Dogmatic Skepticism

[@KaneB]

Skepticism vs inference to the best explanation: kzbin.info/www/bejne/opmcZKNjgpxnmtE Boltzmann brains: kzbin.info/www/bejne/q5-alpyCgNyohpI The simulation hypothesis: kzbin.info/www/bejne/fYGXiKyeptCIiJI

[@logosdev]

Thank you :]

[@HerrEinzige]

It seems like the common sense hypothesis is that we don't need to like and comment on the video since the views outweigh the likes and comments. So clearly by liking and commenting I am going against the common sense hypothesis.

[@f1urps]

Yeah, the principle of indifference is just a straightforward misuse of probabilities. I am sympathetic to the dogmatic skeptic's point, however. I don't think you can make a rigorous argument for this, but when I think about skepticism, and all the infinite myriad of assumptions it exposes that underlie our everyday thinking, I can't help but feel an intuitive sense that it would be a miracle if we happened to be correct about it all.

[@strangerperson1823]

These videos are so important. Thank you for your work

[@S3rios]

I don't think you need to assign an unspecified credence in order to get suspension of judgement; I reject the idea that a credence of 50% is what "suspension of judgement" actually means. If someone roles a die and I assume the die is fair, I'm going to suspend judgement on what the actual result will be since all of them seem equally likely. If asked I will say that it's probably not going to be 4, but I can also say the same for every other number, and assuming only one of them will turn out to be true, then it seems right that, given indifference, I should just suspend judgement on which one it will be. I think the point is also illustrated with the pragmatic example. It's not that you have a fork and your map tells you one of them is false, it's that you come to an infinitely large set of diverging paths, none of which are more likely to lead you home than any other. And so, isn't it completely rational to arbitrarily pick the path you like more? It is probably false, given all the other paths, but it's no more likely to be false than any of the other paths were, and you have to pick one.

[@triffnix]

any engagement at all is helpful, so here you go :)

[@KaneB]

Thanks!

[@veganphilosopher1975]

Great high level overview with examples that are relevant to philosophical touch points that are all too common

[@tudornaconecinii3609]

40:00 I wouldn't say "all we did was change the description of outcomes". That is directly contingent on the probabilities assigned.

[@tudornaconecinii3609]

To detail this a bit, this is only a paradox if you take one statement to be P(Person in Britain)=1/3 and the other to be P(Person in Britain)=1/2. But that's not what's going on. What's going on is in the first case we have P(Person in Britain | 3 possible locations)=1/3 and in the second case we have P(Person in Britain | 2 possible locations)=1/2. Which could still be a bad way to pick your priors, and I'm not necessarily defending the principle of indifference; but this isn't trivially contradictory.

[@KaneB]

@@tudornaconecinii3609 I get why this isn't trivially contradictory, but I'm not sure how this resolves the paradox. Because now the question is: are there two possible locations or three possible locations? -- and the point is that in this case, there doesn't seem to be any fact of the matter. So we're still left unable to assign a determinate probability to the proposition that the person is in Britain.

[@tudornaconecinii3609]

@@KaneB Yeah, basically we have two levels; on the object level we are indifferent between Britain and n-1 other options, which outputs 1/n probability via principle of indifference; on the meta level we *don't know what n is* , and that's where we get stuck. I guess you can look at the principle of indifference as a function that only works within a bounded domain. So you're basically expressing "X is equiprobable to be true among all the options I AM aware of" and you literally can't skip the second part. Reminds me of your recent Absolutely Everything video. That being said, I'm not sure this hurts dogmatic skepticism. While uncertainty about number of options makes you unable to have a determinate probability, it still allows you to choose an upper bound. For example, if you don't know how many locations there are, but you know *of* three locations that you can't distinguish between, then you know there are at *least* three locations, which means Britain is at *most* 33% probable, regardless of the number of locations.

