I still feel like you’re dodging the GoL issue. The situation is not that “GoL-person-A has harmless confusions, and it’s no big deal because they’ll still make good decisions”. The situation is that GoL-person-A is actually literally technically correct. There is in fact a list of lists of booleans, and it does have certain mathematical properties like obeying these four rules. Are you:
A) disagreeing with that? or
B) saying that GoL-person-A is correct by coincidence, i.e. that A did not have any sound basis to reach the beliefs that they believe, but they just happened to guess the right answer somehow? or
C) Asserting that there’s an important difference between the conversation between A and B in the GoL universe, versus the conversation between you and me in the string theory (or whatever) universe? or
OK thanks. I’m now kinda confused about your perspective because there seems to be a contradiction:
On the one hand, I think you said you were sympathetic to #1 (“There is a God’s-eye view of the world” is utter nonsense—it’s just a confused notion, like the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves”).
On the other hand, you seem to be agreeing here that “There is a God’s-eye view of the world” is something that might actually be true, and in fact is true in our GoL example.
Anyway, if we go with the second bullet point, i.e. “this is a thing that might be true”, then we can label it a “hypothesis” and put it into a Bayesian analysis, right?
To be specific: Let’s assume that GoL-person-A formulated the hypothesis: “There is a God’s-eye view of my universe, in the form of a list of lists of N2 booleans with thus-and-such mathematical properties etc.”.
Then, over time, A keeps noticing that every prediction that the hypothesis has ever made, has come true.
So, being a good Bayesian, A’s credence on the hypothesis goes up and up, asymptotically approaching 100%.
This strikes me as a sound, non-coincidental reason for A to have reached that (correct) belief. Where do you disagree?
The point is kinda that you can take it to be a hypothesis and have it approach 100% likelihood. That’s not possible if that hypothesis is instead assumed to be true. I mean, you might still run the calculations, they just don’t matter since you couldn’t change your mind in such a situation even if you wanted to.
I think the baked-in absurdity of that last statement (since people do in fact reject assumptions) points at why I think there’s actual no contradiction in my statements. It’s both true that I don’t have access to the “real” God’s eye view and that I can reconstruct one but will never be able to be 100% sure that I have. Thus I mean to be descriptive of how we find reality: we don’t have access to anything other than our own experience, and yet we’re able to infer lots of stuff. I’m just trying to be especial careful to not ground anything prior in the chain of epistemic reasoning on something inferred downstream, and that means not being able to predicate certain kinds of knowledge on the existence of an objective reality because I need those things to get to the point of being able to infer the existence of an objective reality.
I still feel like you’re dodging the GoL issue. The situation is not that “GoL-person-A has harmless confusions, and it’s no big deal because they’ll still make good decisions”. The situation is that GoL-person-A is actually literally technically correct. There is in fact a list of lists of booleans, and it does have certain mathematical properties like obeying these four rules. Are you:
A) disagreeing with that? or
B) saying that GoL-person-A is correct by coincidence, i.e. that A did not have any sound basis to reach the beliefs that they believe, but they just happened to guess the right answer somehow? or
C) Asserting that there’s an important difference between the conversation between A and B in the GoL universe, versus the conversation between you and me in the string theory (or whatever) universe? or
D) something else?
B
OK thanks. I’m now kinda confused about your perspective because there seems to be a contradiction:
On the one hand, I think you said you were sympathetic to #1 (“There is a God’s-eye view of the world” is utter nonsense—it’s just a confused notion, like the set of all sets that don’t contain themselves”).
On the other hand, you seem to be agreeing here that “There is a God’s-eye view of the world” is something that might actually be true, and in fact is true in our GoL example.
Anyway, if we go with the second bullet point, i.e. “this is a thing that might be true”, then we can label it a “hypothesis” and put it into a Bayesian analysis, right?
To be specific: Let’s assume that GoL-person-A formulated the hypothesis: “There is a God’s-eye view of my universe, in the form of a list of lists of N2 booleans with thus-and-such mathematical properties etc.”.
Then, over time, A keeps noticing that every prediction that the hypothesis has ever made, has come true.
So, being a good Bayesian, A’s credence on the hypothesis goes up and up, asymptotically approaching 100%.
This strikes me as a sound, non-coincidental reason for A to have reached that (correct) belief. Where do you disagree?
The point is kinda that you can take it to be a hypothesis and have it approach 100% likelihood. That’s not possible if that hypothesis is instead assumed to be true. I mean, you might still run the calculations, they just don’t matter since you couldn’t change your mind in such a situation even if you wanted to.
I think the baked-in absurdity of that last statement (since people do in fact reject assumptions) points at why I think there’s actual no contradiction in my statements. It’s both true that I don’t have access to the “real” God’s eye view and that I can reconstruct one but will never be able to be 100% sure that I have. Thus I mean to be descriptive of how we find reality: we don’t have access to anything other than our own experience, and yet we’re able to infer lots of stuff. I’m just trying to be especial careful to not ground anything prior in the chain of epistemic reasoning on something inferred downstream, and that means not being able to predicate certain kinds of knowledge on the existence of an objective reality because I need those things to get to the point of being able to infer the existence of an objective reality.