I am not trying to assess whether or not it is "good" or "practically useful" to pose questions about knowledge in terms of quantum mechanical descriptions of brains. I'm trying to find resources for questions about philosophy of mind and discovery of logical knowledge.
For example, someone might say that for propositions A and B, (if A -> B then ~B -> ~A) is a discovered piece of knowledge about the way all truth functions work. Thus, the (if ... then ...) I just mentioned is "true" and its truth exists in a wholly separate magisterium from propositions that can be subjected to empirical inquiry and arise as the arg max of some posterior probability distribution and be thought of as "true" (or "exceedingly probable give current evidence") in that sense.
My point is that, fundamentally, the knowledge that "(if A -> B then ~B -> ~A) is a discovered piece of knowledge about the way all truth functions work" is itself "subjectable to empirical inquiry and arises as the arg max of some posterior probability distribution and be thought of as "true" (or "exceedingly probable give current evidence") in that sense" (i.e., the empirical evidence would be some examination of amplitudes in a quantum configuration subspace dealing with human minds).
I'm specifically trying to get at aspects of the theory of knowledge which whole branches of philosophers claim are outside of the magisterium in which Bayesian decision theory is applicable, and that this therefore entitles them to hold certain beliefs on the basis that they are "true" in that magisterium that can't be touched by Bayes. My counterargument is that such knowledge about the alleged other magisteria must itself be (at least in principle) experimentally detectable in brains, at the level of QM.
Whether we can do such detection or have useful, specific models for it is a whole different ball of wax that doesn't concern me in this specific question.
In general, if you find yourself stuck or confused on a question of philosophy, try the following things in order:
Try to reduce it to a decision problem.
Walk away and come back to it later with a fresh perspective.
Ignore the question, it probably didn't matter anyway.
I am reading through the sequence on quantum physics and have had some questions which I am sure have been thought about by far more qualified people. If you have any useful comments or links about these ideas, please share.
Most of the strongest resistance to ideas about rationalism that I encounter comes not from people with religious beliefs per se, but usually from mathematicians or philosophers who want to assert arguments about the limits of knowledge, the fidelity of sensory perception as a means for gaining knowledge, and various (what I consider to be) pathological examples (such as the zombie example). Among other things, people tend to reduce the argument to the existence of proper names a la Wittgenstein and then go on to assert that the meaning of mathematics or mathematical proofs constitutes something which is fundamentally not part of the physical world.
As I am reading the quantum physics sequence (keep in mind that I am not a physicist; I am an applied mathematician and statistician and so the mathematical framework of Hilbert spaces and amplitude configurations makes vastly much more sense to me than billiard balls or waves, yet connecting it to reality is still very hard for me) I am struck by the thought that all thoughts are themselves fundamentally just amplitude configurations, and by extension, all claims about knowledge about things are also statements about amplitude configurations. For example, my view is that the color red does not exist in and of itself but rather that the experience of the color red is a statement about common configurations of particle amplitudes. When I say "that sign is red", one could unpack this into a detailed statement about statistical properties of configurations of particles in my brain.
The same reasoning seems to apply just as well to something like group theory. States of knowledge about the Sylow theorems, just as an example, would be properties of particle amplitude configurations in a brain. The Sylow theorems are not separately existing entities which are of themselves "true" in any sense.
Perhaps I am way off base in thinking this way. Can any philosophers of the mind point me in the right direction to read more about this?