It’s often helpful to think about the root cause of your disagreements with other people
Can you please link to the specific disagreements you have in mind, so I can judge whether your proposed root cause actually explains those disagreements?
Sometimes the universe will play nice, but we can’t assume it.
Sure, but we also need to be wary about prematurely concluding that the universe doesn’t play nice in any specific area. If my IQ was 30 points lower or I was born a few centuries earlier, I wouldn’t be able to know or understand a lot of things that I actually do. A lot of places where it seems like the universe isn’t playing nice might just be a reflection of us not being smart enough or not having thought long enough.
I’m sure I’ll link back to this post soon. But this post is motivated by a few things such as:
a) Disagreements over consciousness—if non-materialist qualia existed, then we wouldn’t be able to know about them empirically, but the universe doesn’t have to play nice and make all phenomenon accessible to our scientific instruments, so we should have more uncertainty about this than people generally possess
b) The theories that can explain everything post—as nice as it’d be to just be able to evaluate theories empirically, there’s no reason why we can’t have a theory that is important for determining expectations, which isn’t cleanly falsifiable
Many people believe qualia don’t exist because we wouldn’t be able learn about them empirically. But it seems spurious to assume nothing exists outside of our lightcone just because we can’t observe it.
“Qualia” is not a synonym for “non physical thingy”.
We have subjective evidence for qualia, otherwise the question would never have arisen.
Disagreements over consciousness—if non-materialist qualia existed, then we wouldn’t be able to know about them empirically
We wouldn’t be able to know about them using objective, third person empiricism. Whether third person empiricism is the only kind is part of the wider problem.
A lot of places where it seems like the universe isn’t playing nice might just be a reflection of us not being smart enough or not having thought long enough.
I guess there can be some disagreement on what constitutes “a lot”, but it seems to me that some of these are not subject to this because they are proofs of limitations that can only be gotten around by either pragmatic means (assuming away the problem by limiting yourself the cases where it doesn’t arise) or by relaxing the strength of what the mechanism claims. Of the examples listed, the problem of perception (Chris calls it the problem of skepticism), Gödel’s theorem, the problem of induction, the problem of the prior (Bayesianism), and qualia (the problem of perception again) all seem fundamental in the sense that they are problems that arise from within the abstraction/system, so they can only be gotten around by pragmatism or transcendence/relaxation, and cannot possibly become more tractable by thinking about them more, even if we come up with better ways to deal with them pragmatically or to better transcend them by using different abstractions. In this sense the universe will continue to look like it doesn’t play nice from within those abstractions forever and always because it is a feature of the way those abstractions relate to reality.
Can you please link to the specific disagreements you have in mind, so I can judge whether your proposed root cause actually explains those disagreements?
Sure, but we also need to be wary about prematurely concluding that the universe doesn’t play nice in any specific area. If my IQ was 30 points lower or I was born a few centuries earlier, I wouldn’t be able to know or understand a lot of things that I actually do. A lot of places where it seems like the universe isn’t playing nice might just be a reflection of us not being smart enough or not having thought long enough.
I’m sure I’ll link back to this post soon. But this post is motivated by a few things such as:
a) Disagreements over consciousness—if non-materialist qualia existed, then we wouldn’t be able to know about them empirically, but the universe doesn’t have to play nice and make all phenomenon accessible to our scientific instruments, so we should have more uncertainty about this than people generally possess
b) The theories that can explain everything post—as nice as it’d be to just be able to evaluate theories empirically, there’s no reason why we can’t have a theory that is important for determining expectations, which isn’t cleanly falsifiable
“Qualia” is not a synonym for “non physical thingy”.
We have subjective evidence for qualia, otherwise the question would never have arisen.
We wouldn’t be able to know about them using objective, third person empiricism. Whether third person empiricism is the only kind is part of the wider problem.
I guess there can be some disagreement on what constitutes “a lot”, but it seems to me that some of these are not subject to this because they are proofs of limitations that can only be gotten around by either pragmatic means (assuming away the problem by limiting yourself the cases where it doesn’t arise) or by relaxing the strength of what the mechanism claims. Of the examples listed, the problem of perception (Chris calls it the problem of skepticism), Gödel’s theorem, the problem of induction, the problem of the prior (Bayesianism), and qualia (the problem of perception again) all seem fundamental in the sense that they are problems that arise from within the abstraction/system, so they can only be gotten around by pragmatism or transcendence/relaxation, and cannot possibly become more tractable by thinking about them more, even if we come up with better ways to deal with them pragmatically or to better transcend them by using different abstractions. In this sense the universe will continue to look like it doesn’t play nice from within those abstractions forever and always because it is a feature of the way those abstractions relate to reality.