Category Archives: Philosophy

Followup to:  Probability is Subjectively Objective, Can Counterfactuals Be True?

I am quite confident that the statement 2 + 3 = 5 is true; I am far less confident of what it means for a mathematical statement to be true.

In "The Simple Truth" I defined a pebble-and-bucket system for tracking sheep, and defined a condition for whether a bucket’s pebble level is "true" in terms of the sheep.  The bucket is the belief, the sheep are the reality.  I believe 2 + 3 = 5.  Not just that two sheep plus three sheep equal five sheep, but that 2 + 3 = 5.  That is my belief, but where is the reality?

So now the one comes to me and says:  "Yes, two sheep plus three sheep equals five sheep, and two stars plus three stars equals five stars.  I won’t deny that.  But this notion that 2 + 3 = 5, exists only in your imagination, and is purely subjective."

Continue reading "Math is Subjunctively Objective" »

Followup to:  The Genetic Fallacy, Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom

Yesterday I said that – because humans are not perfect Bayesians – the genetic fallacy is not entirely a fallacy; when new suspicion is cast on one of your fundamental sources, you really should doubt all the branches and leaves of that root, even if they seem to have accumulated new evidence in the meanwhile.

This is one of the most difficult techniques of rationality (on which I will separately post, one of these days).  Descartes, setting out to "doubt, insofar as possible, all things", ended up trying to prove the existence of God – which, if he wasn’t a secret atheist trying to avoid getting burned at the stake, is pretty pathetic.  It is hard to doubt an idea to which we are deeply attached; our mind naturally reaches for cached thoughts and rehearsed arguments.

But today’s post concerns a different kind of difficulty – the case where the doubt is so deep, of a source so fundamental, that you can’t make a true fresh beginning.

Case in point:  Remember when, in the The Matrix, Morpheus told Neo that the machines were harvesting the body heat of humans for energy, and liquefying the dead to feed to babies?  I suppose you thought something like, "Hey!  That violates the second law of thermodynamics."

Continue reading "Fundamental Doubts" »

Followup to:  Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom

In "Where Recursive Justification Hits Bottom", I concluded that it’s okay to use induction to reason about the probability that induction will work in the future, given that it’s worked in the past; or to use Occam’s Razor to conclude that the simplest explanation for why Occam’s Razor works is that the universe itself is fundamentally simple.

Now I am far from the first person to consider reflective application of reasoning principles.  Chris Hibbert compared my view to Bartley’s Pan-Critical Rationalism (I was wondering whether that would happen).  So it seems worthwhile to state what I see as the distinguishing features of my view of reflection, which may or may not happen to be shared by any other philosopher’s view of reflection.

• All of my philosophy here actually comes from trying to figure out how to build a self-modifying AI that applies its own reasoning principles to itself in the process of rewriting its own source code.  So whenever I talk about using induction to license induction, I’m really thinking about an inductive AI considering a rewrite of the part of itself that performs induction.  If you wouldn’t want the AI to rewrite its source code to not use induction, your philosophy had better not label induction as unjustifiable.

• One of the most powerful general principles I know for AI in general, is that the true Way generally turns out to be naturalistic – which for reflective reasoning, means treating transistors inside the AI, just as if they were transistors found in the environment; not an ad-hoc special case.  This is the real source of my insistence in "Recursive Justification" that questions like "How well does my version of Occam’s Razor work?" should be considered just like an ordinary question – or at least an ordinary very deep question.  I strongly suspect that a correctly built AI, in pondering modifications to the part of its source code that implements Occamian reasoning, will not have to do anything special as it ponders – in particular, it shouldn’t have to make a special effort to avoid using Occamian reasoning.

Continue reading "My Kind of Reflection" »

Followup to:  Possibility and Could-ness

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) said:

"A man can do as he wills, but not will as he wills."

For this fascinating sentence, I immediately saw two interpretations; and then, after some further thought, two more interpretations.

On the first interpretation, Schopenhauer forbids us to build circular causal models of human psychology.  The explanation for someone’s current will cannot be their current will – though it can include their past will.

On the second interpretation, the sentence says that alternate choices are not reachable – that we couldn’t have taken other options even "if we had wanted to do so".

On the third interpretation, the sentence says that we cannot control our own desires – that we are the prisoners of our own passions, even when we struggle against them.

On the fourth interpretation, the sentence says that we cannot control our own desires, because our desires themselves will determine which desires we want, and so protect themselves.

I count two true interpretations and two false interpretations.  How about you?