If the point is we can’t derive the validity of probability from nothing, congratulations. You have rediscovered something significantly less useful than the wheel or fire.
So if you can’t derive the validity of probability from nothing, what can you do? 1) Walk around in a self-induced fog of feigned ignorance, having slipped the fact that you have put logical derivation on a throne dictating “truth” without ever having questioned that operation. You certainly can’t derive from nothing that logical derivation is the only source of truth. 2) Look out at the parking lot to see all the cars, look at the telephone, the cell phone in your pocket, and the computer on which you are typing. Contemplate the apparent facts that these all arise from groups of humans “knowing” things “well enough” to put, ultimately, millions of pieces together to create things with an astonishing level of actual complexity compared to even the most brilliant philosopher’s gedanken experiment. Realize that this is either a show put on for you by a demon trying to trick you in to believing that the world is an orderly place who s bits and pieces obey discoverable rules so well that you can discover them and build things that didn’t previously exist out of the pieces to do things you want… OR that the world really is like that.
And if you go the skeptical route, at this level, what do you gain? Because if I ignore your skeptical route and instead study engineernig and physics and chemistry, I gain the ability to build cars and bombs and phones and to become sufficiently wealthy that I can have children and pass my mind-numbing credulousness down in to the next generation.
So is the demon who is deluding us all winning? Or have we, by forcing it to up its game to the level of billion-transistor circuits and the beginnings of AI software that it must fake, called its bluff and forced it to create the world it thought it was faking?
If it turns out there really is/was a demon and at the end we spend the rest of eternity being tortured in flames while you stand there in your pit of flames telling us “I told you so,” then I owe you a beer.
Implicit assumptions- not just the senses, but the reliability of memory and the reliability of rules of induction.
I already mentioned that I believe in the world, not because I think it rational, but as an act of religious-style faith. I think it irrational to believe the world exists because it makes so many assumptions that can’t be defended in a rational argument.
If the point is we can’t derive the validity of probability from nothing, congratulations. You have rediscovered something significantly less useful than the wheel or fire.
So if you can’t derive the validity of probability from nothing, what can you do?
1) Walk around in a self-induced fog of feigned ignorance, having slipped the fact that you have put logical derivation on a throne dictating “truth” without ever having questioned that operation. You certainly can’t derive from nothing that logical derivation is the only source of truth.
2) Look out at the parking lot to see all the cars, look at the telephone, the cell phone in your pocket, and the computer on which you are typing. Contemplate the apparent facts that these all arise from groups of humans “knowing” things “well enough” to put, ultimately, millions of pieces together to create things with an astonishing level of actual complexity compared to even the most brilliant philosopher’s gedanken experiment. Realize that this is either a show put on for you by a demon trying to trick you in to believing that the world is an orderly place who s bits and pieces obey discoverable rules so well that you can discover them and build things that didn’t previously exist out of the pieces to do things you want… OR that the world really is like that.
And if you go the skeptical route, at this level, what do you gain? Because if I ignore your skeptical route and instead study engineernig and physics and chemistry, I gain the ability to build cars and bombs and phones and to become sufficiently wealthy that I can have children and pass my mind-numbing credulousness down in to the next generation.
So is the demon who is deluding us all winning? Or have we, by forcing it to up its game to the level of billion-transistor circuits and the beginnings of AI software that it must fake, called its bluff and forced it to create the world it thought it was faking?
If it turns out there really is/was a demon and at the end we spend the rest of eternity being tortured in flames while you stand there in your pit of flames telling us “I told you so,” then I owe you a beer.
Implicit assumptions- not just the senses, but the reliability of memory and the reliability of rules of induction.
I already mentioned that I believe in the world, not because I think it rational, but as an act of religious-style faith. I think it irrational to believe the world exists because it makes so many assumptions that can’t be defended in a rational argument.