That’s a very interesting condition, and I will agree that it indicates that it is possible I could come to the belief that I did not exist if some event of brain damage or other triggering event occurred to cause this delusion. However, I would only have that belief because my reasoning processes had been somehow broken. It would not be based on a Bayesian update because the only evidence for not existing would be ceasing to have experiences, which it seems axiomatic that I could not update upon. People with this condition seem to still have experiences, they just strangely believe that they are dead or don’t exist.
If you could come to the wrong belief because of brain damage, you could come to the other belief because of brain damage too; this is a general skeptical attack on the possibility of knowledge or using a priori proofs to convince yourself of something without making a lot of other assumptions about your intactness and sanity (akin to how it’s hard to come up with good arguments to believe anything about the world without including some basic assumptions like “induction works”), related to the Kripke/Wittgenstein attack on memory or Lewis Carroll’s rule-following paradox. So while the cogito may be true in the sense of ‘a person thinking implies their existence’, you can’t use it to bootstrap yourself out of total Cartesian doubt & immunity to the evil genius, much less into being a Bayesian reasoner who can assign P=1 to things.
Fair enough, I suppose there is a possibility that there is some way I could have experiences and somehow also not exist, even though I cannot imagine how. My inability to imagine how such evidence could be logically consistent does not mean that it is actually, certainly impossible that I will observe such evidence.
That’s a very interesting condition, and I will agree that it indicates that it is possible I could come to the belief that I did not exist if some event of brain damage or other triggering event occurred to cause this delusion. However, I would only have that belief because my reasoning processes had been somehow broken. It would not be based on a Bayesian update because the only evidence for not existing would be ceasing to have experiences, which it seems axiomatic that I could not update upon. People with this condition seem to still have experiences, they just strangely believe that they are dead or don’t exist.
If you could come to the wrong belief because of brain damage, you could come to the other belief because of brain damage too; this is a general skeptical attack on the possibility of knowledge or using a priori proofs to convince yourself of something without making a lot of other assumptions about your intactness and sanity (akin to how it’s hard to come up with good arguments to believe anything about the world without including some basic assumptions like “induction works”), related to the Kripke/Wittgenstein attack on memory or Lewis Carroll’s rule-following paradox. So while the cogito may be true in the sense of ‘a person thinking implies their existence’, you can’t use it to bootstrap yourself out of total Cartesian doubt & immunity to the evil genius, much less into being a Bayesian reasoner who can assign P=1 to things.
Fair enough, I suppose there is a possibility that there is some way I could have experiences and somehow also not exist, even though I cannot imagine how. My inability to imagine how such evidence could be logically consistent does not mean that it is actually, certainly impossible that I will observe such evidence.