[@islaymmm]

Isn't the probability of the person being in either Ireland or Great Britain conditional on them being in the British isles? If so the probability of the person being in France would be P(F) = 1 - P(B), where P(B) = P(I ∪ GB), and P(I) = P(B) - P(GB | B), and P(GB) = P(B) - P(I | B) in both cases. And I think the probability of the person being in Ireland is 1/4 assuming the principle of indifference. But even purely linguistically I think the example is equivocating on the word France, because when comparing the probabilities concerning countries France is understood as a country, but when you "partition the outcomes differently" it's understood as a geographical location. Not only do you partition the outcomes differently you move to a different layer of conceptual analysis, from country to geographical location. And it happens that country supervenes on geographical location which can mess up how you assign probabilities. In the case of sceptic scenarios versus the CSH, 'before' you appeal to any particular sceptic scenario you have to doubt the CSH. This is analogous to the fact that you have to be in the British isles 'before' you can be in any part of it, so the probability of a particular sceptic scenario being true is conditional on there being at least one sceptic scenario that's true, or in other words, the CSH being false. So the number of sceptic scenarios doesn't seem to affect the probability of the CSH being false...?

[@tudornaconecinii3609]

@@islaymmm "So the number of sceptic scenarios doesn't seem to affect the probability of the CSH being false...?" I'm mostly viewing probability here as mental state of uncertainty rather than density of world distributions, so the number of (necessarily equiprobable; if a particular skeptical scenario has a lower prior for you than CSH then that's that) skeptical scenarios matters insofar as it actually updates your priors. You go from judging "amongst A, B, C, and others" to "amongst A, B, C, D, and others" and it was never clear to you how much "others" as a category is eating from your probability density. It's sort of like you're searching Earth for black swans, and you have a certain prior for whether you're likely to find any, and when you learn new information about how much landmass Earth has, you update your prior up.

[@martinbennett2228]

I found myself wondering what is this 'Common Sense Hypothesis'? Whose hypothesis is it? How is it defined? Why is there only one common sense hypothesis and why not a myriad of 'common sense' hypotheses? Then you did bring this up later and discuss it, at least in part. Even so there is too much that is undefined and unquantified. Probabilities do not apply: take your die example, without knowing that the die is not loaded you do not even know if it will not stand on one corner, nor whether it might disintegrate into dust. Of course you can put in assumptions that the die is not loaded, but that is the point: there have to be underlying assumptions.

[@BennettAustin7]

There have to be assumptions or infinitism :)

[@wireless849]

Thanks

[@KaneB]

Thank you!

[@BlueberryEnjoyer]

I enjoy your videos. Thanks.

[@jonathanmitchell8698]

What if you extend the dogmatic skeptic's skepticism to their internal world? If you can only hold one skeptical hypothesis in mind at a time, aren't you relying on a common sense belief about your previous judgements about other skeptical hypotheses (i.e. that the world as you experience it can be fully explained by those hypotheses)?

[@SmashandGrab567]

Love the videos Kane. Keep it up.

[@KaneB]

Thank you!

[@Moley1Moleo]

Even if we accept the principle of indifference, it is worth noting that we aren't totally without information. For instance, I do not repeatedly notice computer-code-like bugs in everyday interactions. I am clearly not in a very poorly programmed simulation. Humans are relatiely intelligent, and I'd presuppose that this is quite difficult to simulate (either for myself, or for the many other simulated/matrix people). I also note that I'm unsure if there are powerful angels and demons that help and hinder us invisibly. So both are 50% likely. However, I don't obviously notice one winning over the other, so that might be close to a 50% chance of neither, and a 50% chance of both, but their efforts cancle out. But if they cancel out, then Decarte's demon might be counteracted by Moleo's Angel, who will give me some semblance of experiencing reality. Now, you might protest that I cannot know the factors that help push me in these directions. Well, if we don't know that these assumptions I've made are fair, then in the absence of evidence we should give them about 50% credence, so maybe the specified suspension skeptic can assert these buttresses to bolster the middleground, or maybe they cant, and both will seem roughly equally plausible.

