But I don’t think you can call such a process a Bayesian update. Again, it would require you placing conditional probabilities on the various metaphysical axioms—but the very concept of probabilities and Bayes’ theorem are built upon those axioms. If causality doesn’t always hold, if there are entities that do not need to obey it, then Bayes’ theorem doesn’t apply to them. It’s just your own personal conviction shift, but you shouldn’t use Bayesian updates as a framework to think about it, nor fall prey to the illusion that it makes your decision process any better in this kind of thing. It doesn’t. Everyone is just as clueless as everyone else on these matters and no one has any hope to know better. You may pick your metaphysical axioms as they were revealed to you in a dream and they’ll be as good as anything.
You may pick your metaphysical axioms as they were revealed to you in a dream and they’ll be as good as anything.
But that’s not arbitrary at all. That probably reflects some deep subconscious intuitions which are not arbitrary.
And these kinds of intuitive updates happen first, before philosophical reflections on the meta-level.
But then we are the type of people inclined to philosophically reflect on the meta-level about all this. One can argue whether these reflections make any sense or not, we’ll still continue to reflect on the meta-level once in a while and we’ll try to apply some non-rigorous approximate reasoning, since fully rigorous reasoning is not available.
In fact, this dialog between us is an example of this kind of meta-level reflection.
But I don’t think you can call such a process a Bayesian update. Again, it would require you placing conditional probabilities on the various metaphysical axioms—but the very concept of probabilities and Bayes’ theorem are built upon those axioms. If causality doesn’t always hold, if there are entities that do not need to obey it, then Bayes’ theorem doesn’t apply to them. It’s just your own personal conviction shift, but you shouldn’t use Bayesian updates as a framework to think about it, nor fall prey to the illusion that it makes your decision process any better in this kind of thing. It doesn’t. Everyone is just as clueless as everyone else on these matters and no one has any hope to know better. You may pick your metaphysical axioms as they were revealed to you in a dream and they’ll be as good as anything.
But that’s not arbitrary at all. That probably reflects some deep subconscious intuitions which are not arbitrary.
And these kinds of intuitive updates happen first, before philosophical reflections on the meta-level.
But then we are the type of people inclined to philosophically reflect on the meta-level about all this. One can argue whether these reflections make any sense or not, we’ll still continue to reflect on the meta-level once in a while and we’ll try to apply some non-rigorous approximate reasoning, since fully rigorous reasoning is not available.
In fact, this dialog between us is an example of this kind of meta-level reflection.