Say, empiricism doesn’t hold—the laws of this environment are such that “That which has happened before is less likely to happen again” (a reference to an old Overcoming Bias post I can’t locate).
Then we would observe this, and update on it—after all, this mysterious law is presumably immune to itself, or it would have stopped by now,right?
I’m curious to know how you expect Bayesian updates to work in a universe in which empiricism doesn’t hold. (I’m not denying it’s possible, I just can’t figure out what information you could actually maintain about the universe.)
If things have always been less likely after they happened in the past, then, conditioning on that, something happening is Bayesian evidence that it wont happen again.
What exactly do you mean by “empiricism does not hold”? Do you mean that there are no laws governing reality? Is that even a thinkable notion? I’m not sure. Or perhaps you mean that everything is probabilistically independent from everything else. Then no update would ever change the probability distribution of any variable except the one on whose value we update, but that is something we could notice. We just couldn’t make any effective predictions on that basis—and we would know that.
Then we would observe this, and update on it—after all, this mysterious law is presumably immune to itself, or it would have stopped by now,right?
I’m curious to know how you expect Bayesian updates to work in a universe in which empiricism doesn’t hold. (I’m not denying it’s possible, I just can’t figure out what information you could actually maintain about the universe.)
If things have always been less likely after they happened in the past, then, conditioning on that, something happening is Bayesian evidence that it wont happen again.
What exactly do you mean by “empiricism does not hold”? Do you mean that there are no laws governing reality? Is that even a thinkable notion? I’m not sure. Or perhaps you mean that everything is probabilistically independent from everything else. Then no update would ever change the probability distribution of any variable except the one on whose value we update, but that is something we could notice. We just couldn’t make any effective predictions on that basis—and we would know that.