[@weareone1575]

I’m not convinced that choosing CSH as a belief that is pragmatically useful is denying the truth necessarily or picking the wrong path for the sake of comfort. It really depends on why you choose to believe things. If you believe a statement because it actually seems true or you believe a statement because it seems useful to you (or to even try out different theories and seeing how they change your experience). One can see two kinds of belief here, but to distinguish them you could clarify that there is a difference between believing in the epistemic truth of a statement and acting on the basis of a particular assumption. The former is dubious, while the latter is just something for which one can gain empirical evidence by maintaining the theory and going about your every day life. This generalizes to any theories I think. One has to consider the psychological effect that any theory has on a person’s mind. If in practice believing a theory drove a person insane, how could one expect an individual to hold that theory.

[@kennethconnally4356]

The lost-in-the-woods analogy interests me. It seems like, even given 100 paths, when we have no reason to think one is more likely to lead out of the woods than the others, it's reasonable to choose the pleasant, sunny path. But we shouldn't *believe* that this path will be the one to lead out of the woods; we should suspend judgment. If choosing a path in the analogy = believing a hypothesis in the philosophical context, then what the skeptic is doing would be just sitting down in the woods, not following any of the paths. Clearly this would be a poor choice if you're trying to get out of the woods, so the analogy seems to favor the anti-skeptic. But *can* we just choose to believe something for a reason we're conscious is unrelated to its truth-value, for instance because it would be pleasant to believe it? I'm conscious that I would be happier during the next 7 months or so if I firmly believed the 2024 US election were going to be won by my preferred candidate, and so long as I don't make a giant bet on the outcome I don't see a pragmatic downside to holding that belief. Yet I find that I can't believe it just because it would make me happier to do so.

[@lbjvg]

A dismissive “Kantian” view of skepticism: treat all skeptical scenarios as noumena. I live in the world of phenomena and have no access to noumena. The noumena could be any skeptical world, it is unknowable anyway. All that matters is the phenomenal world.

[@WhatAMagician]

Any time philosophers start using math, I use my common sense to dismiss whatever is being discussed.

[@horsymandias-ur]

Would love to hear the thoughts of someone like David Deutsch on this

[@bigol7169]

Hey Kane, would you recommend starting philosophy with original old texts like Plato, or secondary synopses like 'A History of Philosophy' or 'Philosophy 1' by Grayling?

[@KaneB]

I think it's better to begin with general introductions, because a lot of texts in philosophy are easy to misunderstand if you don't have some background knowledge of the context.

[@bigol7169]

@@KaneB thanks, I think that's very sensible!

[@codalune]

I don’t understand why we must assume a 50% chance of csh in order to suspend judgement about it. That doesn’t apply to anything else we suspend judgement about.

[@MatthewMcVeagh]

I'm a sceptic of the 'suspending' kind, and I don't understand the idea of assigning any numerical probability levels to conceivable possibilities. It makes no sense. It makes sense with dice rolls, because we have reasons to take it that there are particular definite probability levels with those. In what sense could the 'common sense' view and a brains in vats view be 50% each? How does that measurement happen? It's absolute nonsense. So a lot of this talk was exploring a nonsensical blind alley, and only towards the end did a more recognisable sceptical position come into play. The common sense view is not common sense by the way.

[@Pirroli]

"The world is at least many thousands of years old" Young Earth creationists: hahaha... No!

[@StatelessLiberty]

It seems obvious to me that multiplying skeptical hypotheses can’t increase their probability. If you ask for the probability I had breakfast this morning, you can’t make this probability arbitrarily close to 1 by listing all the ways I could have had breakfast.

[@ashnur]

the brain in a vat would never, under no circumstances, have the same sort of internal experience as we do and assuming it would just means we literally ignore the same kind of information that in the first place yields this idea so just to be clear, I am not saying you shouldn't be a skeptic. Sure, it could be that what is is very different from what we think is. But if you base your assumption on some information, it is not meaningful to only base it on a superficial understanding of it. basically, I am taking issue with the example, not the idea the example serves.

