poke comments on Infinite Certainty - Less Wrong

32 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 09 January 2008 06:49AM

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Comment author: poke 09 January 2008 11:50:52PM 0 points [-]

It's nice that you're honest and open about the fact that your position presupposes an exceptionally weird sort of skepticism (hence the need to fall back on the possibility of being in The Matrix). Since humans are finite, there's no reason to think absolute confidence in everything isn't attainable, just innumerate the biases. Only by positing some weird sort of subjectivism can you get the sort of infinite regress needed to discount the possibility; I can never really know because I'm trapped inside my head. Why is the uncertainty fetish so appealing that people will entertain such weird ideas to retain it?