Morendil comments on Explain/Worship/Ignore? - Less Wrong

38 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 02 September 2007 08:01PM

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Comment author: RobinZ 20 January 2010 10:45:01PM *  2 points [-]

First define "truth", and I'll start to worry about that.

Truth is correspondence with reality. To quote the narrator:

Frankly, I'm not entirely sure myself where this "reality" business comes from. I can't create my own reality in the lab, so I must not understand it yet. But occasionally I believe strongly that something is going to happen, and then something else happens instead. I need a name for whatever-it-is that determines my experimental results, so I call it "reality". This "reality" is somehow separate from even my very best hypotheses. Even when I have a simple hypothesis, strongly supported by all the evidence I know, sometimes I’m still surprised. So I need different names for the thingies that determine my predictions and the thingy that determines my experimental results. I call the former thingies "belief", and the latter thingy "reality".