I would say that they have the existence of a ground truth that manifests as some regularity in observable phenomena as a prior, but this prior does not need to be taken on faith.
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–What about them makes 'ground truth' a more accurate name for them than 'ground belief'? –When you mention priors, you're thinking we can apply bayesian reasoning from our evidence of other minds & a reliable universe and hence have something firmer than mere belief?
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Once a belief is entirely conditional on its priors, it ceases to have any element of faith in it. I see rationalism as a Kantian program of reducing all beliefs entirely to priors, so all statements are conditional, and you know these conditions.
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Replying to @Plinz @chrisfcarroll and
Ground truth is the objective nature of the system that you are observing. If you are in a dream (like the characters in Twin Peaks), there won't be a ground truth that manifests as observable regularity; a dream universe is not mechanical, and so it does not yield to science.
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an aside: I think we detoured from computationalism per se when I said No to “The theory that there are others with minds similar to mine has more explanatory and predictive power than its negation?”. That No is driven by …
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
standardish criticisms of empiricism, namely sense-data sceptism and the problem of induction. The detour interests me, but please don't feel obliged to share my interest. I think what I'm trying to do on this thread then is update/restate those arguments in your vocabulary …
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
1) Problem of Induction becames “There is no argument that regularities observed today describe the universe I will observe tomorrow except for the (circular) argument that the regularities I observed yesterday worked today.” …
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
2) Sense-data scepticism maps to something like “there is no way to assign an initial p(H) to the hypothesis H=‘My observations are in fact observations of a real univsere’” –It seems relevant to add memory-scepticism: …
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
3) Memory-scepticism “I don't have any evidence that I observed any regularities yesterday. Except my memory, and the only evidence I have that my memory is reliable is the memory of it being reliable yesterday.“ I don't see rejecting scepticism is anything except a step of faith
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
So yes, “Once a belief is entirely conditional on its priors, it ceases to have any element of faith in it” but in epistemology it's exactly the priors that are the problem? Sorry I failed to compress that to twitter format :-(
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There is always a residual probability that you are a Boltzmann brain or one of its metaphysical equivalents. That is not a problem, and you can derive that it should have little influence on your policies.
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