I’m not sure it’s as different as all that from shminux’s perspective.
By way of analogy, I know a lot of people who reject the linguistic habit of treating “atheism” as referring to a positive belief in the absence of a deity, and “agnosticism” as referring to the absence of a positive belief in the presence of a deity. They argue that no, both positions are atheist; in the absence of a positive belief in the presence of a deity, one does not believe in a deity, which is the defining characteristic of the set of atheist positions. (Agnosticism, on this view, is the position that the existence of a deity cannot be known, not merely the observation that one does not currently know it. And, as above, on this view that means agnosticism implies atheism.)
If I substitute (reality, non-realism, the claim that reality is unknowable) for (deity, atheism, agnosticism) I get the assertion that the claim that reality is unknowable is a non-realist position. (Which is not to say that it’s specifically an instrumentalist position, but we’re not currently concerned with choosing among different non-realist positions.)
All of that said, none of it addresses the question which has previously been raised, which is how instrumentalism accounts for the at-least-apparently-non-accidental relationship between past inputs, actions, models, and future inputs. That relationship still strikes me as strong evidence for a realist position.
I can’t see much evidence that the people who construe atheism and agnosticicsm in the way you describe ae actually correct. I agree that the no-reality position and the unknowable-reality position could both be considered
anti-realist, but they are still substantively difference. Deriving no-reality from unknowable reality always seems like an error to me, but maybe someone has an impressive defense of it.
Well, I certainly don’t want to get into a dispute about what terms like “atheism”, “agnosticism”, “anti-realism”, etc. ought to mean. All I’ll say about that is if the words aren’t being used and interpreted in consistent ways, then using them does not facilitate communication. If the goal is communication, then it’s best not to use those words.
Leaving language aside, I accept that the difference between “there is no reality” and “whether there is a reality is systematically unknowable” is an important difference to you, and I agree that deriving the former from the latter is tricky.
I’m pretty sure it’s not an important difference to shminux. It certainly isn’t an important difference to me… I can’t imagine why I would ever care about which of those two statements is true if at least one of them is.
Well, I certainly don’t want to get into a dispute about what terms like “atheism”, “agnosticism”, “anti-realism”, etc. ought to mean.
I don’t see why not.
All I’ll say about that is if the words aren’t being used and interpreted in consistent ways, then using them does not facilitate communication. If the goal is communication, then it’s best not to use those words.
Or settle their correct meanings using a dictionary, or something.
Leaving language aside, I accept that the difference between “there is no reality” and “whether there is a reality is systematically unknowable” is an important difference to you, and I agree that deriving the former from the latter is tricky.
I’m pretty sure it’s not an important difference to shminux.
If shminux is using arguments for Unknowable Reality as arguments for No Reality, then shminux’s arguments are invalid whatever shminux cares about.
It certainly isn’t an important difference to me… I can’t imagine why I would ever care about which of those two statements is true if at least one of them is.
One seems a lot ore far fetched that then other to me.
Well, I certainly don’t want to get into a dispute about what terms like “atheism”, “agnosticism”, “anti-realism”, etc. ought to mean.
I don’t see why not.
If all goes well in a definitional dispute, at the end of it we have agreed on what meaning to assign to a word. I don’t really care; I’m usually perfectly happy to assign to it whatever meaning my interlocutor does. In most cases, there was some other more interesting question about the world I was trying to get at, which got derailed by a different discussion about the meanings of words. In most of the remaining cases, the discussion about the meanings of words was less valuable to me than silence would have been.
That’s not to say other people need to share my values, though; if you want to join definitional disputes (by referencing a dictionary or something) go right ahead. I’m just opting out.
If shminux is using arguments for Unknowable Reality as arguments for No Reality,
I don’t think he is, though I could be wrong about that.
Agnosticism = believing we can’t know if God exists
Atheism = believing God does not exist
Theism = believing God exists
turtles-all-the-way-down-ism = believing we can’t know what reality is (can’t reach the bottom turtle)
instrumentalism/anti-realism = believing reality does not exist
realism = believing reality exists
Thus anti-realism and realism map to atheism and theism, but agnosticism doesn’t map to infinte-turtle-ism because it says we can’t know if God exists, not what God is.
Agnosticism = believing we can’t know if God exists
Or believing that it’s not a meaningful or interesting question to ask
instrumentalism/anti-realism = believing reality does not exist
That’s quite an uncharitable conflation. Antirealism is believing that reality does not exist. Instrumentalism is believing that reality is a sometimes useful assumption.
