I have to agree with komponisto and some others: this post attacks a straw-man version of logical positivism. As komponisto alluded to, you are ignoring the logical in logical positivisim. The logical positivists believed that meaningful statements had to be either verifiable or they had to be logical constructs built up out of verifiable constituents. They held that if A is a meaningful (because verifiable) assertion that something happened, and B is likewise, then A & B is meaningful by virtue of being logically analyzable in terms of the meaning of A and B. They would maintain this even if the events asserted in A and B had disjoint light cones, so that you could never experimentally verify them both. In effect, they subscribed to precisely the view that you endorse when you wrote, “A great many untestable beliefs . . . talk about general concepts already linked to experience, like Suns and chocolate cake, and general frameworks for combining them, like space and time.”
Your “general frameworks for combining” do exactly the work that logical positivists did by building statements from verifiable constituents using logical connectives. In particular space and time would be understood by them in logical terms as follows: space and time reduce to geometry via general relativity, and geometry, along with all math, reduces to logic via the logicist program of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. See, for example, Hans Reichenbach’s The Philosophy of Space and Time.
So, even without invoking omnipotent beings to check whether the cake is there, the logical positivist would attribute meaning to that claim in essentially the same way that you do.
Your “general frameworks for combining” do exactly the work that logical positivists did by building statements from verifiable constituents using logical connectives....So, even without invoking omnipotent beings to check whether the cake is there, the logical positivist would attribute meaning to that claim in essentially the same way that you do.
I agree that EY’s attacking a certain straw-man of positivism, and that EY is ultimately a logical positive with respect to how he showed the meaningfulness of the boltzman cake hypohteses. But, assuming EY submits to a computational complexity prior, his position is distinct, in that there could be two hypothesis, which we fundamentally cannot tell the difference between, e.g., copenhagen, mwi, and yet we have good reason to believe on over the other, even though there will never be any test that justifies belief in one over another (if you think you can test mwi vs. copenhagen, just replace the universe spawns humans with 10^^^^^10 more quanta in it vs. it doesn’t, clearly can’t test these, not enough quanta in the universe).
I have to agree with komponisto and some others: this post attacks a straw-man version of logical positivism. As komponisto alluded to, you are ignoring the logical in logical positivisim. The logical positivists believed that meaningful statements had to be either verifiable or they had to be logical constructs built up out of verifiable constituents. They held that if A is a meaningful (because verifiable) assertion that something happened, and B is likewise, then A & B is meaningful by virtue of being logically analyzable in terms of the meaning of A and B. They would maintain this even if the events asserted in A and B had disjoint light cones, so that you could never experimentally verify them both. In effect, they subscribed to precisely the view that you endorse when you wrote, “A great many untestable beliefs . . . talk about general concepts already linked to experience, like Suns and chocolate cake, and general frameworks for combining them, like space and time.”
Your “general frameworks for combining” do exactly the work that logical positivists did by building statements from verifiable constituents using logical connectives. In particular space and time would be understood by them in logical terms as follows: space and time reduce to geometry via general relativity, and geometry, along with all math, reduces to logic via the logicist program of Russell and Whitehead’s Principia Mathematica. See, for example, Hans Reichenbach’s The Philosophy of Space and Time.
So, even without invoking omnipotent beings to check whether the cake is there, the logical positivist would attribute meaning to that claim in essentially the same way that you do.
I agree that EY’s attacking a certain straw-man of positivism, and that EY is ultimately a logical positive with respect to how he showed the meaningfulness of the boltzman cake hypohteses. But, assuming EY submits to a computational complexity prior, his position is distinct, in that there could be two hypothesis, which we fundamentally cannot tell the difference between, e.g., copenhagen, mwi, and yet we have good reason to believe on over the other, even though there will never be any test that justifies belief in one over another (if you think you can test mwi vs. copenhagen, just replace the universe spawns humans with 10^^^^^10 more quanta in it vs. it doesn’t, clearly can’t test these, not enough quanta in the universe).