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Bound_up comments on 0 And 1 Are Not Probabilities - Less Wrong
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Comments (128)
Errr... as I read EY's post, he is certainly talking about the mathematics of probability (or about the formal framework in which we operate on probabilities) and not about some "subjective sense".
The claim of "people don't actually have absolute certainty" looks iffy to me, anyway. The immediate two questions that come to mind are (1) How do you know? and (2) Not even a single human being?
I think he's just acknowledging the minute(?) possibility that our apparently flawless reasoning could have a blind spot. We could be in a Matrix, or have something tampering with our minds, etcetera, such that the implied assertion:
If this appears absolutely certain to me
Then it must be true
is indefensible.
There are two different things.
David_Bolin said (emphasis mine): "He is saying that in the subjective sense, people don't actually have absolute certainty." I am interpreting this as "people never subjectively feel they have absolute certainty about something" which I don't think is true.
You are saying that from an external ("objective") point of view, people can not (or should not) be absolutely sure that their beliefs/conclusions/maps are true. This I easily agree with.
It should probably be defined by calibration: do some people have a type of belief where they are always right?
Self-referential and anthropic things would probably qualify, e.g. "I believe I exist".
You can phrase statements of logical deduction such that they have no premises and only conclusions. If we let S be the set of logical principles under which our logical system operates and T be some sentence that entails Y, then S AND T implies Y is something that I have absolute certainty in, even if this world is an illusion, because the premise of the implication contains all the rules necessary to derive the result.
A less formal example of this would be the sentence: If the rules of logic as I know them hold and the axioms of mathematics are true, then it is the case that 2+2=4