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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I don't think that you should reject skepticism but fully embrace it: reject the idea that you were ever entitled to belief without priors. Assign probabilities and confidence parameters to all of your statements, make them conditional, and you are good to go.
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Taking my sense-data scepticism as example then, do you mean something like: H=“My observations are in fact observations of a real universe” e=“I observe things” p(H)=The prior probability p(e)=Nearly 1 p(e|H)=Also nearly 1 p(H|e)=tobecalculated & plug into Bayes equation?
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
I realise that where I was going with this is already written up at the final para of https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/induction-problem/#BaySub … : “The simple, and obvious, criticism of the Bayesian method is that the prior (before knowledge of any evidence) probabilities … are arbitrary. The Bayesian response…
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
…Bayesian response is that the Bayesian method of updating probabilities with successive outcomes progressively diminishes the effect of the initial priors. This updating uses the posterior probabilities from the first draw as the “prior” probabilities for the second draw…
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
Further, as the number of trials increases without bound, the updated probability is virtually certain to approach one of the conditional probabilities” But the article seems to me incomplete:
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Replying to @chrisfcarroll @Plinz and
A scientist can follow the update procedure by getting more test subjects. A sceptical epistemologist has only has one universe (in the best case; if we observe a new universe every day even the scientist is stumped) and only one observer; there is no update loop available
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We can derive the conditions under which the Bayesian method arrives at useful models a priori (under the assumptions that our minds are sufficiently approximating universal computation to allow for reliable derivations).
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Replying to @Plinz @chrisfcarroll and
If it empirically turns out that the universe that we live in seems to yield to Bayesianism, it would appear likely that it is in the family of universes that we a priori know to be predictable with Bayesianism.
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