Are you making an argument in favour of anything?
Gordon_Rae
Karma: −5
This article seems to be a redescription of phenomena, so that you don’t need to draw a causal arrow going from the future to the past. An alternative methodology would be to draw the arrow anyway, and discuss what it means; and have your imagined interlocutors explain why their methodology forbids drawing the arrow. (Perhaps Aristotle was wiser than Bayes.)
It seems to me you’ve redescribed Aristotle to make him consistent with C20th folk psychology, where intelligence is inside people’s heads (and not anywhere else), rather than considering alternative ways of modelling a distributed intelligence implemented as a network of multiple agents.
It’s worth being more explicit about why you describe Mary differently from Mary’s teeth. Mary is modelled as an autonomous agent, whose actions are directed by intelligence inside her. Her teeth are modelled as responding to intelligence located outside them: by Mary’s choosing to bite and chew, and by an evolutionary process selecting who survives.
If you’re conducting an experiment to test a hypothesis, the first thing you have to do is set up the apparatus. If you don’t set up the apparatus so it produces data, you haven’t tested anything. Just like if you try to take a urine sample, and the subject can’t pee. The experiment has failed to produce data, not the same as the data failing to prove the hypothesis.