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Münchhausen Trilemma
- 9wzYQbTYsAIc 7y agoSo in short: if you are being truly logical, every statement of fact is just a statement of belief, it seems.
- briefcomment 7y agoYes. Another way of looking at it is that there are no first principles.
- KingMachiavelli 7y agoAnd a similar concept to this is that given a set of accepted axioms, two parties should always come to the same conclusion if both parties are behaving rationally. All debates are at best disagreements of accepted premises and definitions. It's a important concept to remember for anyone who's argumentative/legalistic since understanding the oppossing sides definitions and desired conclusion is often the cause for disagreement. If there are no first principles, then there are no definitive last principles.
- scarejunba 7y agoAn entertaining related concept https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aumann%27s_agreement_theorem Also, in some ideal sense, since we attain consciousness as pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa, all that follows is the result of sense information on the network. The concept of individuality is weak. Two pure minds, fully rational and capable of honest communication, can be different by having different sense information, but if they are able to communicate with each other they should, in time, be identical. i.e. once I have given you everything I know completely and you have given me everything you know completely, we are not distinct, you and I are the same. A full mind meld. We can't do this for all sorts of reasons, but two AGIs truly meeting may, which means that there is a sort of greyness to this true meeting of AGIs: by meeting they achieve unity. All AGIs behaving in this manner then become the same purely by meeting. Interesting.
- rocqua 7y agoThis makes total sense, because of the assumption of common priors. Drop that assumption, and fully rational people can indeed agree to disagree. This is a large part of why rational people can look at the same evidence, and come to different conclusions.
- Dylan16807 7y ago> This makes total sense, because of the assumption of common priors. That's the Wiki article, yes. But scarejunba is going past that, to something more fundamental. If you have "pure minds untainted by experience, tabula rasa", then you remove the issue of priors. No longer is there any matrix of prejudices that have to agree. You start with observations about the world and logic, and nothing else, and everyone ends up in agreement. (To an extent you might bootstrap with priors, but over time you'd use observations and logic to replace them, especially when they disagree with someone else you're debating.)
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- smallnamespace 7y agoThis seems unworkable because it ignores the role instincts have in living things, which are prior beliefs about the world put immediately into action. For example, an infant has an instinct to breathe right after birth. Is that a belief or an action? It’s both—a strategy to survive in the world encoded in genes attached to an implicit belief. An infant that tries to breathe two minutes later would suffer hypoxia and brain damage, while one that tries sooner will choke. There is no pure tabula rasa untainted by priors, as soon as you acknowledge minds are embedded in bodies shaped by millions of years of evolution and steeped in survival tactics, and what are tactics except a set of useful priors about good actions?
- Dylan16807 7y agoThings your body does don't have to be integrated into the priors you use when performing logic. But "You need to breathe." and things like that would be the easiest priors to replace with observational data.
- psychoslave 7y ago> Another way of looking at it is that there are no first principles. Is that part of the principles you adhere to? :)
- dntbnmpls 7y agoYep. It's like the God problem. If God created the universe, then who created God? If another God created God, then who created that God. Ad infinitum. Or you can just ignore the exhausting issue altogether by claiming it is axiomatic. It's the same with any logical statement. You could go all the way up to the premises and question that and when given a proof of the premises, then you can question the premises of the "proof of the premises". Ad infinitum. Or you just take the axiomatic approach. I think most of life is lived axiomatically.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoThis is correct, but a lot of people derive and indefensible conclusion from it. The real insight is that any belief in an axiom is an exercise in faith. A scientist who fails to recognise the role of faith in their beliefs commits the same error as a religious person who fails to recognise the role of faith in their beliefs.
- mannykannot 7y agoThis is a common argument, and it is a form of argument by dictionary definition, which are seldom informative, and most often used to avoid the issues. While individual scientists may hold beliefs that go beyond scientific premises, the significant difference between scientific and religious belief is that in the former case, all axioms are considered to be defeasible - and they quite often are overthrown.
- AmericanChopper 7y agoThe foundational axioms of scientific practice are generally not considered to be defeasible at all. The axioms of any particular theory or field may also be considered entirely beyond reproach. This is also not a semantic argument at all. It is strictly a logical one.
- specialist 7y agoPlease humor me. Trying to articulate a half-baked notion. A close relative went from marine biologist to creationist (et al), and I've been struggling to accept the change. My Calvinist self still doesn't understand Evangelic system of faith. -- Given Structure + Process => Outcomes: Scientist: Faith in processes, eg scientific method. Belief is based on reproducibility. Evangelical: Faith in outcomes. The book (authority) is used to rationalize (justify) proclamations of belief. To your point: Yes, both have "faith", but with different starting points and emphasis.
- SarikayaKomzin 7y agoIndeed. This is why it often seems like anything built up rationally can be tore down rationally. This leads some to the interesting (and perhaps terrifying) conclusion that narratives are more important and useful than rationalism. Example: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_de_Maistre “ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.” Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true.
