Here’s a question. As humans, we have the inherent flexibility to declare that something has either a probability of zero or a probability of one, and then the ability to still change our minds later if somehow that seems warranted.
You might declare that there’s a zero probability that I have the ability to inflict infinite negitive utility on you, but if then I take you back to a warehouse where I have banks of computers that I can mathematically demonstrate contain uploaded minds which are going to suffer in the equivalent of hell for an infinite amount of subjective time, you likely would at that point to change your estimate to something greater then zero. But if you actually set the probability to zero, you can’t actually do that without violating Bayesian rules, right?
It seems there’s a disconnect here; it may be better, in terms of actually using our minds to reason, to be able to treat a probability as if it were 0 or 1, but only because we can later change our minds if we realize we made an error; in which case it probably wasn’t actually 0 or 1 to start with in the strictest sense.
Here’s a question. As humans, we have the inherent flexibility to declare that something has either a probability of zero or a probability of one, and then the ability to still change our minds later if somehow that seems warranted.
You might declare that there’s a zero probability that I have the ability to inflict infinite negitive utility on you, but if then I take you back to a warehouse where I have banks of computers that I can mathematically demonstrate contain uploaded minds which are going to suffer in the equivalent of hell for an infinite amount of subjective time, you likely would at that point to change your estimate to something greater then zero. But if you actually set the probability to zero, you can’t actually do that without violating Bayesian rules, right?
It seems there’s a disconnect here; it may be better, in terms of actually using our minds to reason, to be able to treat a probability as if it were 0 or 1, but only because we can later change our minds if we realize we made an error; in which case it probably wasn’t actually 0 or 1 to start with in the strictest sense.