Richard2 comments on A Priori - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 October 2007 09:02PM

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Comment author: Richard2 11 October 2007 11:04:00PM 2 points [-]

Constant - Sure, there's something to be said for epistemic externalism. But I thought Eliezer had higher ambitions than merely distinguishing rationality and reliability? He seems to be attacking the very notion of the a priori, claiming that philosophers lazily treat it as a semantic stopsign or 'truce' (a curious claim, since many philosophers take themselves to be more or less exclusively concerned with the a priori domain, and yet have been known to disagree with one other on occasion), and dismissively joking "it makes you wonder why a thirsty hunter-gatherer can't use the "a priori truth factory" to locate drinkable water." (The answer isn't that hard to see if one honestly wonders about it for a moment or two.) But maybe you're right, and these cheap shots are just part of the local attire, not intended for cognitive consumption.

g - I already answered this. Change the extra-physical laws of nature as you will, it is not conceptually possible for a world physically identical to ours to lack flying airplanes. What else are we to call the boeing-arranged atoms at 10000ft? The zombie (physically identical but non-conscious) world, by contrast, does seem conceptually possible. So there's no analogy here.

TGGP - Yes, I think that, thanks to the bridging laws, "the materially-sufficient is psycho-sufficient". This dualism is empirically indistinguishable from materialism. Anticipating experience may be a useful constraint for science, but that is not all there is to know. (See also my responses to James above.)