Actually, the assignment of probability 1 to an event that has happened is also subjective. You don’t know that it had to occur with complete inevitability, ie you don’t know that it had a conditional probability of 1 relative to the preceding state of the universe. You are setting it to 1 because it is a given as far as you are concerned
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Suppose I build a deterministic agent which has a value function in the most literal sense, ie. it has to call the function to get the values of various alternative actions in order to make a decision about which to perform. Would you still say it has no use for value judgements?
An agent, an entity that acts, cannot say “what will be, will be”, because it makes decisions, and because the decisions it makes are a component of the future. If it does not know the decision it will make before it makes it, it will be in a state of subjective uncertainty about the future. Subjective uncertainty and objective deyetminism are quite compatible.
I think it is possible that you are being misled by fictional evidence. In Arrival, the Heptapods knowledge of the future is a straightforward extension of a fixed future, but everything we know indicates considerable barriers between determinism and foreknowledge
If the project of eliminative materialism is fully finished, it would completely remove value judgments from human language.
Because values are intrinsically non physical? Because agents dont have preferences? Because agents dont want to talk about preferences?
A category made up of 1 the Statue of Liberty 2 The current Pope and 3 my toothbrush, for all its insane bagginess, and poor fit to reality is made up of things which themselves exist. So it’s much too hasty to conclude lack of reality from poor fit.
Yes, I do think consciousness is such a category. The OP mentions, under the heading of consciousness, issues of what I would call personal identity and qualia. I can’t think of any reason why having the one would grant you the other.
Who are you arguing against? Do Nozick or Hanson say that anything is fundamentally coloured?
Maybe it would help if I said that atoms are non-fundamentally colored, in exactly the same way that a chair, or grass, or the sky is non-fundamentally colored
That may be true, but it isn’t a refutation of the claim that “when the reductive explanation of property P hits its basic level, property P is no longer found”, because atoms are not “fundamental things”, not the basis of the reductive explanation of matter: electrons and photons are.
Even a free electron (being a thing that scatters light) has a color
What colour is an electron? There is no answer to the question “what is the colour of an electron”, because electrons are basic in the reductive explanation of colour. How an electron scatters photons is behaviour that depends on context.
Are you willfully misreading me, or is it just accidental
Consider the possibility that you are not being as clear as you think you are.
l’m responding to your:-
are atoms colorless? No! Very no! They are colored in exactly the mundane way that everything is, which is rather the entire point.
If sodium is intrinsically orange, why is sodium chloride white? There are a number of explanations of colour in terms of the behaviour of photons and electrons.. and the behaviour of sodium in a plasma is not the same as its behaviour in a NaCl molecule, but which is why salt isn’t orange… and none of these explanations eave colour as a fundamental quality.
I don’t know why you think “actual stuff” stops at atoms. What, then, are the components of atoms?
Try inverting the claim that you can explain a property in terms of itself. If I say that some things are good because they have a property of goodness, have I reduced the concept of “good”.
I’m using “special pleading” to summarise the opposite of rule based epistemology, the thing you think is excluded. (I’m not actually all that the clear what it is. Some examples would be useful).
The second is closer to what I’m saying. SE makes a whole bunch of loaded assumptions about knowledge and method which are baked into the structure of the conversation but which the conversation is designed to avoid discussing. Hence what I say in the last two paragraphs.
To repeat: some assumptions have to be made, and the ones that SE makes are fairly standard.
Are “they” literally and explicitly Street Epistemologists?
J. Budziszewski
I had a bet going with myself as to whether the defense of special pleading was going to have religious motivations.
street epistemology suggests, by what it chooses to ask about [....] that people should be sceptical that they can know anything.
