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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Replying to @Plinz @chrisfcarroll and
That said, empirically it seems that our universe is history preserving (you cannot delete information), which strongly implies determinism, which would mean you can treat the future as existing. But if it is not causally influencing the present, it is functionally irrelevant.
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