endoself comments on Stuff That Makes Stuff Happen - Less Wrong

51 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 18 October 2012 10:49AM

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Comment author: Eugine_Nier 19 October 2012 03:06:57AM 2 points [-]

More generally, for me to expect your beliefs to correlate with reality, I have to either think that reality is the cause of your beliefs, expect your beliefs to alter reality, or believe that some third factor is influencing both of them.

I can construct examples where for this to be true requires us to treat mathematical truths as causes. Of course, this causes problems for the Bayesian definition of "cause".

Comment author: endoself 20 October 2012 04:32:50AM *  1 point [-]

Mathematical truths do behave like causes. Remember, Bayesian probabilities represent subjective uncertainty. Yes, my uncertainty about the Riemann hypothesis is correlated with my uncertainty about other mathematical facts is the same way that my uncertainty about some physical facts is correlated with my uncertainty about others, so I can represent them both as Bayesian networks (really, one big Bayesian network, as my uncertainty about math is also correlated with my uncertainty about the world).