(Answering the latter half of your comment first; I’ll respond to the other half in a separate comment.)
I submit that my “has to be” is of the latter type, but even more airtight.
Indeed, there is a sense in which your “has to be” is of the latter type. In fact, we can go further, and observe that even the “is” (at least in this case—and probably in most cases) is also a sort of “has to be”, viz., this scenario:
A: Is your husband at home?
B: Yes, he is. Why, I’m looking at him right now; there he is, in the kitchen. Hi, honey!
A: Now, you don’t know that your husband’s at home, do you? Couldn’t he have been replaced with an alien replicant while you were at work? Couldn’t you be hallucinating right now?
B: Well… he has to be at home. I’m really quite sure that I can trust the evidence of my sense…
A: But not absolutely sure, isn’t that right?
B: I suppose that’s so.
This is, fundamentally, no more than a stronger version of your “submerged in a crater of concrete” scenario, so by what right do we claim it to be qualitatively different than “he left work two hours ago”?
And that’s all true. The problem, however, comes in when we must deduce specific claims from very general beliefs—however certain the latter may be!—using a complex, high-level, abstract model. And of this I will speak in a sibling comment.
This is, fundamentally, no more than a stronger version of your “submerged in a crater of concrete” scenario, so by what right do we claim it to be qualitatively different than “he left work two hours ago”?
I agree. At the core, every belief is bayesian. I don’t recognize a fundamental difference, just one of categorization. We carved up reality, hopefully at its joints, but we still did the carving. You seemed to be the one arguing a material difference between “has to” and “is”.
As an aside, it’s possible you missed my edit. I’ll reproduce it here:
I concede that this is all hypothesis, but it is of the same sort as “the Higgs Boson exists, or else we’re wrong about a lot of things”… before we found it.
Concerning your edit—no, I really don’t think that it is of the same sort. The prediction of the Higgs Boson was based on a very specific, detailed model, whereas—to continue where the grandparent left off—what you’re asking me to do here is to assent to propositions that are not based on any kind of model, per se, but rather on something like a placeholder for a model. You’re saying: “either these things are true, or we’re wrong about reductionism”.
Well, for one thing, “these things” are, as I’ve said, not even clearly coherent. It’s not entirely clear what they mean, because it’s not clear how to reason about this sort of thing, because we don’t have an actual model for how subjective phenomenal consciousness emerges from physics.
And, for another thing, the dilemma is a false one—it should properly be a quatrilemma (is that a word…?), like so:
“Either these things are true, or we’re wrong about reductionism, or we’re wrong about whether reductionism implies that these things are true, or these things are not so much false as ‘not even wrong’ (because there’s something we don’t currently understand, that doesn’t overturn reductionism but that renders much of our analysis here moot).”
“Ah!” you might exclaim, “but we know that reductionism implies these things! That is—we’re quite certain! And it’s really very unlikely that we’re missing some key understanding, that would render moot our reasoning and our scenarios!” To that, I again say: without an actual reduction of consciousness, an actual and complete dissolution of the Hard Problem, no such certainty is possible. And so it is these latter two horns of the quatrilemma which seems to me to be at least as likely as the truth of the higher rungs of the ladder.
(Answering the latter half of your comment first; I’ll respond to the other half in a separate comment.)
Indeed, there is a sense in which your “has to be” is of the latter type. In fact, we can go further, and observe that even the “is” (at least in this case—and probably in most cases) is also a sort of “has to be”, viz., this scenario:
A: Is your husband at home?
B: Yes, he is. Why, I’m looking at him right now; there he is, in the kitchen. Hi, honey!
A: Now, you don’t know that your husband’s at home, do you? Couldn’t he have been replaced with an alien replicant while you were at work? Couldn’t you be hallucinating right now?
B: Well… he has to be at home. I’m really quite sure that I can trust the evidence of my sense…
A: But not absolutely sure, isn’t that right?
B: I suppose that’s so.
This is, fundamentally, no more than a stronger version of your “submerged in a crater of concrete” scenario, so by what right do we claim it to be qualitatively different than “he left work two hours ago”?
And that’s all true. The problem, however, comes in when we must deduce specific claims from very general beliefs—however certain the latter may be!—using a complex, high-level, abstract model. And of this I will speak in a sibling comment.
I agree. At the core, every belief is bayesian. I don’t recognize a fundamental difference, just one of categorization. We carved up reality, hopefully at its joints, but we still did the carving. You seemed to be the one arguing a material difference between “has to” and “is”.
As an aside, it’s possible you missed my edit. I’ll reproduce it here:
Concerning your edit—no, I really don’t think that it is of the same sort. The prediction of the Higgs Boson was based on a very specific, detailed model, whereas—to continue where the grandparent left off—what you’re asking me to do here is to assent to propositions that are not based on any kind of model, per se, but rather on something like a placeholder for a model. You’re saying: “either these things are true, or we’re wrong about reductionism”.
Well, for one thing, “these things” are, as I’ve said, not even clearly coherent. It’s not entirely clear what they mean, because it’s not clear how to reason about this sort of thing, because we don’t have an actual model for how subjective phenomenal consciousness emerges from physics.
And, for another thing, the dilemma is a false one—it should properly be a quatrilemma (is that a word…?), like so:
“Either these things are true, or we’re wrong about reductionism, or we’re wrong about whether reductionism implies that these things are true, or these things are not so much false as ‘not even wrong’ (because there’s something we don’t currently understand, that doesn’t overturn reductionism but that renders much of our analysis here moot).”
“Ah!” you might exclaim, “but we know that reductionism implies these things! That is—we’re quite certain! And it’s really very unlikely that we’re missing some key understanding, that would render moot our reasoning and our scenarios!” To that, I again say: without an actual reduction of consciousness, an actual and complete dissolution of the Hard Problem, no such certainty is possible. And so it is these latter two horns of the quatrilemma which seems to me to be at least as likely as the truth of the higher rungs of the ladder.
My response here would be the same as my responses to the other outstanding threads.