Or believing that it’s not a meaningful or interesting question to ask
Those would be ignosticism and apatheism respectively.
That’s quite an uncharitable conflation. Antirealism is believing that reality does not exist. Instrumentalism is believing that reality is a sometimes useful assumption.
Yes, yes, we all know your idiosyncratic definition of “exist”, I was using the standard meaning because I was talking to a realist.
Yeah. The issue here, i gather, has to do a lot with domain specific knowledge—you’re a physicist, you have general idea how physics does not distinguish between, for example, 0 and two worlds of opposite phases which cancel out from our perspective. Which is way different from naive idea of some sort of computer simulation, where of course two simulations with opposite signs being summed, are a very different thing ‘from the inside’ from plain 0. If we start attributing reality to components of the sum in Feynman’s path integral… that’s going to get weird.
You realize that, assuming Feynman’s path integral makes accurate predictions, shiminux will attribute it as much reality as, say, the moon, or your inner experience.
Thanks for the clarification, it helps. An agnostic with respect to God (which is what “agnostic” has come to mean by default) would say both that we can’t know if God exists, and also that we can’t know the nature of God. So I think the analogy still holds.
Right. But! An agnostic with respect to the details of reality—an infinite-turtle-ist—need not be an agnostic with respect to reality, even if an agnostic with respect to reality is also an agnostic with respect to it’s details (although I’m not sure if that follows in any case.)
(shrug) Sure. So my analogy only holds between agnostics-about-God (who question the knowability of both the existence and nature of God) and agnostics-about-reality (who question the knowability of both the existence and nature of reality).
As you say, there may well be other people out there, for example those who question the knowability of the details, but not of the existence, of reality. (For a sufficiently broad understanding of “the details” I suspect I’m one of those people, as is almost everyone I know.) I wasn’t talking about them, but I don’t dispute their existence.
I have to admit, this has gotten rarefied enough that I’ve lost track both of your point and my own.
So, yeah, maybe I’m confusing knowing-X-exists with knowing-details-of-X for various Xes, or maybe I’ve tried to respond to a question about (one, the other, just one, both) with an answer about (the other, one, both, just one). I no longer have any clear notion, either of which is the case or why it should matter, and I recommend we let this particular strand of discourse die unless you’re willing to summarize it in its entirety for my benefit.
I predict that these discussions, even among smart, rational people will go nowhere conclusive until we have a proper theory of self-aware decision making, because that’s what this all hinges on. All the various positions people are taking in this are just packaging up the same underlying confusion, which is how not to go off the rails once your model includes yourself.
Not that I’m paying close attention to this particular thread.
I’m not sure it’s as different as all that from shminux’s perspective.
By way of analogy, I know a lot of people who reject the linguistic habit of treating “atheism” as referring to a positive belief in the absence of a deity, and “agnosticism” as referring to the absence of a positive belief in the presence of a deity. They argue that no, both positions are atheist; in the absence of a positive belief in the presence of a deity, one does not believe in a deity, which is the defining characteristic of the set of atheist positions. (Agnosticism, on this view, is the position that the existence of a deity cannot be known, not merely the observation that one does not currently know it. And, as above, on this view that means agnosticism implies atheism.)
If I substitute (reality, non-realism, the claim that reality is unknowable) for (deity, atheism, agnosticism) I get the assertion that the claim that reality is unknowable is a non-realist position. (Which is not to say that it’s specifically an instrumentalist position, but we’re not currently concerned with choosing among different non-realist positions.)
All of that said, none of it addresses the question which has previously been raised, which is how instrumentalism accounts for the at-least-apparently-non-accidental relationship between past inputs, actions, models, and future inputs. That relationship still strikes me as strong evidence for a realist position.
I can’t see much evidence that the people who construe atheism and agnosticicsm in the way you describe ae actually correct. I agree that the no-reality position and the unknowable-reality position could both be considered anti-realist, but they are still substantively difference. Deriving no-reality from unknowable reality always seems like an error to me, but maybe someone has an impressive defense of it.
Well, I certainly don’t want to get into a dispute about what terms like “atheism”, “agnosticism”, “anti-realism”, etc. ought to mean. All I’ll say about that is if the words aren’t being used and interpreted in consistent ways, then using them does not facilitate communication. If the goal is communication, then it’s best not to use those words.
Leaving language aside, I accept that the difference between “there is no reality” and “whether there is a reality is systematically unknowable” is an important difference to you, and I agree that deriving the former from the latter is tricky.
