I asked you how it could be that a person could have no defaults on a given topic.
To clarify—my answer is that “there are topics I’ve never considered, and before consideration, I need not have a default belief.” For me at least, the level consideration to actually form a belief is nontrivial. I am often in a state of uninterested impartiality. If you ask me whether you have a friend named Joe, I would not hazard a guess and would be about equally surprised by either answer.
To put it more abstractly: There’s no particular computational reason why the mind needs to have a default for every input. You suggest some topic X, and it’s quite possible for me to remain blank, even if I heard you and constructed some internal representation of X. That representation need not be tied to a belief or disbelief in any of the propositions about X under discussion.
To clarify—my answer is that “there are topics I’ve never considered, and before consideration, I need not have a default belief.” For me at least, the level consideration to actually form a belief is nontrivial. I am often in a state of uninterested impartiality. If you ask me whether you have a friend named Joe, I would not hazard a guess and would be about equally surprised by either answer.
To put it more abstractly: There’s no particular computational reason why the mind needs to have a default for every input. You suggest some topic X, and it’s quite possible for me to remain blank, even if I heard you and constructed some internal representation of X. That representation need not be tied to a belief or disbelief in any of the propositions about X under discussion.