your claim is that if we admit that the universe follows these patterns then this automatically means that these patterns will apply in the future.
Yeah. My point is that the original statement of the Problem of Induction was naive in two ways:
It invokes “similarity”, “resemblance”, and “collecting a bunch of confirming observations”
It talks about “the future resembling the past”
#1 is the more obviously naive part. #2′s naivety is what I explain in this post’s “Not About Past And Future” section. Once one abandons naive conceptions #1 and #2 by understanding how science actually works, one reduces the Problem of Induction to the more tractable Problem of Occam’s Razor.
I don’t think we know that the universe follows these patterns as opposed to appearing to follow these patterns.
Hm, I see this claim as potentially beyond the scope of a discussion of the Problem of Induction.
“Hm, I see this claim as potentially beyond the scope of a discussion of the Problem of Induction.”
Not quite—because in order to avoid the problem of induction you need the universe to be following these patterns in the specific sense that these patterns are what is causing what we observed—not just for the universe to appear to follow these patterns.
If we reverse-engineer an accurate compressed model of what the universe appears like to us in the past/present/future, that counts as science.
If you suspect (as I do) that we live in a simulation, then this description applies to all the science we’ve ever done. If you don’t, you can at least imagine that intelligent beings embedded in a simulation that we build can do science to figure out the workings of their simulation, whether or not they also manage to do science on the outer universe.
If we live in a simulation, then it’s likely to be turned off at some point, breaking the induction hypothesis. But then, maybe it doesn’t matter as we wouldn’t be able to observe this.
The problem of induction of is more than one thing, because everything is more than one thing.
The most often discussed version is the epistemic problem, the problem of justifying why you should believe that future patterns will continue. That isn’t much affected by ontologcal issues like whether the universe is simulated. Using probabilistic reasoning , it still makes sense to bet on patterns continuing, mainly because you have no specific information about the alternatives. But you do need to abandon certainty and use probability if ontology can pull the rug from under you.
The ontologcal problem is pretty much equivalent to the problem of the nature of physical law—what makes the future resemble the past? The standard answer , that physical laws are just descriptions, does not work.
Theories of how quarks, electromagnetism and gravity produce planets with intelligent species on them are scientific accomplishments by virtue of the compression they achieve, regardless of why quarks appear to be a thing.
There’s no general agreement on what science is supposed to achieve—specifically, there is an instrumentalism versus realism debate. For realists, it does matter if science fails to discover what’s really real.
Yeah. My point is that the original statement of the Problem of Induction was naive in two ways:
It invokes “similarity”, “resemblance”, and “collecting a bunch of confirming observations”
It talks about “the future resembling the past”
#1 is the more obviously naive part. #2′s naivety is what I explain in this post’s “Not About Past And Future” section. Once one abandons naive conceptions #1 and #2 by understanding how science actually works, one reduces the Problem of Induction to the more tractable Problem of Occam’s Razor.
Hm, I see this claim as potentially beyond the scope of a discussion of the Problem of Induction.
“Hm, I see this claim as potentially beyond the scope of a discussion of the Problem of Induction.”
Not quite—because in order to avoid the problem of induction you need the universe to be following these patterns in the specific sense that these patterns are what is causing what we observed—not just for the universe to appear to follow these patterns.
If we reverse-engineer an accurate compressed model of what the universe appears like to us in the past/present/future, that counts as science.
If you suspect (as I do) that we live in a simulation, then this description applies to all the science we’ve ever done. If you don’t, you can at least imagine that intelligent beings embedded in a simulation that we build can do science to figure out the workings of their simulation, whether or not they also manage to do science on the outer universe.
If we live in a simulation, then it’s likely to be turned off at some point, breaking the induction hypothesis. But then, maybe it doesn’t matter as we wouldn’t be able to observe this.
The problem of induction of is more than one thing, because everything is more than one thing.
The most often discussed version is the epistemic problem, the problem of justifying why you should believe that future patterns will continue. That isn’t much affected by ontologcal issues like whether the universe is simulated. Using probabilistic reasoning , it still makes sense to bet on patterns continuing, mainly because you have no specific information about the alternatives. But you do need to abandon certainty and use probability if ontology can pull the rug from under you.
The ontologcal problem is pretty much equivalent to the problem of the nature of physical law—what makes the future resemble the past? The standard answer , that physical laws are just descriptions, does not work.
Theories of how quarks, electromagnetism and gravity produce planets with intelligent species on them are scientific accomplishments by virtue of the compression they achieve, regardless of why quarks appear to be a thing.
There’s no general agreement on what science is supposed to achieve—specifically, there is an instrumentalism versus realism debate. For realists, it does matter if science fails to discover what’s really real.