2 kids found 2 similar boxes. They opened box 1. It contained a cookie. Kid 1 immediately grabbed it and started eating it, saying “the other box probably has a cookie too; that one is yours” (proposition A)
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By the time kid 2 got box 2 open and discovered it contained a lump of coal, kid 1 had eaten the cookie.
Between the first bite of the cookie and the discovery of the lump of coal, both kids inhabited a reality where proposition A was assumed to be true.
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This is what it means for a reality to be constructed out of the benefit of doubt. The brief period where Prop A *might* have been true was also the period when kid 1 was *really* eating the cookie.
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In modal logic terms, the cookie was eaten in all possible worlds (P: ▢ the cookie is eaten by kid A) but there was a second cookie only in *some* possible worlds (Q: ⋄ There is a cookie). In between was world W where both P and Q were true for period T.
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But the thing is, we spend 100% of our time in realities like W comprising true-in-all-worlds and true-in-some-worlds beliefs, *and acting as though both kinds of belief are the same*
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Edit: Q: ⋄ There is a second cookie
P and Q together describe the world that is holistically committed to by kid 1 asserting Prop A *while actually eating the cookie* (the eating is part of the assertion)
I’ll clean up the logic when I write this up somewhere cleanly
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The thing is, in this toy example, it’s easy to separate speculative ⋄ beliefs from actually-the-case ▢ beliefs at a granular level. In practice, we navigate by millions of beliefs, most of them either unconscious, or unsorted into the two kinds of beliefs, or both.
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You live in a cognitive house built of 2 types of bricks: ▢ and ⋄. But you rarely look at the walls as ⋄‘s turn into either ▢ or epistemic holes. Until the whole house is on the brink of collapse.
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Btw this is how suspension of disbelief in escaped realities like superhero movies works. They ask you to buy a few big ⋄ beliefs into your reality in first 30 minutes but then build the rest of the reality out of ▢ bricks on top of those
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