David_Gerard comments on Boltzmann Brains and Anthropic Reference Classes (Updated) - Less Wrong

-4 Post author: pragmatist 04 June 2012 04:04AM

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Comment author: David_Gerard 04 June 2012 10:15:54AM 2 points [-]

For instance, I have beliefs about Barack Obama. A spontaneously congealed Boltzmann brain in an identical brain state could not have those beliefs. There is no appropriate causal connection between Obama and that brain, so how could its beliefs be about him?

This is playing games with words, not saying anything new or useful. It presumes a meaning of "belief" such that there can be no such thing as an erroneous or unfounded belief, and that's just not how the word "belief" is used in English.

Comment author: pragmatist 04 June 2012 10:24:47AM *  0 points [-]

You have misunderstood what I am saying. It is definitely not a consequence of my claim that there are no erroneous or unfounded beliefs. One can have a mistaken belief about Obama (such as the belief that he was born in Kenya), but for it to be a belief about Obama, there must be some sort of causal chain linking the belief state to Obama.

Comment author: David_Gerard 04 June 2012 01:08:24PM 2 points [-]

So what you mean is that the Boltzmann brain can have no causally-connected beliefs about Obama, not no beliefs-as-everyone-else-uses-the-word about Obama. Fine, but your original statement and your clarification still gratuitously repurpose a word with a conventional meaning in a manner that will be actively misleading to the reader, and doing this is very bad practice.