It’s not as if a star would have absolutely no effect from a Boltzmann cake suddenly appearing inside of it. A civilization with a good enough model of how this star zigs and zags, they would be able to find facts about the star which would force a bayesian to move from the ridiculously tiny prior probability of the hypothesis :
On August 1st 2008 at midnight Greenwich time, a one-foot sphere of chocolate cake spontaneously formed in the center of the Sun; and then, in the natural course of events, this Boltzmann Cake almost instantly dissolved.
to some posterior distribution. Some pieces of evidence might increase the probability of the hypothesis, some might decrease it.
This is not a cheap objection in anyway. To misinterpret verifications such as early Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine as claiming that only those sentences which we can currently test are meaningful is a mistake. A common mistake, and one that some using the term positivist to describe themselves have made.
If logical positivism / verificationism were true, then the assertion of the spaceship’s continued existence would be necessarily meaningless, because it has no experimental consequences distinct from its nonexistence. I don’t see how this is compatible with a correspondence theory of truth.
This is another sort of mistake. Because a hypothesis can’t be tested by me does not mean that it is meaningless. Vereficationists would agree with this because they think verification works everywhere, even on the other side of the universe. If some alien race over there could have seen the spaceship, or seen something which made the probability of there being a spaceship there high, or not have, then the claim is not meaningless.
What vereficationists like Quine are saying is that science is done through the senses. In the matrix code, way above the level of the machine language, our senses are the evidence nodes of our Bayes nets, and our hypotheses are the last nodes. The top layer of nodes consists of the complete set of states that some beings sensory apparatus can be in, any node in this mind containing a belief which is independent of all of the evidence nodes, contains a belief which is meaningless for that mind. But showing subjective meaninglessness of some hypothesis in one being is not enough to show that a belief/hypothesis is meaningless for all minds.
I think the critiques of this article apply to the worse of the worse of positivism. But many of those critiques are critiques that were made by hard verificationists such as Quine. But the simplest form of versificationism can be traced to Edmund Husserl belief it or not. The core of what the first movement of phenomenologists, and Quine, were saying is that only stimulus sentences can ever be used as initial evidence. Some stimulus may increase the probability of some other belief which may then be used as evidence for some other belief in turn, but without evidence from stimulus there wouldn’t be enough useful shifting about of probability to do anything. Certainly a human brain, or even a replica of Einsteins brain, would have a hard time figuring out the theories of relativity if they only had a 4by4 binary black and white pixel view of the world, and could move around the camera providing them the input around freely as they like.
If no constructable mind could ever get any result from any instrument, natural, current or wildly advanced, that would force a rational mind to update its probability about a given sentence, a la bayes, then that sentence is not a scientifically meaningful belief. This is to be senseless for Wittgenstein, or literally meaningless, this is only to be scientifically meaningless for Quine. Both positions have been called vereficationism and I think both are useful, and true-ish at least.
Lastly,I’ve always thought of positivism as going perfectly with a correspondence theory of truth. We can treat “senseless” or “meaningless” as just meaning “un-entangle-able beliefs”, as in beliefs which make no restrictions on experience.
It seems to me that Yudkowsky and the whole lot of LW staples are plainly positivists. And I have always thought of this as a good thing. Positivism plus LW style Bayesianism plus effort, form an epistemology which at least gives you a stronger fighting chance than you would have otherwise. Forming stupid belifs is harder after reading lesswrong, and harder after reading Quine, or Goodman, or even the most basic vereficationists texts. Many people have made philosophical mistakes which can then be avoided by reading vereficationists. Such as LW. Give credit where it is due, to yourself and Quine.
This is another sort of mistake. Because a hypothesis can’t be tested by me does not mean that it is meaningless. Vereficationists would agree with this because they think verification works everywhere, even on the other side of the universe. If some alien race over there could have seen the spaceship, or seen something which made the probability of there being a spaceship there high, or not have, then the claim is not meaningless.
