Marcello comments on Raising the Sanity Waterline - Less Wrong

112 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 12 March 2009 04:28AM

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Comment author: Marcello 12 March 2009 07:10:30AM 9 points [-]

Michael Vassar said:

Naive realism is a supernatural belief system anyway

What exactly do you mean by "supernatural" in this context? Naive realism doesn't seem to be anthropomorphizing any ontologically fundamental things, which is what I mean when I say "supernatural".

Now of course naive realism does make the assumption that certain assumptions about reality which are encoded in our brains from the get go are right, or at least probably right, in short, that we have an epistemic gift. However, that can't be what you meant by "supernatural", because any theory that doesn't make that assumption gives us no way to deduce anything at all about reality.

Now, granted, some interpretations of naive realism may wrongly posit some portion of the gift to be true, when in fact, by means of evidence plus other parts of the gift, we end up pretty sure that it's wrong. But I don't think this sort of wrongness makes an idea supernatural. Believing that Newtonian physics is absolutely true, regardless of how fast objects move is a wrong belief, but I wouldn't call it a supernatural belief.

So, what exactly did you mean?