= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
lukeprog comments on What does your web of beliefs look like, as of today? - Less Wrong Discussion
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (30)
I'm not sure how much we disagree. Obviously it all comes back to opaque brain processes in the end, and thus epistemology remains messy. I don't think anything I said in my original post denies this.
As for a black-box module in my brain doing math, yes, that's part of what I call "me." What I'm doing there is responding to a common objection to Bayesianism - that it's all "subjective." Well yes, it requires subjective probability assessments. So does every method of epistemology. But at least with Bayesian methods you can mathematically model your uncertainty. That's all I was trying to say, there, and I find it hard to believe that you disagree with that point. As far as I can tell, you're extrapolating what I said far beyond what I intended to communicate with it.
As for reducing epistemology to Bayesianism, my footnote said it was impractical, and I also said it's incomplete without cognitive science, which addresses the fact that, for example, our belief-forming processes remain mostly opaque to this day.
Fair enough. We don't seem to disagree much then, if at all, when it comes to the correctness of what you wrote.
However, in that case, I would still object to your summary in that given the realistic limitations of our current position, we have to use all sorts of messy and questionable procedures to force our opaque and unreliable brains to yield workable and useful knowledge. With this in mind, saying that epistemology is reducible to cognitive science and Bayesian probability, however true in principle, is definitely not true in any practically useful sense. (The situation is actually much worse than in the analogous example of our practical inability to reduce chemistry to physics, since the insight necessary to perform the complete and correct reduction of epistemology, if it ever comes, will have to be somehow obtained using the tools of our present messy and unreliable epistemology.)
Therefore, what is missing from your summary is the statement of the messy and unreliable parts currently incorporated into your epistemology, which is a supremely relevant question precisely because they are so difficult to analyze and describe accurately, since their imperfections will interfere with the very process of their analysis. Another important consideration is that a bold reductionist position may lead one to dismiss too quickly various ideas that can offer a lot of useful insight in this present imperfect position, despite their metaphysical and other baggage.
The list of "what is missing from [my] summary" is indeed long! Hence, a "summary."