What I really should say is that I believe we can’t develop a consistent epistemology that is also complete. That is, there will be facts that cannot be reckoned within a consistent epistemology and an epistemology that admits such facts will be inconsistent. I believe this follows directly from the incompleteness theorems, in so far as we consider epistemologies formal systems (I do because I deal with stuff that could get in the way as part of the phenomenological layer). So you are right that I mean an epistemology cannot be correct in the way we let oracles be correct (complete and consistent).
I think this is worth stressing because thinking as if oracles are possible and as if they are indeed the thing we should aspire to be like seems to be natural within human thought even though it is a computationally impossible achievement within our universe as best we can tell. I believe I read an implicit assumption in much writing, rationalist or no, that is also to this effect.
With sufficient computational resources we can act as if we are oracles, but only if we restrict ourselves to problems simple enough that the resources needed, generally of order exponential or more in terms of the problem size, are physically available to us. I expect though that for no matter how much resources we have we will always be interested in those questions for which we do not have enough resources to pretend to be oracles for, so addressing such issues is important both now while we are very much limited by our brains and in the future when we will at least be limited by the amount of reachable energy within the universe.
Thus we are stuck trading off between various epistemologies the same way in mathematics we may have to use different formal systems to address different questions, as in when we choose whether or not to pick up the axiom of choice and in so doing necessitate the introduction of heuristics to keep us away from the places where everything is true because the system no longer keeps those things out on its own. Of course this is all part of a single computation with an epistemological telos implemented in our “same old brain”s, but that’s something distinct from even if it approximates an epistemology.
This seems contra our current best understanding of physics, specifically that fundamental physics operates in a nondeterministic fashion from our perspective because there is uncomputable stuff happening. Just what that looks like appears to be literally unknowable, but we have made some decent inferences as to what might be going on, hence MWI and other metaphysical theories.
What I really should say is that I believe we can’t develop a consistent epistemology that is also complete. That is, there will be facts that cannot be reckoned within a consistent epistemology and an epistemology that admits such facts will be inconsistent. I believe this follows directly from the incompleteness theorems, in so far as we consider epistemologies formal systems (I do because I deal with stuff that could get in the way as part of the phenomenological layer). So you are right that I mean an epistemology cannot be correct in the way we let oracles be correct (complete and consistent).
I think this is worth stressing because thinking as if oracles are possible and as if they are indeed the thing we should aspire to be like seems to be natural within human thought even though it is a computationally impossible achievement within our universe as best we can tell. I believe I read an implicit assumption in much writing, rationalist or no, that is also to this effect.
With sufficient computational resources we can act as if we are oracles, but only if we restrict ourselves to problems simple enough that the resources needed, generally of order exponential or more in terms of the problem size, are physically available to us. I expect though that for no matter how much resources we have we will always be interested in those questions for which we do not have enough resources to pretend to be oracles for, so addressing such issues is important both now while we are very much limited by our brains and in the future when we will at least be limited by the amount of reachable energy within the universe.
Thus we are stuck trading off between various epistemologies the same way in mathematics we may have to use different formal systems to address different questions, as in when we choose whether or not to pick up the axiom of choice and in so doing necessitate the introduction of heuristics to keep us away from the places where everything is true because the system no longer keeps those things out on its own. Of course this is all part of a single computation with an epistemological telos implemented in our “same old brain”s, but that’s something distinct from even if it approximates an epistemology.
The falsity of this argument follows directly from the computability of physics.
This seems contra our current best understanding of physics, specifically that fundamental physics operates in a nondeterministic fashion from our perspective because there is uncomputable stuff happening. Just what that looks like appears to be literally unknowable, but we have made some decent inferences as to what might be going on, hence MWI and other metaphysical theories.