I’m not sure I’d call C5 and C6 full-fledged beliefs. There is still content missing. C5, as you characterized it, is the brain state in the BB identical to my B5. B5 says “B1 and B2 are beliefs about brown shoes.” Now B5 gets it content partially through entanglement with B1 and B2. That part holds for C5 as well. But part of the content of B5 involves brown shoes (the ”… about brown shoes” part), actual objects in the external world. The corresponding entanglement is lacking for C5.
If you change B5 to “B1 and B2 are beliefs”, then I think I’d agree that C5 is also a belief, a false belief that says “C1 and C2 are beliefs.” Of course this is complicated by the fact that we don’t actually have internal access to our brain states. I can refer to my brain states indirectly, as “the brain state instantiating my belief that Obama is President”, for instance. But this reference relies on my ability to refer to my beliefs, which in turn relies on the existence of those beliefs. And the lower-order beliefs don’t exist for the BB, so it cannot refer to its brain states in this way. Maybe there is some other way one could make sense of the BB having internal referential access to its brain states, but I’m skeptical. Still, let me grant this assumption in order to answer your final questions.
should I expect the brain that instantiates C1-C6 to interact with C5/C6 (which are beliefs) any differently than the way it interacts with C1-C4 (which aren’t)?
Not really, apart from the usual distinctions between the way we interact with higher order and lower order belief states.
For example, would it somehow know that C1-C4 aren’t beliefs, but C5-C6 are?
I’m not sure I’d call C5 and C6 full-fledged beliefs. There is still content missing. C5, as you characterized it, is the brain state in the BB identical to my B5. B5 says “B1 and B2 are beliefs about brown shoes.” Now B5 gets it content partially through entanglement with B1 and B2. That part holds for C5 as well. But part of the content of B5 involves brown shoes (the ”… about brown shoes” part), actual objects in the external world. The corresponding entanglement is lacking for C5.
If you change B5 to “B1 and B2 are beliefs”, then I think I’d agree that C5 is also a belief, a false belief that says “C1 and C2 are beliefs.” Of course this is complicated by the fact that we don’t actually have internal access to our brain states. I can refer to my brain states indirectly, as “the brain state instantiating my belief that Obama is President”, for instance. But this reference relies on my ability to refer to my beliefs, which in turn relies on the existence of those beliefs. And the lower-order beliefs don’t exist for the BB, so it cannot refer to its brain states in this way. Maybe there is some other way one could make sense of the BB having internal referential access to its brain states, but I’m skeptical. Still, let me grant this assumption in order to answer your final questions.
Not really, apart from the usual distinctions between the way we interact with higher order and lower order belief states.
No.
OK, cool. I think I now understand the claim you’re making… thanks for taking the time to clarify.