I don’t think I understand.. If it isn’t possible to ever verify the existence of these aliens, what does it matter that they could have seen the spaceship? Essentially, how does it help that some being A could verify a phenomenon if I can’t ever verify that this is indeed the case?
It doesn’t help you at all. It just means that verificationsts would and should not call it meaningless. It is unverifiable for you but not for science as a whole.
It’s not as if a star would have absolutely no effect from a Boltzmann cake suddenly appearing inside of it. A civilization with a good enough model of how this star zigs and zags, they would be able to find facts about the star which would force a bayesian to move from the ridiculously tiny prior probability of the hypothesis :
to some posterior distribution. Some pieces of evidence might increase the probability of the hypothesis, some might decrease it.
This is not a cheap objection in anyway. To misinterpret verifications such as early Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine as claiming that only those sentences which we can currently test are meaningful is a mistake. A common mistake, and one that some using the term positivist to describe themselves have made.
This is another sort of mistake. Because a hypothesis can’t be tested by me does not mean that it is meaningless. Vereficationists would agree with this because they think verification works everywhere, even on the other side of the universe. If some alien race over there could have seen the spaceship, or seen something which made the probability of there being a spaceship there high, or not have, then the claim is not meaningless.
What vereficationists like Quine are saying is that science is done through the senses. In the matrix code, way above the level of the machine language, our senses are the evidence nodes of our Bayes nets, and our hypotheses are the last nodes. The top layer of nodes consists of the complete set of states that some beings sensory apparatus can be in, any node in this mind containing a belief which is independent of all of the evidence nodes, contains a belief which is meaningless for that mind. But showing subjective meaninglessness of some hypothesis in one being is not enough to show that a belief/hypothesis is meaningless for all minds.
I think the critiques of this article apply to the worse of the worse of positivism. But many of those critiques are critiques that were made by hard verificationists such as Quine. But the simplest form of versificationism can be traced to Edmund Husserl belief it or not. The core of what the first movement of phenomenologists, and Quine, were saying is that only stimulus sentences can ever be used as initial evidence. Some stimulus may increase the probability of some other belief which may then be used as evidence for some other belief in turn, but without evidence from stimulus there wouldn’t be enough useful shifting about of probability to do anything. Certainly a human brain, or even a replica of Einsteins brain, would have a hard time figuring out the theories of relativity if they only had a 4by4 binary black and white pixel view of the world, and could move around the camera providing them the input around freely as they like.
If no constructable mind could ever get any result from any instrument, natural, current or wildly advanced, that would force a rational mind to update its probability about a given sentence, a la bayes, then that sentence is not a scientifically meaningful belief. This is to be senseless for Wittgenstein, or literally meaningless, this is only to be scientifically meaningless for Quine. Both positions have been called vereficationism and I think both are useful, and true-ish at least.
Lastly,I’ve always thought of positivism as going perfectly with a correspondence theory of truth. We can treat “senseless” or “meaningless” as just meaning “un-entangle-able beliefs”, as in beliefs which make no restrictions on experience.
It seems to me that Yudkowsky and the whole lot of LW staples are plainly positivists. And I have always thought of this as a good thing. Positivism plus LW style Bayesianism plus effort, form an epistemology which at least gives you a stronger fighting chance than you would have otherwise. Forming stupid belifs is harder after reading lesswrong, and harder after reading Quine, or Goodman, or even the most basic vereficationists texts. Many people have made philosophical mistakes which can then be avoided by reading vereficationists. Such as LW. Give credit where it is due, to yourself and Quine.
I don’t think I understand.. If it isn’t possible to ever verify the existence of these aliens, what does it matter that they could have seen the spaceship? Essentially, how does it help that some being A could verify a phenomenon if I can’t ever verify that this is indeed the case?
It doesn’t help you at all. It just means that verificationsts would and should not call it meaningless. It is unverifiable for you but not for science as a whole.