[@waterfallfaerie]

As far as I can tell, the brain in a vat hypothesis is based specifically on the fact that the brain cannot actually tell the difference between "authentic" stimuli that come from a physical world and "artificial" stimuli that come from pulses of electricity (whether from inside or outside of the brain). The simplest example comes from the evidence that in a mammal having a visual dream, the visual cortices are activated in the same way they would be when they open their eyes (assuming they are sighted and not totally blind). I may be simply misunderstanding what you mean, but in what way would that internal experience of a simulated reality differ from signals that result from a real physical world? Could you also explain what information is being ignored? (I genuinely don't know what you mean here, since all I know is that the whole point is that electrical signals are the basis of your experience and so recreating those signals through other means would necessarily yield the same result)

[@ashnur]

@@waterfallfaerie The brain can't tell anything. The person can. I know that people can mess with the perception through stimulating or suppressing signals in the brain, but this also applies to a lot of other parts of the body.

[@waterfallfaerie]

@@ashnur I just want to understand what exactly you mean by "the person can tell" when the brain is the source of experience for a person as far as science can tell. Without a brain, there is no "experience" or "personhood" and so I am curious as to where in that equation is there room for a person's understanding that is separate from signaling in the brain. (I'm again asking seriously as I am genuinely unable to understand how the brain's signaling can be differentiated from the person's experience such that a person could tell where an electrical signal originated from) I wouldn't use the words "mess with perception" as there is no categorical difference between the signals created by actually seeing a cat and having those exact signals replicated through machinery that is connected to the optic nerve-furthermore, if we are brains in a vat, then all of our experiences would be as being brains in a vat and in that case it may be relevant to ask how would such a brain know what "real" perception is since it has potentially never had sensory organs through which to perceive. If you have good evidence to suggest that a person's experience and perception is not entirely generated and controlled by brain tissue which is not privy to the outside world and only has access to it through electrical signals sent by sensory organs or generated within the brain, then I absolutely want to learn about that evidence because it would change my mind.

[@ashnur]

@@waterfallfaerie "the brain is the source of the experience" is exactly the statement I doubt here. I know no evidence for this, sounds like typical popsci reductionalism. Without the brain there is no experience, sure. Without the blood, without the rest of the nervous system, without the lymphatic system, without bones, without muscles, without the external world there is no "experience" either, nor any "personhood" so I am curious as to where in that equation there is room for a person's understanding that is separate from signaling in the blood, the nervous system, the lymphatic system, the bones, the muscles and the external world? I'm asking seriously, as I am genuinely unable to understand how the blood's circulation, the nervous system's signaling, the lymphathic system's circulation, the bones protection and support, the muscles' movement can be differentiated from the person's experience such that a person could tell where an electrical signal is originated from. Just because you reduce things, doesn't mean that reduction is valid. It's very easy to state such nonsense as "those exact signals replicated through machinery" but this formulation misses the simple point that seeing the same cat the same way twice will not create the same exact signal already. And even if I grant you that you could re-create them somehow, something that hasn't been proven afaik, it would still miss all the other signals that happen at the same time. So you would have to replicate not just the visual signals, but the whole experience. And then this discussion will be about how much you have to simulate to completely fool everyone, all the time. And yes, if the brain is in the vat then the brain is in the vat. Stating tautologies will not actually prove anything. My evidence is that I pay close attention to my perception. This is the same thing as with determinists. You posit a theory that is constructed to be undeniable because any evidence could be just simulation by your theory. I call these kinds of theories mental traps because once you subscribe to it, there is no out, everything will be immediately explained by the same simple idea. The reason I reject it is mostly that given the complexity of the situation, the simplest explanation is that our whole experience is needed to maintain the fragile and staggered experience of consciousness. If it would be so easy to simulate this, it's questionable for me why it requires such a sophisticated fakery in the first place. Taking the real world as it is seems a more straightforward, less convoluted explanation. I don't think I can tell you - a nonbeliever in reality - that would convince you of reality. Same as with nonbelievers of free will, or believers in gods.

[@rebeccar25]

Potential dream comment

[@sleepingduty2987]

this is engagement.