That isn’t entirely neutral… although it’s hard to see how you could say or do anything that is entirely neutral.. but it is well warranted. Epistemologists have identified a lot of specific things laypeople get wrong, and moreover have general arguments to the effect that it is hard to know anything.
it treats scepticism as a positive position or worldivew, abstracted from the intentional content , rather than an attitude toward particular beliefs or proposals. (“Sceptical about what?” “Oh, just sceptical in general.“)
Are you saying that global scepticism is wrong or indefensible? Or just that it is presupposition of the street Epistemologist’s, and so that the problem is done kind of bias.
It suggests that the methods they use are so faulty that knowing the particulars of the belief is extraneous information.
In my experience, when laypeople use special pleading, they are overwhelmingly likely to be using it fallaciously. If you are offering philosophical therapy to people, it is reasonable to assume they are inclined to overconfidence and under generalisation, just as it is reasonable to assume they aren’t eating enough vegetables.
Holding true beliefs for bad reasons is still bad epistemology.
One can’t have it both ways. If your consciousness can persist in some infinitesimal state, then one of the things it will have lost on its way to that state is the ability to feel suffering, or boredom, or a sensation of passing time or anything of the like.
Being in a infinitesimal measure world is not the same as having infintessimal, zombie like, consciousness. It would be very convenient if it were, but you can’t pick assumptions to get to the conclusions you want.
The more conventional perspective on QM is of a single nondeterministic world or of a single world in which events have subquantum causes. From this perspective “quantum torment”—lingering indefinitely in a near-death state—is logically possible but inconceivably improbable, something that wouldn’t happen even if you reran the history of the cosmos a googol times, because it involves the quantum dice (whether deterministic or nondeterministic) repeatedly coming up just the right way to prevent your body from finally giving up the ghost.
It’s much easier to neglect low probability events in a single universe (I should say a finite single universe) where they generally don’t occur. If low measure worlds occur, they may well seem fully real to the observers inside them.
The more conventional perspective on QM is of a single nondeterministic world or of a single world in which events have subquantum causes. From this perspective “quantum torment”—lingering indefinitely in a near-death state—is logically possible but inconceivably improbable, something that wouldn’t happen even if you reran the history of the cosmos a googol times, because it involves the quantum dice (whether deterministic or nondeterministic) repeatedly coming up just the right way to prevent your body from finally giving up the ghost.
It’s much easier to neglect low probability events in a single universe (I should say a finite single universe) where they generally don’t occur. If low measure worlds occur, they may well seem fully real to the observers inside them.
No. Don’t do a count on branches, aggregate the amplitude of the branches in question. We should expect to die
Objectively or subjectively? If the objective measure of the branches is very low, you could round that off to “expect to die”… from someone else’s perspective. From your perspective, even if there is one low probability branch where you continue, you can be sure to subjectively experience it, since there is no “you” to experience anything in the high probability branches.
But really it’s too firm a conclusion to expect to live.
There are no facts about MWI and QI because they rely on questions about 1. Probability 2. Consciousness 3. Personal identity that we don’t have good answers to.
Many worlds says that our socks are always black.
Nope. What distinguishes worlds, if their contents are the same?
The Copenhagen interpretation says that us observing the socks causes them to be black.
Nope. That would be consciousness-causes-collapse. Which is a different theory.
If the brain can’t do anything except make predictions, where making predictions is defined defined to exclude seeking metaphysical truth, then you have nothing to object to, since it would be literally impossible for anyone to do other than as you recommend.
Since people can engage in metaphysical truth seeking, it is either a sub-variety of prediction, or the theory that the brain is nothing but a prediction error minimisation machine is false.
If you are interested in the objective probability of the coin flip,the it only has one value because it is only one event. In a deterministic universe the objective probability is 1, in a suitably indeterministic universe it is always 0.5.
If you think the questions “what will it be” and “what was it” are different, you are dealing with subjective probability, because the difference the passage of time makes is a difference in the information available to you, the subject.
Failing to distinguish objective and subjective probability leads to confusion. For instance, the sleeping beauty paradox is only a paradox if you expect all observers to calculate the same probability despite the different information available to them.