidence, if he knew for a fact that it was a fair die. No. Even if each instant were independent, I should expect that they would probably continue to appear dependent.
But I confess I’m not sure what to make of the past instants. If all the regularity I ever observed is just a general feature of possible experience and the instants themselves are related by no such regularity, then woudn’t this make the regularity of the past memories an illusion, and thus the memories themselves illusory? In this case, I would have no right to look upon my past experience as a huge sample of past instants. I would just have the single current instantaneous experience as my only sample, and my memories would just be a feature of it. It would be as if, instead of Bob spending his whole life pressing the button in the black box countless times, he pressed it only once, saw the resulting number on the screen, and had no more data. Now, this would be a really bleak scenario. But I’m not quite sure about this last step of my reasoning.