So in short: if you are being truly logical, every statement of fact is just a statement of belief, it seems.
So if you dig far enough, how accurate our beliefs are is partly reliant on factors beyond our control: if our minds happen to be wired with bad axioms we may be unable to avoid inaccurate conclusions.
How? If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true.
This statement has as much meaning as randomly uttered noise.
Take "the Earth is round" belief. The Earth was round since before humans existed. Having or not having evidence to support this belief did not and does not alter the shape in any way. The Earth is still round. So this belief was always true (even if unbeknownst to anyone) regardless of who held it and whether they had any evidence to support it.
It may not be able to be verified, but it can often be falsified. Suppose I believe that all bridges are safe for me because there is a swarm of fairies following me around holding up the bridges. And suppose you believe that no bridges are safe between the hours of 2 and 3 am, because the gods have so decreed. And suppose we both come to a bridge at 2am.
If I walk over the bridge and it collapses, it falsifies my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me, but it doesn't prove your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am. On the other hand, if I walk over the bridge and it doesn't collapse, it falsifies your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am, but does not prove my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me.
"All models are wrong, but some models are useful."
For all of our important beliefs -- about people, politics, religion, whatever -- it's always important that we ask ourselves, "How would I know if I was wrong?"
Just because you can't prove something is true, doesn't mean it's not true. You can just never know whether it's true or not. See also the Zen Proverb that someone posted in this thread.
Putting that aside, some things are unverifiable yet have concrete ramifications for people's lives. Some examples:
- If "earth will be swallowed by a black hole in ten seconds" is true, I'll never be able to verify it, even though it will have the concrete effect of ending my life.
- I can't verify _or_ falsify that other humans have conscious experiences, but I believe they do. If that belief happens to be false, the world is vastly different than if it is true.
- _Nobody_ could 100% verify that a given physical law applies everywhere at all times. But if it does, some people's lives will be different than if it did not. The fact that everyone in the cosmos has experiences consistent with the law being true, and nobody ever has an experience inconsistent with the law, are part of what make the law true. But that fact can't be verified by anyone.
(A hypothetical omniscient person could verify all these things, but omniscience just means "knowing all true things", so redefining truth in terms of what an omniscient person could verify would be circular.)
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/
https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/
> so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers
I'm not a philosopher myself but I found Heraclitus's writings (Democritus's, too) a lot more interesting than many philosophers' writings from the 20th century, in this field being more modern doesn't necessarily mean being better or knowing more.
Skepticism doesn't demand that you "reject the ability to do things." See Hume.
Max Stirner, the most radical skeptic of them all, is without a doubt a more interesting philosopher than many others one is forced to read. Moreover, contrary to the claim made by the OP - he expects the reader to have read philosophy from other authors.
A radical skeptic like Stirner loves Kant and Hume. Maybe it's because Kant shows that the "thing-in-itself" is unknowable even if it exists and Hume shows us that empirical observation is basically all we have for trying to work with the world. Both show that no one in science has found anything resembling truth
Appears there is no clear consensus on exactly why skepticism is false.
To be honest the percentage of modern philosophers (or any other modern profession) having a view on something like this has no relation to the actual thing being true, false, or true or false at the same time or neither true nor false at the same time. We're all playing glasperlenspiel [1] trying to make sense of some of the things that surround us, that is until all of us will inevitably die.
Thanks for te book recommendation. Looks amazing. Loved Siddartha.
None of the listed options is so convincing that everybody using their rationality would immediately agree with the proposed model of truth. That seems to indicate that also for these options, rationality alone is insufficient to establish truth, and a belief/irrational/social factor still would be at play.
I'm not implying that the mentioned approaches developed by analytic philosophers are useless. They do deepen our understanding how reasoning and fact establishing works. But in my opinion they are still very far away of solving the Münchhausen Trilemma.
This leads some to the interesting (and perhaps terrifying) conclusion that narratives are more important and useful than rationalism. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre
“ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.”
Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true.
There has been an ongoing debate in the UK about proportional representation and the first past the post system. It has not, as yet, lead to violence and chaos. So I think that the link Maistre identifies between questioning the status quo and chaos is not always true.
