What Bayesianism taught me
lesswrong.com
lesswrong.com
'I think therefore I am' - cliche ofc. Only thing I can prove.
BUT. Prove a damn thing after that. If you can, you're not logically correct, you have no proof of anything outside of your existence. It looks real to you - that's your 'proof'.
We've all thought this at least once: It could be a simulation, you can't prove it's not.
You are choosing to believe you're living on earth, and there's a universe, and you're in it, and it's made out of stuff.
You are choosing this (perhaps sensible) scenario, but it is a choice. Because you may well be here reading this to yourself, from yourself, by yourself in the vacuum of your own imagination - and you wouldn't know.
Anyways... once you pass all that, you get to pick and choose what you prefer, and life becomes easier, and kinder, and more fun.. in my little experience anyway. Because you know everything you see and do is half-bullshit, and it's alllllright.
I don't see how the fact that it might all be a dream makes the experience of pain any less painful or the experience of pleasure any easier to come by. I experience it all the same.
For example: It would be nice to believe in an omni-benevolent god that would take care of me after I die. But that's the sort of answer that I'd want to have confidence in - and I'd be aware that it's equally probable that there's an omni-malicious god waiting to torture me forever.
If I'd started off believing in evil-god then the knowledge that I had no information either way would be a comfort.
If I'd started off believing in good-god then it would be a burden.
Uncertainty in that respect neither comforts nor disturbs without reference to a baseline belief, it just is.
And when we start talking about things like morality, there is a sense in which there's a question as to what we're doing when we use moral language. However, most of the thought experiments concern real life examples anyway - outside of very specific areas of realist metaethics I don't think that's something that most people think about very much.
I'm... struggling to think of any big questions about reality that would affect my life. Ontology, epistemology - again most of the stuff I know is more about how people think about their experience - or can be converted directly into that talk with no loss of effect - than it is about esoteric metaphysics.
I disagree on that point. Even a good-god would have rules that are probably either complicated or vague, so trying to fulfill those will actually be a burden on your everyday life.
We are not talking about uncertainty here. Quite the contrary: we are talking about the clear certainty that there just is no true or false in these questions, not that we can’t determine them.
At least for me, once I realized that, I stopped wondering about an afterlife and just assumed the most probable version: nothing. And It doesn’t bother me in any way.
For morals it also helped me a lot, as I realized that is no universal good/bad. We (and especially I) create these notions ourselves and only by ourselves. That means if am faced with moral questions, I can freely think about what _I_ think is right or wrong and I don’t have to wonder about those omnipresent values that kind of seem to be there.
But you referenced “most people” and I agree that they probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these thinks. But that obviously doesn’t change my perspective on the world.
But to give you more practical example: I guess everybody in the western world is at least in some way faced with the question of how they are going to handle the fact that their comfort and well-being is in a considerable degree made possible by the suffering of others. This of course not a situation that we created with our own hands, but we life in and by our everyday life support a system that works like this. I would say that if you believe in absolute morals, you either have to dedicate a significant part of your life to do something about that or you are probably a hypocrite.
The mentioned realization allows you to avoid this dilemma.
However, regardless - I WISH there were more people like you on the planet, things would get a whole lot better if we just started discussions as thinking folk.
Your best guess is as equally right/wrong as everyone else's, but it will be something you can truly get behind. You don't have to search through only other people's ideas, to find something you like. You can simply create your own, if we didn't do that - humanity would have no definitions to play with. Why is yours any worse than some dude who died 800 years ago? It's not.
Shitty definitions will hurt you, better ones will be useful to you.
Are religious definitions the only definitions in existence, of COURSE NOT! - So choose outside of that paradigm if that suits you, mix and match from everyone's ideas and your own. The world will open up if you do that, you'll make mistakes, you'll learn stuff, you'll create stuff..
Anyway, that's my two cents.
This whole way of thinking, the idea that no-one knows shit - 'it's all just a best guess' is extremely liberating. At least for me. That's why.
Bayesianism redefines the concept of knowledge, which under Bayesianism is represented as a probability. I have very strong knowledge that there is no god. If given sufficiently strong proof against that, I will update my beliefs about the issue -- but this does not mean the same as being unsure about it now.
The issue isn't that there is a small probability of god existing, but rather there is a vanishingly small probability of your particular brand of god being true versus all the other particular brands of god or gods being true.
The pudding in a Bayesian discussing is as so often in the normalizing factor...
> The problem with syllogisms is that they're always valid. [...]
> The Bayesian definition of evidence favoring a hypothesis is evidence which we are more likely to see if the hypothesis is true than if it is false. Observing that a syllogism is logically valid can never be evidence favoring any empirical proposition, because the syllogism will be logically valid whether that proposition is true or false.
> Syllogisms are valid in all possible worlds, and therefore, observing their validity never tells us anything about which possible world we actually live in.
If a proposition is logically possible, there's a non-zero probability it's actually true. E.g. it's possible that God does not exist. It's also possible that God does exist and put dinosaur fossils in the ground to troll us. I say this without sarcasm.
Pure Logic(TM) isn't always pragmatic enough to suit our needs because it restricts its inputs and outputs to 100% certainties. In the real world, nothing is ever 100% certain. Maybe we have a lot of life experiences with gravity. Maybe we predict with seven 9's that objects will continue to fall down like they always have. But can we ever be truly-entirely-perfectly certain that tomorrow, gravity won't be around because God forgot to pay the utility bill? No, actually, we can't. We're just really confident because we've experienced evidence of gravity for our entire lives.
Likewise, you can never be truly certain that the diodes in your computer won't spontaneously reverse current. But we can still rely on diodes to work properly because we predict that such an event is super-ultra-extremely unlikely (has low probability) given the voltages humanity's electrical engineers decided to ram through our circuits.