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cousin_it comments on Diseased thinking: dissolving questions about disease - Less Wrong
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If my common sense is invalid and just my imagination, then how in the world do I manage to program computers successfully? That seems to be the most objective test there is, unless you believe all computers are in a conspiracy to deceive humans.
Just to clarify, in a deterministic universe, there are no "invalid" or "wrong" things. Everything just is. Every belief and action is just as valid as any other because that is exactly how each of them has been determined to be.
No, this belief of yours is wrong. A deterministic universe can contain a correct implementation of a calculator that returns 2+2=4 or an incorrect one that returns 2+2=5.
Sure it can. But it is possible to declare one of them as valid only because you are outside of both and you have a notion of what the result should be.
But to avoid the confusion over the use of words I will restate what I said earlier slightly differently.
In a deterministic universe, neither of a pair of opposites like valid/invalid, right/wrong, true/false etc has more significance than the other. Everything just is. Every belief and action is just as significant as any other because that is exactly how each of them has been determined to be.
I thought about your argument a bit and I think I understand it better now. Let's unpack it.
First off, if a deterministic world contains a (deterministic) agent that believes the world is deterministic, that agent's belief is correct. So no need to be outside the world to define "correctness".
Another matter is verifying the correctness of beliefs if you're within the world. You seem to argue that a verifier can't trust its own conclusion if it knows itself to be a deterministic program. This is debatable - it depends on how you define "trust" - but let's provisionally accept this. From this you somehow conclude that the world and your mind must be in fact non-deterministic. To me this doesn't follow. Could you explain?
I program computers successfully too :-)