This is a great summary! My confidence that Humeanism is false is not extremely high; but it’s high enough for me to think philosophers of science are far too confident of Humeanism relative to the evidence. The main source of uncertainty for me here is that I’m really not clear on what it takes for something to be a ‘law of nature’. But if the essential question here is whether extremely strong correlations in fundamental physics call for further explanation, then I side with the ‘yeah, some explanation would be great’ side. The main worry is that if these events are brute coincidences, we have no Bayesian reason to expect the coincidence to continue into the future. The core intuition underlying non-Humeanism is that some simpler and more unitary mechanism is far more likely to have given rise to such empirical consistency than is such consistency to be the end of the story.
My concern with philosophers of science confidently endorsing Humeanism is that I expect this to be a case of ‘I’m supposed to think like a Scientist, and Scientists are skeptical of things, especially weird things we can’t directly observe’. Even if Humeanism itself is true, I would be very surprised if most Humeans believe in it for the right reasons.
In some ways this argument parallels the argument Eliezer has with himself over whether our universe is more like first-order logic or more like second-order; first-order logic is similar in some ways to Humeanism, because it doesn’t think we need to subsume the instances within a larger generalization in order to fully explain and predict them. (Or, more precisely, it thinks such generalizations are purely anthropocentric, human constructs for practical ends; they give us little if any reason to update in favor of any metaphysical posits.)
This is a great summary! My confidence that Humeanism is false is not extremely high; but it’s high enough for me to think philosophers of science are far too confident of Humeanism relative to the evidence. The main source of uncertainty for me here is that I’m really not clear on what it takes for something to be a ‘law of nature’. But if the essential question here is whether extremely strong correlations in fundamental physics call for further explanation, then I side with the ‘yeah, some explanation would be great’ side. The main worry is that if these events are brute coincidences, we have no Bayesian reason to expect the coincidence to continue into the future. The core intuition underlying non-Humeanism is that some simpler and more unitary mechanism is far more likely to have given rise to such empirical consistency than is such consistency to be the end of the story.
My concern with philosophers of science confidently endorsing Humeanism is that I expect this to be a case of ‘I’m supposed to think like a Scientist, and Scientists are skeptical of things, especially weird things we can’t directly observe’. Even if Humeanism itself is true, I would be very surprised if most Humeans believe in it for the right reasons.
In some ways this argument parallels the argument Eliezer has with himself over whether our universe is more like first-order logic or more like second-order; first-order logic is similar in some ways to Humeanism, because it doesn’t think we need to subsume the instances within a larger generalization in order to fully explain and predict them. (Or, more precisely, it thinks such generalizations are purely anthropocentric, human constructs for practical ends; they give us little if any reason to update in favor of any metaphysical posits.)