But how did you know how to phrase your original beliefs about photons? You could just have easily decided to describe photons as “photons obey Maxwell’s equations up to an event horizon and case to exist outside of it”.
Systems of belief are more like a lump of sandstone than a pile of sand, but they are also more like a lump of sandstone, a rather friable lump, than a lump of marble. They are not indissoluble structures that can be made in arbitrary shapes, the whole edifice supported by an attachment at one point to experience.
Experience never brought hypotheses such as you suggest to physicists’ attention. The edifice as built has no need of it, and it cannot be bolted on: it will just fall off again.
But these hypotheses have just be brought to our attention—just now. In fact the claim that these hypotheses produce indistinguishable physics might even be useful. If I want to simulate my experiences, I can save on computational power by knowing that I no longer have to keep track of things that have gone behind an event horizon. The real question is why the standard set of beliefs should be more true or meaningful than this new one. A simple appeal to what physicists have so far conjectured is not in general sufficient.
Which meaningful beliefs to consider seriously is an issue separate from the original koan, which asks which possible beliefs are meaningful. I think we are all agreeing that a belief about the remote photon’s extinction or not is a meaningful one.
I don’t see how you can claim that the belief that the photon continues to exist is a meaningful belief without also allowing the belief that the photon does not continue to exist to be a meaningful belief. Unless you do something along the lines of taking Kolmogorov complexity into account, these beliefs seem to be completely analogous to each other. Perhaps to phrase things more neutrally, we should be asking if the question “does the photon continue to exist?” is meaningful. On the one hand, you might want to say “no” because the outcome of the question is epiphenomenal. On the other hand, you would like this question to be meaningful since it may have behavioral implications.
I don’t see how you can claim that the belief that the photon continues to exist is a meaningful belief without also allowing the belief that the photon does not continue to exist to be a meaningful belief.
They’re both meaningful. There are reasons to reject one of them as false, but that’s a separate issue.
OK. I think that I had been misreading some of your previous posts. Allow me the rephrase my objection.
Suppose that our beliefs about photons were rewritten as “photons not beyond an event horizon obey Maxwell’s Equations”. Making this change to my belief structure now leaves beliefs about whether or not photons still exist beyond an event horizon unconnected from my experiences. Does the meaningfulness of this belief depend on how I phrase my other beliefs?
Also if one can equally easily produce belief systems which predict the same sets of experiences but disagree on whether or not the photon exists beyond the event horizon, how does this belief differ from the belief that Carol is a post-utopian?
Systems of belief are more like a lump of sandstone than a pile of sand, but they are also more like a lump of sandstone, a rather friable lump, than a lump of marble. They are not indissoluble structures that can be made in arbitrary shapes, the whole edifice supported by an attachment at one point to experience.
Experience never brought hypotheses such as you suggest to physicists’ attention. The edifice as built has no need of it, and it cannot be bolted on: it will just fall off again.
But these hypotheses have just be brought to our attention—just now. In fact the claim that these hypotheses produce indistinguishable physics might even be useful. If I want to simulate my experiences, I can save on computational power by knowing that I no longer have to keep track of things that have gone behind an event horizon. The real question is why the standard set of beliefs should be more true or meaningful than this new one. A simple appeal to what physicists have so far conjectured is not in general sufficient.
Which meaningful beliefs to consider seriously is an issue separate from the original koan, which asks which possible beliefs are meaningful. I think we are all agreeing that a belief about the remote photon’s extinction or not is a meaningful one.
I don’t see how you can claim that the belief that the photon continues to exist is a meaningful belief without also allowing the belief that the photon does not continue to exist to be a meaningful belief. Unless you do something along the lines of taking Kolmogorov complexity into account, these beliefs seem to be completely analogous to each other. Perhaps to phrase things more neutrally, we should be asking if the question “does the photon continue to exist?” is meaningful. On the one hand, you might want to say “no” because the outcome of the question is epiphenomenal. On the other hand, you would like this question to be meaningful since it may have behavioral implications.
They’re both meaningful. There are reasons to reject one of them as false, but that’s a separate issue.
OK. I think that I had been misreading some of your previous posts. Allow me the rephrase my objection.
Suppose that our beliefs about photons were rewritten as “photons not beyond an event horizon obey Maxwell’s Equations”. Making this change to my belief structure now leaves beliefs about whether or not photons still exist beyond an event horizon unconnected from my experiences. Does the meaningfulness of this belief depend on how I phrase my other beliefs?
Also if one can equally easily produce belief systems which predict the same sets of experiences but disagree on whether or not the photon exists beyond the event horizon, how does this belief differ from the belief that Carol is a post-utopian?