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dankane comments on The Useful Idea of Truth - Less Wrong
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I don't see how you can claim that the belief that the photon continues to exist is a meaningful belief without also allowing the belief that the photon does not continue to exist to be a meaningful belief. Unless you do something along the lines of taking Kolmogorov complexity into account, these beliefs seem to be completely analogous to each other. Perhaps to phrase things more neutrally, we should be asking if the question "does the photon continue to exist?" is meaningful. On the one hand, you might want to say "no" because the outcome of the question is epiphenomenal. On the other hand, you would like this question to be meaningful since it may have behavioral implications.
They're both meaningful. There are reasons to reject one of them as false, but that's a separate issue.
OK. I think that I had been misreading some of your previous posts. Allow me the rephrase my objection.
Suppose that our beliefs about photons were rewritten as "photons not beyond an event horizon obey Maxwell's Equations". Making this change to my belief structure now leaves beliefs about whether or not photons still exist beyond an event horizon unconnected from my experiences. Does the meaningfulness of this belief depend on how I phrase my other beliefs?
Also if one can equally easily produce belief systems which predict the same sets of experiences but disagree on whether or not the photon exists beyond the event horizon, how does this belief differ from the belief that Carol is a post-utopian?