All of solitarywalker's Comments + Replies

Many thanks for the reply. I realize it may be a tad absurd to question the centrality of prediction, especially given the context of these posts, so I appreciate the judicious responses + links.

Many of the discussions on this site deal in subjects \ frameworks of which I am largely ignorant, so I am here to learn (and have fun). Looking forward to reading your thoughts in the future : )

This post was persuasively and efficiently articulated, so thank you. A handful of initial reactions:

  1. You seem to have anticipated this response. The definition you begin with—truth as "accurate predictions about our experiences"—is fairly narrow. One could respond that what you identify here are the effects of truth (presumably? but maybe not necessarily), while truth is whatever knowledge enables us to make these predictions. In any case, it doesn't seem self-evident that truth is necessarily concerned with making predictions, and I wonder how much of

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3Gordon Seidoh Worley
Not much. You could choose some other kind of truth definition if you like. My goal was to use a deflationary definition of truth in order to avoid stumbling into philosophical mindfields, and because I'm not committed to metaphysical realism myself so I'd be dishonest if I used such a definition. I'd say that amounts to the same thing. There's some links in the post relevant to the case for this about Bayesianism and the predictive processing model of the brain. Maybe. "Purpose" is here a stand-in term for a whole category of things like what Heidegger called Sorge. Although not necessarily exhaustive, I wrote a post about this topic. I could see certain notions of belief and faith fitting in here. As I think I addressed a couple points up, yes and humans are in the implementation formed such that this is insufficient. Seeking truth starts at home, so to speak. :-)