Very useful and instructive post.
I would like to comment that one of the biggest tests(or so it seems to me) to check if a belief chain is valid or not is the test of resistance to arbitrary changes.
You write that systems like [I was abused]<->[people are meanies] <-> [life is horrible] <-> are stable and this is why people believe them; because they seem to hold sound under their own reasoning. But they are inherently not stable because they are not connected to the unshakable foundation of the source of truth(reality)!
Suppose you apply my test and /arbitrarily change one of the beliefs/. Let’s say I decide to change the belief [I was abused] to [I was not abused] (which is an entirely plausible viewpoint to hold unless you think that everyone is abused). In that case, the whole chain falls apart, because if you were not abused, then it does not prove that people are meanies, which in turn implies a possible non-terrible world. And therefore the system is only stable on the surface. A house is not called solid if it can stand up; it is called solid if it can stand rough weather(arbitrary changes) without falling.
Let’s look at the truthful chain [Laws of physics exist] <-> [Gravity exists] <-> [If I jump, I will not float]. In this case we can arbitrarily change the value of ANY belief and still have the chain repair itself. Let’s say I say that the LAWS OF PHYSICS ARE FALSE. In that case I would merely say, “Gravity- supported by the observation that jumping peoples fall- proves or at least very strongly evidences the existence of a system of rules that govern our universe”, and from there work out the laws of physics from basic principles at caveman level. It might take a long time, but theoretically it holds.
Now, if I say that gravity does not exist, a few experiments with the laws of physics → gravity will prove me wrong. And If I decide to claim that if I jump, I will not fall, gravity, supported by the laws of physics, thinks otherwise(and enforces its opinion quite sharply).
The obvious assumption here is that there is a third person saying “these things are false” in the second example as opposed to god making a change in the first. But the key point is that actually stable (or true) belief chains cannot logically support such a random change without auto-repairing itself. It is impossible to imagine the laws of physics existing as they are and yet gravity being arbitrarily different for some reason. The truth of the belief chain holds all the way to the laws of physics down to quantum mechanics, which is the highest detail of reality we have yet to find.
It seems clear to me that the ability to support and repair an arbitrary chain is what differentiates true chains from bad chains.
27chaos, that is a very interesting paper and I thank you for the find. It’s actually quite a happy coincidence as neural networks (having been prompted by the blegg sequence) was on my next-to-study list. Glad to be able to add this paper to my queue.
Very useful and instructive post. I would like to comment that one of the biggest tests(or so it seems to me) to check if a belief chain is valid or not is the test of resistance to arbitrary changes.
You write that systems like [I was abused]<->[people are meanies] <-> [life is horrible] <-> are stable and this is why people believe them; because they seem to hold sound under their own reasoning. But they are inherently not stable because they are not connected to the unshakable foundation of the source of truth(reality)!
Suppose you apply my test and /arbitrarily change one of the beliefs/. Let’s say I decide to change the belief [I was abused] to [I was not abused] (which is an entirely plausible viewpoint to hold unless you think that everyone is abused). In that case, the whole chain falls apart, because if you were not abused, then it does not prove that people are meanies, which in turn implies a possible non-terrible world. And therefore the system is only stable on the surface. A house is not called solid if it can stand up; it is called solid if it can stand rough weather(arbitrary changes) without falling.
Let’s look at the truthful chain [Laws of physics exist] <-> [Gravity exists] <-> [If I jump, I will not float]. In this case we can arbitrarily change the value of ANY belief and still have the chain repair itself. Let’s say I say that the LAWS OF PHYSICS ARE FALSE. In that case I would merely say, “Gravity- supported by the observation that jumping peoples fall- proves or at least very strongly evidences the existence of a system of rules that govern our universe”, and from there work out the laws of physics from basic principles at caveman level. It might take a long time, but theoretically it holds.
Now, if I say that gravity does not exist, a few experiments with the laws of physics → gravity will prove me wrong. And If I decide to claim that if I jump, I will not fall, gravity, supported by the laws of physics, thinks otherwise(and enforces its opinion quite sharply).
The obvious assumption here is that there is a third person saying “these things are false” in the second example as opposed to god making a change in the first. But the key point is that actually stable (or true) belief chains cannot logically support such a random change without auto-repairing itself. It is impossible to imagine the laws of physics existing as they are and yet gravity being arbitrarily different for some reason. The truth of the belief chain holds all the way to the laws of physics down to quantum mechanics, which is the highest detail of reality we have yet to find.
It seems clear to me that the ability to support and repair an arbitrary chain is what differentiates true chains from bad chains.
You might appreciate this paper: http://www.cs.toronto.edu/~nitish/msc_thesis.pdf
27chaos, that is a very interesting paper and I thank you for the find. It’s actually quite a happy coincidence as neural networks (having been prompted by the blegg sequence) was on my next-to-study list. Glad to be able to add this paper to my queue.