I’m pretty sure it’s not an important difference to shminux. It certainly isn’t an important difference to me… I can’t imagine why I would ever care about which of those two statements is true if at least one of them is.
I don’t see why not.
Or settle their correct meanings using a dictionary, or something.
If shminux is using arguments for Unknowable Reality as arguments for No Reality, then shminux’s arguments are invalid whatever shminux cares about.
One seems a lot ore far fetched that then other to me.
If all goes well in a definitional dispute, at the end of it we have agreed on what meaning to assign to a word. I don’t really care; I’m usually perfectly happy to assign to it whatever meaning my interlocutor does. In most cases, there was some other more interesting question about the world I was trying to get at, which got derailed by a different discussion about the meanings of words. In most of the remaining cases, the discussion about the meanings of words was less valuable to me than silence would have been.
That’s not to say other people need to share my values, though; if you want to join definitional disputes (by referencing a dictionary or something) go right ahead. I’m just opting out.
I don’t think he is, though I could be wrong about that.
Pretty sure you mixed up “we can’t know the details of reality” with “we can’t know if reality exists”.
That would be interesting, if true.
I have no coherent idea how you conclude that from what I said, though.
Can you unpack your reasoning a little?
Sure.
Agnosticism = believing we can’t know if God exists
Atheism = believing God does not exist
Theism = believing God exists
turtles-all-the-way-down-ism = believing we can’t know what reality is (can’t reach the bottom turtle)
instrumentalism/anti-realism = believing reality does not exist
realism = believing reality exists
Thus anti-realism and realism map to atheism and theism, but agnosticism doesn’t map to infinte-turtle-ism because it says we can’t know if God exists, not what God is.
Or believing that it’s not a meaningful or interesting question to ask
That’s quite an uncharitable conflation. Antirealism is believing that reality does not exist. Instrumentalism is believing that reality is a sometimes useful assumption.
Those would be ignosticism and apatheism respectively.
Yes, yes, we all know your idiosyncratic definition of “exist”, I was using the standard meaning because I was talking to a realist.
Yeah. The issue here, i gather, has to do a lot with domain specific knowledge—you’re a physicist, you have general idea how physics does not distinguish between, for example, 0 and two worlds of opposite phases which cancel out from our perspective. Which is way different from naive idea of some sort of computer simulation, where of course two simulations with opposite signs being summed, are a very different thing ‘from the inside’ from plain 0. If we start attributing reality to components of the sum in Feynman’s path integral… that’s going to get weird.
You realize that, assuming Feynman’s path integral makes accurate predictions, shiminux will attribute it as much reality as, say, the moon, or your inner experience.
The issue is with all the parts of it, which include your great grandfather’s ghost, twice, with opposite phases, looking over your shoulder.
Since I am not a quantum physicist, I can’t really respond to your objections, and in any case I don’t subscribe to shiminux’s peculiar philosophy.
Thanks for the clarification, it helps.
An agnostic with respect to God (which is what “agnostic” has come to mean by default) would say both that we can’t know if God exists, and also that we can’t know the nature of God. So I think the analogy still holds.
Right. But! An agnostic with respect to the details of reality—an infinite-turtle-ist—need not be an agnostic with respect to reality, even if an agnostic with respect to reality is also an agnostic with respect to it’s details (although I’m not sure if that follows in any case.)
(shrug) Sure. So my analogy only holds between agnostics-about-God (who question the knowability of both the existence and nature of God) and agnostics-about-reality (who question the knowability of both the existence and nature of reality).
As you say, there may well be other people out there, for example those who question the knowability of the details, but not of the existence, of reality. (For a sufficiently broad understanding of “the details” I suspect I’m one of those people, as is almost everyone I know.) I wasn’t talking about them, but I don’t dispute their existence.
Absolutely, but that’s not what shiminux and PrawnOfFate were talking about, is it?
I have to admit, this has gotten rarefied enough that I’ve lost track both of your point and my own.
So, yeah, maybe I’m confusing knowing-X-exists with knowing-details-of-X for various Xes, or maybe I’ve tried to respond to a question about (one, the other, just one, both) with an answer about (the other, one, both, just one). I no longer have any clear notion, either of which is the case or why it should matter, and I recommend we let this particular strand of discourse die unless you’re willing to summarize it in its entirety for my benefit.
I predict that these discussions, even among smart, rational people will go nowhere conclusive until we have a proper theory of self-aware decision making, because that’s what this all hinges on. All the various positions people are taking in this are just packaging up the same underlying confusion, which is how not to go off the rails once your model includes yourself.
Not that I’m paying close attention to this particular thread.