Le 30-juin-05, à 12:57, chris peck a écrit :
> 'intuition is always like believing that the earth is flat.'(BM)
>
> I disagree. People believed the earth was flat because it looked flat,
> they didnt intuit this idea. Intuition is not just the absence of any
> doubt about a proposition, intuition is active not passive.
Well I can agree. My "earth is flat" was perhaps not a good example. I
just like it because it makes the pointing toward the idea of local
truth. Earth *is* flat locally.
> For many reasons I think that is wrong. Intuition is experience in
> action, it is functioning wisdom. It is refined and precise, and
> almost always right.
... always right locally. Don't take this as dismissing intuition. Of
course I relate intution and first person knowledge and Brouwer's
intutionism, and all this with some purpose in mind related to the main
points discussed here. We will recur again on all this.
> Im troubled by the extent to which counter intuitive ideas are
> embraced seemingly /because/ they are counter intuitive. It almost
> becomes the case that the more counter intuitive a hypothesis is, the
> more we trust it. Theoretical physics is testament to that surely?
Here I disagree. Surely modern physics makes many counter intuitive,
but if you look at history you see that physicist take time to accept
them.
> What is counter intuitive about the DH is that it offers no
> understandable mechanism for its conclusion.
Like in classical logic. You can prove things without constructing them.
> This is what immediately strikes one when you read the DH for the
> first time, there is an air of supernatural about it. How can the
> eventual population of the universe - however reference classes are
> defined - ever have a backwardly causal relationship with a cataclysm
> today?
But that was not the goal. Accepting the premisses and the
reasoning-ways you get the conclusions, even if you don't see the
"causal" links.
<snip>
> Furthermore, im sure that your expressed belief in the truth of the DH
> doesnt /actually/ interfere with your day to day routine.
As I said I find the DH correct, I just don't buy its hypotheses (nor
to be sure the idea of absolute self-sampling among humans, why not
bacteria).
> You argue with folk like me, rather than build bunkers in preparation
> for the apocalypse. Why?
Here I totally differ from "Leslie". Would I bought the DH (reasoning +
premisses), I would definitely not build a bunker. The "beauty" of the
DH argument, is that, as you told yourself, he does not refer to
"causality" or "concrete reasons", so that if DH is correct there is
absolutely no point in trying to build a bunker to prevent it. If the
humans solve all "human problems and prevent all risk of apocalypse, or
build bunker for all citizens" then the DH entails we will all die for
an unknown reason. But as I said the DH premisses do not make sense for
me.
> This is quite obvious from the ease with which counter intuitive
> conclusions can be derived from baysean reasoning in conjunction with
> 1rst person perspectives generally.
I agree. In particular Leslie error (imo) is to mix 1 and 3 person
reasoning in a non genuine way.
> Anyway Im arguing more than I wanted to about all this. I ought to go
> and download one of your papers.
If you read the SANE paper I would like to know if you follow the UDA
(the Universal Dovetailer Argument) which shows that IF the comp
hypothesis is true THEN physics is (in a constructive sense) a branch
of computer science. Take it easy and don't hesitate to make comments
for any step of the reasoning. Some on this list agrees physicality
could be secondary and could or should emerge from some relative or
absolute measure on the set of "Observer-Moments". We disagree on what
are exactly those OMs, or about the way to analyze the "measure", etc.
As you see we dig deep: the primitive nature of nature is really where
Aristotle opposed himself against Plato, and since 2300 years most
follows Aristotle.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
Received on Fri Jul 01 2005 - 09:56:16 PDT