[@darrellee8194]

Why do skeptics believe in the principle of indifference?

[@OBGynKenobi]

"The world is at least MANY THOUSANDS of years old??" I'm very sceptical about that one.

[@HudBug]

it is pretty common to be christian.

[@siddhartacrowley8759]

​@@HudBug Christian =/= Creationist

[@animore8626]

Key being "at least." Of course, scientific consensus pushes us into the billions range. Point is just that common sense tells us that the world is much older than, say, five minutes.

[@sjmurphysj39]

Comment for engagement

[@InventiveHarvest]

Credence is a measurement of level of belief. Credence is not justification for a belief. To say that one has a credence of over 50% in a belief and therefore they should believe it is a vicious circle. Justification is a reason for credence, not the other way around. When determining what explanation best fits the data, we have to take the data as given. The cover of the novel, The Wizard of Oz, attributes its writing to Frank Baum. Now, it is possible that an evil demon wrote the Wizard of Oz using an alias of Frank Baum. Nothing about the cover implies an evil demon though. The cover implies that it was written by Frank Baum. We have to take this as a given if our intent is to explain the data. There is evidence that Frank Baum wrote the book and there is not evidence that a demon wrote the book; even though the end result would look the same. The evil demon author hypothesis actually ignores the data, which says that the book was written by Baum. Throwing more and more baseless hypothesis at a problem in no way decreases my credence in the hypothesis that listens to the data. As the video points out, there are mathematical problems with assigning probabilities to credence. If I am certain of something, it's fine to assign a 1 to it, or a 0 of I am certain that it is false. It's the middle part of uncertainty that has the problems. Unspecified credence is a good argument for skepticism, but I have a response. I can use an inexact ranking for credence. While there is no fact of the matter on exactly how much credence one should give to CSH over BIV, one can say that credence in justified hypothesis should be greater than credence in hypothesis that ignore evidence. How this works in regards to examples in the video is as follows. I am indifferent in believing whether Verity is in France, Brittain, or Ireland and I am also indifferent in believing whether Verity is in France or the Isles. All of these hypothesis have the same ranking, but I don't know what the actual value is. If I had some evidence about the matter, like the distribution of times Verity went to France and the other location(s), then I could rank one of the outcomes higher in credence.

[@danwylie-sears1134]

There's whether the CSH is true, and then there are questions about the ultimate nature of reality. There is an external world. I know there is, because _I_ am utterly incapable of making up all this stuff I perceive. Maybe Brahman is Atman, and there's some sense in which the ultimate nature of the external world is unified with the ultimate nature of selfhood. But that doesn't undermine CSH, because Atman isn't _me,_ even if it's the underlying reality that makes it possible for me to be a self. Likewise, maybe the ultimate nature of the external world is that it's virtual from some perspective. But that doesn't stop it from being the external world, because it's still external to _me_ even if the true basis of physics is that there's a brain in a vat being fed signals from a computer. The whole thing about probabilities is incoherent. If we don't know anything that would enable us to assign a probability to P, and we don't know anything that would enable us to assign a probability Q, that doesn't mean that P and Q have equal probabilities. Maybe they aren't even propositions. Maybe they're expressions of emotion that are phrased to sound like propositions, but if we understood them better we would figure out that they're just expressions of emotion. Why waste the majority of the video on putative probabilities based only on our inability to assign probabilities?

[@KaneB]

The CSH commits to much more than just “there is an external world”, though: in addition, it makes a number of claims about what the external world is like. So even if we had a watertight argument for the conclusion that there is an external world, I don't think this would do much to defeat skepticism as defined here. >> Why waste the majority of the video on putative probabilities based only on our inability to assign probabilities? Because I'm explaining an argument given by somebody else, and as far as I can tell, this is an essential part of his argument… and I do spend a lot of that time criticising this assumption…

[@danwylie-sears1134]

