DanielVarga comments on The Dilemma: Science or Bayes? - Less Wrong

19 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 13 May 2008 08:16AM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (185)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: Perplexed 23 September 2010 05:55:40PM 4 points [-]

One often sees talk here of something called the "Mind Projection Fallacy". In essence, it is the error of taking something subjective and treating it as objective. A canonical example would be saying "X is mysterious", rather than "I don't understand X". That is, what ought to be handled as a two-place predicate IsMysteriousTo(X,N) (topic X is mysterious to person N) is erroneously handled as a one-place predicate IsMysterious(X) (topic X is mysterious, full stop).

One criticism that might be made of the position you are taking here is that you are falling into a form of the Mind Projection Fallacy. Try imagining Exists(X) as a fallacious one-place predicate and replace it with ExistsFor(X,N), i.e. X has existence from the viewpoint of observer N.

Similarly, you should say "X was instantiated at a point in time in my past, hence X currently exists from my viewpoint, and I expect X to cease to exist at some point in my future. Any other supposed X, existing on some other branch of reality, is not the X to which I refer."

This, as I understand it, is the way Kripke says that issues of identity and existence must be handled in modal logics.

If you can accept this viewpoint, then it is just a small step to realizing that the people you are disagreeing with, those who consider past, future, and all branches of reality as equally "real" are actually talking about the model theory for your modal logic.

Comment author: DanielVarga 23 September 2010 09:13:37PM 0 points [-]

This is a preaching to the choir kind of argument. I am very very impressed with it, but you should not be surprised that quen_tin is unimpressed.