Admittedly there is time and place for debate. You don't argue about the cars direction, when the driver is trying to concentrate in a dangerous situation.
But maybe the success of representative democracy is not based in rationalism but instead the mythology around individual liberty.
It's the same with any logical statement. You could go all the way up to the premises and question that and when given a proof of the premises, then you can question the premises of the "proof of the premises". Ad infinitum. Or you just take the axiomatic approach.
I think most of life is lived axiomatically.
While individual scientists may hold beliefs that go beyond scientific premises, the significant difference between scientific and religious belief is that in the former case, all axioms are considered to be defeasible - and they quite often are overthrown.
This is also not a semantic argument at all. It is strictly a logical one.
A close relative went from marine biologist to creationist (et al), and I've been struggling to accept the change. My Calvinist self still doesn't understand Evangelic system of faith.
--
Given Structure + Process => Outcomes:
Scientist: Faith in processes, eg scientific method. Belief is based on reproducibility.
Evangelical: Faith in outcomes. The book (authority) is used to rationalize (justify) proclamations of belief.
To your point: Yes, both have "faith", but with different starting points and emphasis.
Perhaps. The "just" part gets me thinking.
There seems to be an important qualitative difference between prototypical statements of belief---e.g. I believe in the healing power of reiki---and prototypical statements of fact---e.g. This is a glass of water.
While both of the above do contain elements of belief---namely, narratives about what things are in the world---they seem to operate quite differently in many respects.
Belief-style statements tend to more overtly signal traits like social ingroup or self-identity. In particular, declaring belief in the power of reiki seems more likely to influence how others think and concieve of you as a person. I doubt that declaring the existence of a glass of water is likely to do the same.
More generally, this line of thought makes tempts me to say that fact-like staments tend to have less social content than belief-style ones.
Or, more susinctly, facts are a proper subset of beliefs.
In the same way that 2D space differs wildly from 1000D space, despite the former being a subset of the latter, I think it ignores a lot to treat "facts" as "just beliefs." How a belief operates matters.
It's a important concept to remember for anyone who's argumentative/legalistic since understanding the oppossing sides definitions and desired conclusion is often the cause for disagreement. If there are no first principles, then there are no definitive last principles.
Also, in some ideal sense, since we attain consciousness as pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa, all that follows is the result of sense information on the network. The concept of individuality is weak. Two pure minds, fully rational and capable of honest communication, can be different by having different sense information, but if they are able to communicate with each other they should, in time, be identical. i.e. once I have given you everything I know completely and you have given me everything you know completely, we are not distinct, you and I are the same. A full mind meld.
We can't do this for all sorts of reasons, but two AGIs truly meeting may, which means that there is a sort of greyness to this true meeting of AGIs: by meeting they achieve unity. All AGIs behaving in this manner then become the same purely by meeting. Interesting.
Drop that assumption, and fully rational people can indeed agree to disagree. This is a large part of why rational people can look at the same evidence, and come to different conclusions.
That's the Wiki article, yes. But scarejunba is going past that, to something more fundamental.
If you have "pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa", then you remove the issue of priors. No longer is there any matrix of prejudices that have to agree. You start with observations about the world and logic, and nothing else, and everyone ends up in agreement.
(To an extent you might bootstrap with priors, but over time you'd use observations and logic to replace them, especially when they disagree with someone else you're debating.)
For example, an infant has an instinct to breathe right after birth. Is that a belief or an action? It’s both—a strategy to survive in the world encoded in genes attached to an implicit belief. An infant that tries to breathe two minutes later would suffer hypoxia and brain damage, while one that tries sooner will choke.
There is no pure tabula rasa untainted by priors, as soon as you acknowledge minds are embedded in bodies shaped by millions of years of evolution and steeped in survival tactics, and what are tactics except a set of useful priors about good actions?
But "You need to breathe." and things like that would be the easiest priors to replace with observational data.
Any breaks in trust, or breakdowns in communication can disrupt the process of mind melding. And it seems to me that trust and failure of communication are features of boundaries between individuals.
Interesting indeed
Is that part of the principles you adhere to? :)