@@KaneBAh, you do indeed spend that time. I suspect that I clicked to turn captions on partway through, and accidentally jumped to near the end of the video. So I appreciate your reply, without which I wouldn't have realized that the middle of the video was there. Our experience fully warrants (a), (b), (c), and (e). What we don't know is whether there's some additional complexity about the fundamental nature of reality. A simulation of a universe that's 13.7 billion years old, and includes all the detail we have about the past, is ipso facto a simulation of a world that's many thousands of years old, even if those are years of simulated time rather than of fundamental-reality time. Other minds that exist in a Matrix-type world still are other minds. I'm comfortable getting by without any certainty of (d). If the actual universe is a virtual universe that Descartes's demon simulates in order to provide all our experiences, that just means that a particular virtual universe is an actual universe. And that's good enough, even if DD is manipulating us.

[@osakagrindset]

Assumption: assume time is continuous. Let time t be in the interval from [0,1] Hypothesis 0; we experience reality directly Hypothesis 0 + delta; we experience reality directly but delayed by some infintessimal amount of time delta ... repeat Hypothesis 1: We experience reality directly except delayed by 1 second Here we have an infinite amount of equally credible hypotheses that i must take into account as a skeptic. But i will conclude as a dogmatic direct realist.

[@andreit3291]

bump

[@andreasvox8068]

Philosophers really shouldn't be allowed to calculate probabilities.

[@HudBug]

“aLl hAVe EquaL ProBAbiLitIes!”

[@ostihpem]

Why?

[@andreasvox8068]

@@ostihpem because it leads to nonsense conclusions like this.Mathematicians worked very hard to identify the necessary foundations, and philosophers never provide the sigma algebra or the measure that they'd need.

[@KaneB]

Who's going to stop us?

[@andreasvox8068]

@@KaneB common sense should 😀 It's not possible to assign consistent probabilities to arbitrary systems of sets,let alone doubtable constructs like "all possible worlds"

[@andreyrussian2480]

Skepticism is not suspension of judgement but suspension of opinion. It means that skepticism not for supporting of common picture of reality but for equalizing every picture of reality.

[@HudBug]

I have just those kinds of experiences that i would have had CSH been true or that i would have had the BIV been true? i don’t disagree. but “there is no empirical evidence that favours CSH over BIV, because my experiences would be indistinguishable *if* BIV were true.” however, *if* I had reason to believe BIV were true, then my experiences would not be indistinguishable between CSH over BIV, but I have no reason to believe BIV is true, or any other skeptical hypothetical. I’d first need to accept that the hypothesis is true, before it gave me reason to doubt CSH. It seems that there are simply no defeaters, and without any defeat, these seemings that my leg cramps, or that it’s raining outside my window, or that there is a larger ray of unsorted cards in front of me, etc. just will be accepted. uh oh, i think i’m becoming a phenomenal conservative, of some sort.

[@HudBug]

I think I forgot what your objections against phenomenal conservatives even was. Let me check real quick.

[@KaneB]

>> if I had reason to believe BIV were true, then my experiences would not be indistinguishable between CSH over BIV I disagree; it depends on what the reasons to believe BIV are. There are already positive arguments for some skeptical hypotheses: both the simulation hypothesis and the Boltzmann brain hypothesis, for instance. Yet in both cases, the hypotheses are empirically equivalent to CSH. Maybe you don't find the arguments for those hypotheses convincing. But I don't see how we can rule out the possibility of a convincing argument along those lines.

[@HudBug]

thank you for the correction. I suppose i’ll revise my statements: Not all skeptical hypothesis are unsupported, expect those for which evidence not-given, like BIV (i have not seen any arguments made for such a position). also, yeah, the simulation hypothesis is not all that convincing given the arguments for it. if id have to guess why so many have accepted or argued for it, a lot of it seems to be like those pretty bad arguments for God, in the sense the simulation hypothesis really appeals to our theistic or religious dispositions that were evolved. as for the Boltzmann brain hypothesis, i’d have to look into the arguments. also, given all the work that you have done and will do, i will definitely become a patron member once i get my job in electrical, which is likely pretty soon.

[@RealAICCl]

Yea i dont believe you