Here's another installment of rationality quotes. The usual rules apply:
- Please post all quotes separately, so that they can be upvoted or downvoted separately. (If they are strongly related, reply to your own comments. If strongly ordered, then go ahead and post them together.)
- Do not quote yourself.
- Do not quote from Less Wrong itself, Overcoming Bias, or HPMoR.
- No more than 5 quotes per person per monthly thread, please.
No, I don't think so. Bishop Berkeley, after all, wasn't entirely clueless and was quite familiar with the sensory input. But what Samuel Johnson actually had in mind is besides the point.
It seems to me that the requirement to list assumptions for basic sensory data (absent a strong prior as in e.g. "I swallowed a strong psychoactive ten minutes ago") is rather pointless. Yes, solipsism may be correct, or the universe might be a simulation the code of which is about to be changed, etc. but once you put into doubt the basic sensory reality around you (for example, a big stone in front of your foot) you will quickly be forced to assume it back or the substrate for your mind might not survive.
It's kinda like the off-switch problem -- I think it comes from Iain Banks' Culture novels. The Minds, the super-intelligent AIs, love to go off into virtual worlds and play with, say, architecture in a six-dimensional space with varying gravity. They find much more utility by staying in the virtual reality compared to the actual one. But -- their "bodies", the computing substrate is still in reality. And if someone flips the off-switch in reality while the Mind is being happy in the virtual world, well...
It's not clear to me why you think this. Repeating it every time is tiresome, sure, and so that's why the assumptions should be implicitly stated rather than explicitly stated, unless explicitly stating them helps in that situation.
But the central claim is that "all data is theory-laden," which is an important point. It applies to what we perceive &qu... (read more)