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Vladimir_Gritsenko comments on Moore's Paradox - Less Wrong
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Comments (21)
There seems to be some confusion here concerning authority. I have the authority to say "I like the color green." It would not make sense for me to say "I believe I like the color green" because I have first-hand knowledge concerning my own likes and dislikes and I'm sufficiently confident in my own mental capacities to determine whether or not I'm deceiving myself concerning so simple a matter as my favorite color.
I do not have the authority to say, "Jane likes the color green." I may know Jane quite well, and the probability of my statement being accurate may be quite high, but my saying it is so does not make it so.
I chose to believe in the existance of God - deliberately and conciously. This decision, however, has absolutely zero effect on the actual existance of God.
Critical realism shows us that the world and our perception of the world are two different things. Ideally any rational thinker should have a close correlation between their perception of the world and reality, but outside of first-hand knowledge they are never equivalent.
You are correct - it is harder for me to say "God exists" than it is for me to say "I believe God exists" for the same reason it is harder for a scientist to say "the higgs-boson exists" than it is to say "according to our model, the higgs-boson should exist."
The scientist has evidence that such a particle exists, and may strongly believe in it's existence, but he does not have the authority to say definitively that it exists. It may exists, or not exist, independent of any such belief.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but from a Bayesian perspective the only difference between first-hand knowledge and N-th hand knowledge (where N>1) are the numbers. There is nothing special about first-hand.
Suppose you see a dog in the street, and formulate this knowledge to yourself. What just happened? Photons from the sun (or other light sources) hit the dog, bounced, hit your eye, initiated a chemical reaction, etc. Your knowledge is neither special nor trivial, but is a chain of physical events.
Now, what happens when your friend tells you he sees a dog? He had to form the knowledge in his head. Then he vocalized it, sound waves moved through the air, hit your ear drum, initiated chemical reactions... supposing he is a truth-sayer, the impact on you, evidence-wise, is almost exactly the same. Simply, the chain of events leading to your own knowledge is longer, but that's the only difference. Once again, there is no magic here. Your friend is just another physical link in the chain.
(A corollary is that introspection in humans is broken. Often we honestly say we want X, but do Y. The various manifestations of this phenomenon have been talked about extensively on OB. It is conceivable that in the future scientists would be able to predict our behavior better than ourselves, by studying our brains directly. So we don't really have any special authority over ourselves.)
If there was an agent known to be a perfect pipe of evidence, we should treat its words as direct observations. People are not perfect pipes of evidence, so that complicates issues. However, some things are pretty clear even though I have no first-hand knowledge of them:
Los Angeles exists. (Note that I've never been to the Americas.) It is now night-time in Los Angeles. (About 2 AM, to be precise.) In 2006, the city of Los Angeles had a population of approximately 3.8 million.
And so on, until:
Modern evolutionary theory is generally true. There is no God.
And if I am wrong, it is simply because I failed my math, not because I lack in "authority". So there, I said it. Your turn :-)