I do NOT know that “the subjective feeling of being right” is an adequate approach to purge all error.
Also, I think that hypotheses are often wrong, but they motivate new careful systematic observation, and that this “useful wrongness” is often a core part of a larger OODA loop of guessing and checking ideas in the course of learning and discovery.
My claim is that “the subjective feeling of being right” is a tool whose absence works to disqualify at least some wrongnesses as “maybe true, maybe false, but not confidently and clearly known to be true in that way that feels very very hard to get wrong”.
Prime numbers fall out of simple definitions, and I know in my bones that five is prime.
There are very few things that I know with as much certainty as this, but I’m pretty sure that being vividly and reliably shown to be wrong about this would require me to rebuild my metaphysics and epistemics in radical ways. I’ve been wrong a lot, but the things I was wrong about were not like my mental state(s) around “5 is prime”.
And in science, seeking reliable generalities about the physical world, there’s another sort of qualitative difference that is similar. For example, I grew up in northern California, and I’ve seen so many Sequoia sempervirens that I can often “just look” and “simply know” that that is the kind of tree I’m seeing.
If I visit other biomes, the feeling of “looking at a forest and NOT knowing the names of >80% of the plants I can see” is kind of pleasantly disorienting… there is so much to learn in other biomes!
(I’ve only ever seen one Metasequoia glyptostroboides that was planted as a specimen at the entrance to a park, and probably can’t recognize them, but my understanding is that they just don’t look like a coastal redwood or even grow very well where coastal redwoods naturally grow. My confidence for Sequoiadendron giganteum is in between. There could hypothetically be a fourth kind of redwood that is rare. Or it might be that half the coastal redwoods I “very confidently recognize” are male and half are female in some weird way (or maybe 10% are have even weirder polyploid status than you’d naively expect?) and I just can’t see the subtle distinctions (yet)? With science and the material world, in my experience, I simply can’t achieve the kind of subjective feeling of confident correctness that exists in math.)
In general, subjectively, for me, “random ass guesses” (even the ones that turn out right (but by random chance you’d expect them to mostly be wrong)) feel very very different from coherently-justified, well-understood, broadly-empirically-supported, central, contextualized, confident, “correct” conclusions because they lack a subjective feeling of “confidence”.
And within domains where I (and presumably other people?) are basically confident, I claim that there’s a distinct feeling which shows up in one’s aversions to observation or contemplation about things at the edge of awareness. This is less reliable, and attaching the feelings to Bayesian credence levels is challenging and I don’t know how to teach it, and I do it imperfectly myself...
...but (1) without subjective awareness of confidence and (2) the ability to notice aversion (or lack thereof) to tangential and potentially relevant evidence...
...I wouldn’t say that epistemic progress is impossible. Helicopters, peregrine falcons, F-16s, and bees show that there are many ways to fly.
But I am saying that if I had these subjective senses of confidence and confusion lesioned from my brain, I’d expect to be, mentally, a bit like a “bee with only one wing” and not expect to be able to make very much intellectual progress. I think I’d have a lot of difficulty learning math, much less being able to tutor the parts of math I’m confident about.
(I’m not sure if I’d be able to notice the lesion or not. It is an interesting question whether or how such things are neurologically organized, and whether modular parts of the brain are “relevant to declarative/verbal/measurable epistemic performance” in coherent or redundant or complimentary ways. I don’t know how to lesion brains in the way I propose, and maybe it isn’t even possible, except as a low resolution thought experiment?)
In summary, I don’t think “feeling the subjective difference between believing something true and believing something false” is necessary or sufficient for flawless epistemology, just that it is damn useful, and not something I’d want to do without.
I do NOT know that “the subjective feeling of being right” is an adequate approach to purge all error.
Also, I think that hypotheses are often wrong, but they motivate new careful systematic observation, and that this “useful wrongness” is often a core part of a larger OODA loop of guessing and checking ideas in the course of learning and discovery.
My claim is that “the subjective feeling of being right” is a tool whose absence works to disqualify at least some wrongnesses as “maybe true, maybe false, but not confidently and clearly known to be true in that way that feels very very hard to get wrong”.
Prime numbers fall out of simple definitions, and I know in my bones that five is prime.
There are very few things that I know with as much certainty as this, but I’m pretty sure that being vividly and reliably shown to be wrong about this would require me to rebuild my metaphysics and epistemics in radical ways. I’ve been wrong a lot, but the things I was wrong about were not like my mental state(s) around “5 is prime”.
And in science, seeking reliable generalities about the physical world, there’s another sort of qualitative difference that is similar. For example, I grew up in northern California, and I’ve seen so many Sequoia sempervirens that I can often “just look” and “simply know” that that is the kind of tree I’m seeing.
If I visit other biomes, the feeling of “looking at a forest and NOT knowing the names of >80% of the plants I can see” is kind of pleasantly disorienting… there is so much to learn in other biomes!
(I’ve only ever seen one Metasequoia glyptostroboides that was planted as a specimen at the entrance to a park, and probably can’t recognize them, but my understanding is that they just don’t look like a coastal redwood or even grow very well where coastal redwoods naturally grow. My confidence for Sequoiadendron giganteum is in between. There could hypothetically be a fourth kind of redwood that is rare. Or it might be that half the coastal redwoods I “very confidently recognize” are male and half are female in some weird way (or maybe 10% are have even weirder polyploid status than you’d naively expect?) and I just can’t see the subtle distinctions (yet)? With science and the material world, in my experience, I simply can’t achieve the kind of subjective feeling of confident correctness that exists in math.)
In general, subjectively, for me, “random ass guesses” (even the ones that turn out right (but by random chance you’d expect them to mostly be wrong)) feel very very different from coherently-justified, well-understood, broadly-empirically-supported, central, contextualized, confident, “correct” conclusions because they lack a subjective feeling of “confidence”.
And within domains where I (and presumably other people?) are basically confident, I claim that there’s a distinct feeling which shows up in one’s aversions to observation or contemplation about things at the edge of awareness. This is less reliable, and attaching the feelings to Bayesian credence levels is challenging and I don’t know how to teach it, and I do it imperfectly myself...
...but (1) without subjective awareness of confidence and (2) the ability to notice aversion (or lack thereof) to tangential and potentially relevant evidence...
...I wouldn’t say that epistemic progress is impossible. Helicopters, peregrine falcons, F-16s, and bees show that there are many ways to fly.
But I am saying that if I had these subjective senses of confidence and confusion lesioned from my brain, I’d expect to be, mentally, a bit like a “bee with only one wing” and not expect to be able to make very much intellectual progress. I think I’d have a lot of difficulty learning math, much less being able to tutor the parts of math I’m confident about.
(I’m not sure if I’d be able to notice the lesion or not. It is an interesting question whether or how such things are neurologically organized, and whether modular parts of the brain are “relevant to declarative/verbal/measurable epistemic performance” in coherent or redundant or complimentary ways. I don’t know how to lesion brains in the way I propose, and maybe it isn’t even possible, except as a low resolution thought experiment?)
In summary, I don’t think “feeling the subjective difference between believing something true and believing something false” is necessary or sufficient for flawless epistemology, just that it is damn useful, and not something I’d want to do without.