Then how can you be certain that, this particular physical system happens to believe in the correct theories about the universe? Including theories like “I have no free will”?
“Certain to be correct?” No. All you can hope for is to be Less Wrong, hence the name of this site.
How you get there in a materialistic view is fairly straightforward: by the same type of process operating on different timescales and levels of abstraction.
Firstly by evolution of nervous systems and brains, encoding behaviour that match better what the organisms need to do in the world to survive. Secondly, with more powerful brains enabling complex behaviour to be learned, subsequent evolution of acquired behaviour. Thirdly with more powerful brains still, cultural evolution affecting patterns of thought and formation of systems of mass dissemination of ideas. Fourthly, a process of evolution via science of more detailed and explicit models of how things work.
By this stage of the process you should expect the models that survive to be more accurate, not because they are willed to be so but because the patterns of thought that produce such models enable success in the physical world for the organisms using them. It is of course possible that they’re complete bunk that happens to work anyway, in which case too bad for us. What we can be pretty sure of though is that they’re better than literally random noise.
“Certain to be correct?” No. All you can hope for is to be Less Wrong, hence the name of this site.
How you get there in a materialistic view is fairly straightforward: by the same type of process operating on different timescales and levels of abstraction.
Firstly by evolution of nervous systems and brains, encoding behaviour that match better what the organisms need to do in the world to survive. Secondly, with more powerful brains enabling complex behaviour to be learned, subsequent evolution of acquired behaviour. Thirdly with more powerful brains still, cultural evolution affecting patterns of thought and formation of systems of mass dissemination of ideas. Fourthly, a process of evolution via science of more detailed and explicit models of how things work.
By this stage of the process you should expect the models that survive to be more accurate, not because they are willed to be so but because the patterns of thought that produce such models enable success in the physical world for the organisms using them. It is of course possible that they’re complete bunk that happens to work anyway, in which case too bad for us. What we can be pretty sure of though is that they’re better than literally random noise.