“Since my expectations sometimes conflict with my subsequent experiences, I need different names for the thingies that determine my experimental predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘beliefs’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”
I think this is a fine response to Mr. Carrico, but not to the post-modernists. They can still fall back to something like “Why are you drawing a line between ‘predictions’ and ‘results’? Both are simply things in your head, and since you can’t directly observe reality, your ‘results’ are really just your predictions of the results based off of the adulterated model in your head! You’re still just asserting your belief is better.”
The tack I came up with in the meditation was that the “everything is a belief” might be a bit falsely dichotomous. I mean, it would seem odd, given that everything is a belief, to say that Anne telling you the marble is in the basket is just as good evidence as actually checking the basket yourself. It would imply weird things like, once you check and find it in the box, you should be only 50% sure of where the marble is, because Anne’s statement is weighed equally.
(And thought it’s difficult to put my mind in this state, I can think of this as not in service of determining reality, but instead as trying to inform my belief that, after I reach into the box, I will believe that I am holding a marble.)
Once you concede that different beliefs can weigh as different evidence, you can use Bayesian ideas to reconcile things. Something like “nothing is ‘true’ in the sense of deserving 100% credence assigned to it (saying something is true really does just mean that you really really believe it, or, more charitably, that belief has informed your future beliefs better than before you believed it), but you can take actions to become more ‘accurate’ in the sense of anticipating your future beliefs better. While they’re both guesses (you could be hallucinating, or something), your guess before checking is likely to be worse, more diluted, filtered through more layers from direct reality, than your guess after checking.”
I may be off the mark if the post-modernist claim is that reality doesn’t exist, not just that no one’s beliefs about it can be said to be better than anyone else’s.
“Since my expectations sometimes conflict with my subsequent experiences, I need different names for the thingies that determine my experimental predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies ‘beliefs’, and the latter thingy ‘reality’.”
I think this is a fine response to Mr. Carrico, but not to the post-modernists. They can still fall back to something like “Why are you drawing a line between ‘predictions’ and ‘results’? Both are simply things in your head, and since you can’t directly observe reality, your ‘results’ are really just your predictions of the results based off of the adulterated model in your head! You’re still just asserting your belief is better.”
The tack I came up with in the meditation was that the “everything is a belief” might be a bit falsely dichotomous. I mean, it would seem odd, given that everything is a belief, to say that Anne telling you the marble is in the basket is just as good evidence as actually checking the basket yourself. It would imply weird things like, once you check and find it in the box, you should be only 50% sure of where the marble is, because Anne’s statement is weighed equally.
(And thought it’s difficult to put my mind in this state, I can think of this as not in service of determining reality, but instead as trying to inform my belief that, after I reach into the box, I will believe that I am holding a marble.)
Once you concede that different beliefs can weigh as different evidence, you can use Bayesian ideas to reconcile things. Something like “nothing is ‘true’ in the sense of deserving 100% credence assigned to it (saying something is true really does just mean that you really really believe it, or, more charitably, that belief has informed your future beliefs better than before you believed it), but you can take actions to become more ‘accurate’ in the sense of anticipating your future beliefs better. While they’re both guesses (you could be hallucinating, or something), your guess before checking is likely to be worse, more diluted, filtered through more layers from direct reality, than your guess after checking.”
I may be off the mark if the post-modernist claim is that reality doesn’t exist, not just that no one’s beliefs about it can be said to be better than anyone else’s.