ChristianKl comments on Help with understanding some non-standard-LW philosophy viewpoints - Less Wrong
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Comments (47)
The point isn't that you don't do either.
Your post is mainly talking about world in a non-probabilistic way. Given that's the case the professor with whom you are talking get's confused.
To me it looks like the problem is belief in belief of logical positivism.
The fact that you intuition is that you can't prove that you are not a Boltzmann brain, doesn't change that your intuition is that you aren't a Boltzmann brain.
I intuition is that P!=NP but at the same time I'm certain that I don't have the mathetical skills to prove P!=NP.
The fact that you don't have an intuitive mental distinction between "X is true" and "I can prove X is true" is a problem.
Sorry, don't know what you mean to say here. Could you rephrase?
Could you elaborate on what you mean?
Again, could you elaborate? I don't see any reason to associate anything I've said with logical positivism.
Of course I intuit that I'm not a Boltzmann brain, and of course I act as if I'm not. Not sure where I indicated otherwise. Again, my issue is with taking intuitions far beyond these fundamental we-need-to-start-somewhere levels and using them as strong evidence of truth.
Let's start with
Specifically, I keep getting the impression that most (all?) of the arguments for the ontology issues boil down to trusting philosophical intuitions and/or the way people use words. Something along the following lines.I keep getting the impressionalmost directly translates toMy intuition tells me. You still base your chain of reasoning on it.Almost none of the reasoning in your post can be expressed by predicate logic and/or probability theory.
While we are at it, it's worth noting that the intuition that probability obviously extends logic is doubtful.
You don't see how the claim that everything is explainable with logic and probability theory relates to logical positivism?
You choose a particular set of where to start that's highly culturally charged. Anna Wierzbicka argues for example in "Imprisoned in English" that it makes sense to start with fundamentals that nearly all human cultures agree on such as there being
mothersandfathersbut for example notbrothersas some cultures have that concept while others don't.You start with the idea that complex concepts like
mean,intuition,reason,associate,indicate,issueandevidenceas all being fairly straightforward basics while Anna Wierzbicka would take neither of those as fundamentally basic.All of them are heavily charged with a lot of cultural associations that you likely hold unquestioned because you learned them as a child and never questioned them.
Hear, hear!