| | Ed,
> The editorial comments were to express the integration
> needed to view the systems as they really are (in
> reality).
The difficulty here is that this seems to go against the purpose of a questionnaire. If you want to get the most accurate answers possible from respondents, then you shouldn't be adding editorial comments reflecting your view of reality, but editorials describing how /someone who believes that philosophy/ would see that answer. Otherwise, you will be receiving skewed results, with false positives of people who answer the way you prefer them to answer rather than because that's what they really believe.
> But an Objectivist would say that applied reason will
> lead to useful conclusions (rather than "can lead).
I have seen people come to perfectly reasonable conclusions, based on the evidence they had available to them... but conclusions which were completely false.
Besides, you don't want me to bring up Goedel's Incompleteness Theorem here, now do you?
> It appears that you don't fully adopt an Objectivist
> epistemology.
Now that I'm learning more about what Objectivist epistemology is, from someone who knows more about it than I do and is willing to discuss it, it appears so.
>> (Why, yes, these first three conclusions happen to be
>> approximately the same as a certain philosophical
>> system's axioms...)
> But approximately applies to horseshoes and
> hand-grenades, not axioms.
I'm using clumsy English language rather than proper symbolic logic, so pretty much everything I'm describing is an approximation and gloss, anyway.
> Besides, your second "axiom" is Kantian. An Objectivist
> would say that regularity (what you call "rules") is
> evidence of identity -- that the universe could not be
> (rather than "appears not to be") some imagined,
> anti-identity "flux" without any regularity.
I think I see where the difficulty here is - I was using 'appears' more to describe the fact that we haven't quite worked out exactly what all of those rules /are/, rather than that there /are/ no rules. Clumsy phrasing on my part, I admit.
>> * The scientific method has a lot of limits on what
>> knowledge it can give a 'pass' to. However, even with
>> those limits, there aren't any /better/ methods to
>> ruling out falsehoods and finding what potential truths
>> are left.
> Would you agree, Daniel, that when science rules out a
> falsehood, that that falsehood is ruled out absolutely
> (providing humans with certainty, rather than a truth
> which has mere "probability").
Um... no, I can't say that I'd agree with that.
> And if not, then how can you even say "methods to ruling
> out falsehoods" (if they aren't ever completely ruled
> out)?
When applying the scientific method demonstrates that there's less than, say, one in a googleplex chance that a proposed hypothesis is true (feel free to pick your own threshold level), I feel safe in saying that science has "ruled out" that hypothesis and demonstrated it to be a falsehood.
>> * My senses and memory are a lot more limited and
>> fallible than I think they are, and can be fooled,
>> especially by people deliberately attempting to fool
>> them. (We could call this the 'Randi Principle'.)
> But didn't you use your own senses and memory to find
> this fact out?
Indeed. But I said that my senses /can/ be fooled, not that they're /always/ being fooled. There are measures that can be taken to help compensate for lapses in one's senses and to help keep tricksters from fooling you - one such method being the use of "double-blind" studies instead of non-blinded studies.
Or, put another way, just because there's a non-zero chance that I'm being fooled, doesn't mean a 0.00000001% chance of being fooled about a particular case is the same as a 10% chance. There's a reason that published scientific studies with lower p-values are considered better than ones with higher p-values.
>> * According to all significant testing done so far,
>> the supernatural doesn't seem to exist. There is
>> technically a non-zero chance that one or another truly
>> supernatural phenomena are real, but it would take a
>> massive quantity of reliable evidence to even balance
>> out the existing evidence of absence.
> This is spoken like a true, vulgar empiricist.
Depending on how you mean 'vulgar', thank you.
> The difference between your view and the Objectivist one
> is made clear here. Daniel, can you tell me how would you
> get natural evidence (the only kind humans have) of the
> supernatural?
Pick a particular supernatural claim, and I can give a better answer. If someone makes a claim of having some supernatural power, then, to start with, I would like them to demonstrate said power under conditions controlled enough to rule out quackery, flim-flam, and outright con artistry. The conditions laid out by the James Randi Educational Foundation's million-dollar prize should suffice as a first line - if anyone can claim that prize, then I would be quite willing to reconsider my belief on the non-existence of the supernatural, based upon the new evidence.
>> * There is a set of mathematics which describes how
>> strongly to hold a belief depending on what evidence is
>> available for and against that belief. The better I am
>> able to understand and apply this math, the more
>> accurately my beliefs will reflect reality (Ie, Bayes'
>> Theorem, as described at http://yudkowsky.net/rational
>> /bayes .) This leads to a number of useful rules of
>> thumb about what pieces of evidence are useful, and what
>> are useless fallacies (eg, The truth is not a popularity
>> contest; Wishing doesn't make it so; etc).
> But this assumes that knowledge is impossible -- i.e.,
> that the only possible mental disposition to be in would
> be a continuum of "belief."
You seem to be implying that having a mental disposition somewhere along a continuum of "belief" means that knowledge is impossible... when, in the Bayesian system, the /knowledge/ comes from your belief /having/ a particular location on that continuum.
> And you don't need Bayes' Theorem to discover the
> uselessness of fallacies. As an exercise, please use
> Bayes' Theorem to provide a rough estimate of how
> strongly to hold these beliefs about the external world?:
>
> 1) Canada is north of Mexico
> 2) helium sulfide does not exist
> 3) the Morning Star and the Evening Star are both
> instances of the planet Venus
Now /this/ is an interesting set of questions. :)
I think what you're trying to ask, here, is how high to peg a belief, when all the available evidence points to that belief being true. Another way of asking that question is, "What is the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow?", given only the number of times the sun has risen previously. Laplace offered a formula, the 'rule of succession', where the probability = (successes + 1) / (number of trials + 2). So if I've come across, say, a thousand /independent/ references that Canada is north of Mexico, then I should hold that belief to about 1,001/1,002 = 99.9002% strength. If I've come across a million such references, then I should hold that belief at about 99.9999% strength.
>> The above generally leads to an empiricist
>> epistemology, with the caveat that even truly rational
>> people can come to different conclusions if they receive
>> different subsets of the possible evidence.
> But the caveat you mention is an inherent limitation of
> empiricism which does not apply to Objectivism.
I could counter that you can only determine how true or false Objectivism /really/ is... through the methods of empiricism. :)
> Vulgar empiricism views the mind as a sense organ,
> affording resemblances of the external world.
How sure are you that the form of empiricism you're describing is, in fact, how empiricists /actually/ view the mind?
> It does not view the mind as something which can
> logically integrate the evidence of the senses. For, if
> you could logically integrate the evidence of the senses,
> then the problem of different subsets of evidence would
> be transient and surmountable.
> This "trick" (continual integration) works for everything
> so that, eventually, we come to common conclusions (about
> all matters of fact) -- even if starting with different
> subsets of possible evidence.
What makes you think that this is not already the case with empiricists? Have you even read the basic description of Bayesian theory I provided above - describing how the whole /point/ is in gathering new evidence, and, in the best cases when people have different beliefs, sharing what evidence has been gathered to resolve the differences?
Your post seems to imply that you think that Objectivism is non-empirical. If that's the case (and I'll give the other forumites a day or two to chime in for or against the idea), then I will cheerfully click the 'non-Objectivist' box in my profile.
(PS: I seem to have missed whatever FAQ describes how to place quotes inline; even the 'Reply' button just opens up an empty text-box. Is there a reference handy?)
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