komponisto comments on Advancing Certainty - Less Wrong

34 Post author: komponisto 18 January 2010 09:51AM

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Comment author: komponisto 25 January 2010 03:15:42AM *  0 points [-]

But remember my original point here: level-of-belief is controlled by the amount of information. In order for me to reach certain extremely high levels of certainty about Knox's innocence, it may be necessary to effectively simulate a copy of Knox inside my mind.

ETA: And that of course raises the question about whether in that case my beliefs are about the mind-external Knox ("simulated" or not) or the mind-internal simulated Knox. This is somewhat tricky, but the answer is the former -- for the same reason that the simple, non-conscious model of Amanda I have in my mind right now represents beliefs about the real, conscious Amanda in Capanne prison. Thus, a demon could theoretically create a conscious simulation of an innocent Amanda Knox in my mind, which could represent a "wrong" extremely-certain belief about a particular external reality. But in order to pull off a deception of this order, the demon would have to inhabit a world with a lot more information than even the large amount available to me in this scenario.