unknowable / necessarily axiomatic questions

[ajschumacher]

1. Who? (consciousness; "I think, therefore I am." - but not just existence; the phenomenon of consciousness, qualia, etc. is wild... the unanswerable here is maybe more like "what is consciousness?")
2. When? (are memories of real things in the past, or implanted? is there some "demon" associated with this? not quite Descartes' demon, not Maxwell's demon... also: what even is "time"?)
3. Where? (in a physical world? or brains in a jar? this is Descartes' demon; see also Boltzmann brain)
4. What? (is physical stuff? we never "experience it directly"... how can we truly know it?)
5. Will? (induction; will the sun rise tomorrow? etc.)
6. Why? ("prime mover" etc.)
7. How? (do we go on? this is mostly a joke, but maybe a fine segue to concerns of everyday life that depend on many assumptions - see also #186 "axiomatic thinking")

"epistemic optimism (the view that science tends to succeed in revealing what the world is like and that there are good reasons to take theories to be true or truthlike)" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pessimistic_induction

Also somewhere, maybe related to "Who?", fit in belief in things that can't be verified experimentally, like believing that other people also have consciousness. Oh! Could this be "Which?" as in "Which things do we believe in without evidence?"

[ajschumacher]

see also: #260

[ajschumacher]

"Faith is the foundation on which all else rests; it is the root of all knowledge."

Tolstoy, August 28 entry of A Calendar of Wisdom, page 253

also I sometimes think of this topic as "7 questions" (seven questions)

[ajschumacher]

ref #186

[ajschumacher]

Fear of Knowledge: Against Relativism and Constructivism Paul Boghossian https://oxford.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199287185.001.0001/acprof-9780199287185

[ajschumacher]

"Hume's general point [in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding], later referred to as the problem of induction, was that we have no way of knowing experience is a guide for valid conclusions about the future because if we did, that claim could be based only on past experience." (page 35, Bernoulli's Paradox)

[ajschumacher]

"Whether Bayes himself believed he had disproved Hume we have no way of knowing. Some historians such as Stephen Stigler at the University of Chicago have suggested that since Bayes did not find the counterexample sufficiently convincing because it relied on some assumptions he could not justify, he delayed publishing his results. When presenting Bayes's results to the world, Price did not shy away from emphasizing their philosophical and religious significance. Contemporary reprints of the essay show Price intended the title to be “A Method of Calculating the Exact Probability of All Conclusions founded on Induction.” In his publication, he added this preamble: “The purpose I mean is, to shew what reason we have for believing that there are in the constitution of things fixt laws according to which things happen, and that, therefore, the frame of the world must be the effect of the wisdom and power of an intelligent cause; and thus to confirm the argument taken from final causes for the existence of the Deity.” That is, somewhere in the calculation of probabilities for Bayes's rule, Price thought he saw evidence for God." (page 41, Bernoulli's Paradox)

[ajschumacher]

ex nihilo nil https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nothing_comes_from_nothing

[ajschumacher]

"The results of experiments, particularly surprising or controversial ones, can be trusted noly if the experiments are known to be sound; however, as is often the case, an experiment is known to be sound only if it produces the results we expect. So it would seem that no experiment can ever convince us of something surprising. This situation was anticipated by the ancient Greek philosopher Sextus Empiricus. In a skepticism of induction that predated David Hume's by 1,500 years, he wrote: “If they shall judge the intellects by the senses, and the senses by the intellect, this involves circular reasoning inasmuch as it is required that the intellects should be judged first in order that the sense may be judged, and the senses be first scrutinized in order that the intellects may be tested [hence] we possess no means by which to judge objects.”" (page 301, Bernoulli's Fallacy)

[ajschumacher]

"To accept the dignity of another person is an axiom."

Tolstoy, in his "Calendar of Wisdom" book, April 16 entry, page 119 I think.

(also in #186)

[ajschumacher]

"When a person tries to apply his intellect to the question “Why do I exist in this world?” he becomes dizzy. The human intellect cannot find the answers to such questions." (July 29, Tolstoy)

[ajschumacher]

"It is dangerous to disseminate the idea that our life is purely the product of material forces and that it depends entirely on these forces." (August 22, Tolstoy)

[ajschumacher]

"Faith is the foundation on which all else rests; it is the root of all knowledge." (August 28, Tolstoy)

[ajschumacher]

"The problem is that our brains aren't wired to think about it [randomness]. Instead, we are built to look for patterns in sights, sounds, interactions, and events in the world. This mechanism is so ingrained that we see patterns even when they aren't there. There is a subtle reason for this: We can store patterns and conclusions in our heads, but we cannot store randomness itself. Randomness is a concept that defies categorization; by definition, it comes out of nowhere and can't be anticipated. While we intellectually accept that it exists, our brains can't completely grasp it, so it has less impact on our consciousness than things we can see, measure, and categorize." (page 155)

in Creativity, Inc.

[ajschumacher]

AI effect (moving goalposts): we mean consciousness

[ajschumacher]

Nietzsche:

'Faith' means not wanting to know what is true.

quoted in The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Caplan (page 15)

[ajschumacher]

"Yet a standard debating tactic of creation scientists is to insist that "evolutionary theory, along with its bedfellow, secular humanism, is really a religion."" (The Myth of the Rational Voter, by Caplan page 186; quote is Shermer 2002 page 143)

[ajschumacher]

illusion of explanatory depth

[ajschumacher]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auto-da-f%C3%A9

[ajschumacher]

consciousness #373