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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Why is that argument circular?
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I was going to say… I meant 'today' as an unbound variable so: “Regularities observed at time x will hold at time x+1, because regularities at some times y have been observed to hold at time y+1’ But that may be flawed, and …
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
… I may need to think harder about what a computational version of the problem of induction looks like. (My background confidence is roughly based on the belief that a version of PoI can be constructed for any given version of empiricism)
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My answer would be that indeed you have no reason to trust that the past predict the future beyond the available evidence that it does.
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The available evidence is that the past-past has predicted the past; we have no evidence concerning the future?
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I am not sure that the future exists in any sense, and I only know the past from my memories. But I can repeatedly test the hypothesis that my memories have significance, and that I can derive predictions for new observations from them. As far as I remember it worked out.
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