- eb3c90 7y ago>“ According to Maistre, any attempt to justify government on rational grounds will only lead to unresolvable arguments about the legitimacy and expediency of any existing government and that this in turn will lead to violence and chaos.[23][24] As a result, Maistre argued that the legitimacy of government must be based on compelling, but non-rational grounds which its subjects must not be allowed to question.” > >Perhaps whatever is useful is oftentimes more important than what is true. There has been an ongoing debate in the UK about proportional representation and the first past the post system. It has not, as yet, lead to violence and chaos. So I think that the link Maistre identifies between questioning the status quo and chaos is not always true. Admittedly there is time and place for debate. You don't argue about the cars direction, when the driver is trying to concentrate in a dangerous situation.
- SarikayaKomzin 7y agoYeah. I shared that quote as an example of the “terrifying” conclusions this good lead one to, not necessarily because I though his reactionary stance was true (or useful, haha). But maybe the success of representative democracy is not based in rationalism but instead the mythology around individual liberty.
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- cwojno 7y ago100% this. Most people do NOT realize this when engaged in normal conversation nor while in philosophical debates.
- skrebbel 7y agoThat's just like, your opinion, man.
- abtinf 7y agoHumans require food and water to live. You might evade that fact as a mere belief, but you cannot escape the consequences of such an approach.
- normalnorm 7y agoWhat are the consequences? Have you ever experienced them yourself?
- guerrilla 7y agoNo, this is not the conclusion that analytic epistemology has come to. Have a look at coherentism, foundationalism and reliabalism for example. The view you describe is skepticism and is held by a very small minority of modern philosophers. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-coherence/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/justep-foundational/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/reliabilism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/skepticism/
- scarmig 7y agoCounterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things. People who're inclined to take that route are likely to avoid modern philosophy, so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers.
- guerrilla 7y agoOr you could take a look at the references and the corpus and see that there are strong arguments against it instead of just guessing with no data. Analytic philosophers don't tend to build things anyway. They focus more on answering specific questions. There are plenty of "continental" philosophers who still do and many in fact have no problem with this.
- paganel 7y agoYou're assuming "building things" will bring us closer to getting to know the world a little better (or its essence), that might be false. > so of course they would be a small minority of philosophers I'm not a philosopher myself but I found Heraclitus's writings (Democritus's, too) a lot more interesting than many philosophers' writings from the 20th century, in this field being more modern doesn't necessarily mean being better or knowing more.
- justin66 7y ago> Counterargument: skepticism is kind of boring compared to the other positions. There's just not much to build on if you flatly reject the ability to build things. Skepticism doesn't demand that you "reject the ability to do things." See Hume.
- xelxebar 7y ago> ... every statement of fact is just a statement of belief, it seems. Perhaps. The "just" part gets me thinking. There seems to be an important qualitative difference between prototypical statements of belief---e.g. I believe in the healing power of reiki---and prototypical statements of fact---e.g. This is a glass of water. While both of the above do contain elements of belief---namely, narratives about what things are in the world---they seem to operate quite differently in many respects. Belief-style statements tend to more overtly signal traits like social ingroup or self-identity. In particular, declaring belief in the power of reiki seems more likely to influence how others think and concieve of you as a person. I doubt that declaring the existence of a glass of water is likely to do the same. More generally, this line of thought makes tempts me to say that fact-like staments tend to have less social content than belief-style ones. Or, more susinctly, facts are a proper subset of beliefs. In the same way that 2D space differs wildly from 1000D space, despite the former being a subset of the latter, I think it ignores a lot to treat "facts" as "just beliefs." How a belief operates matters.
- jaw 7y agoI think that's a potentially misleading way of summarizing it. Facts are true beliefs; not all beliefs are true. The trilemma only implies that there's no way for me to step outside of my own head and know, beyond the possibility of error, that my beliefs are true. But they may still be true. (That applies recursively to the trilemma itself!) So if you dig far enough, how accurate our beliefs are is partly reliant on factors beyond our control: if our minds happen to be wired with bad axioms we may be unable to avoid inaccurate conclusions.
- wellpast 7y ago> But they may still be true. How? If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true. This statement has as much meaning as randomly uttered noise.
- close04 7y agoMoral and purely subjective beliefs aside, unless we're talking about a wave function collapse, observing (proving?) a belief does not change the truth value of the underlying point of discussion. So implicitly... it is what it is whether you confirm it to be true or not. Broken clock telling the right time twice a day and all that. Take "the Earth is round" belief. The Earth was round since before humans existed. Having or not having evidence to support this belief did not and does not alter the shape in any way. The Earth is still round. So this belief was always true (even if unbeknownst to anyone) regardless of who held it and whether they had any evidence to support it.
- gwd 7y ago> If beliefs have no way to be verified, what does it mean to say one still may be true. It may not be able to be verified, but it can often be falsified. Suppose I believe that all bridges are safe for me because there is a swarm of fairies following me around holding up the bridges. And suppose you believe that no bridges are safe between the hours of 2 and 3 am, because the gods have so decreed. And suppose we both come to a bridge at 2am. If I walk over the bridge and it collapses, it falsifies my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me, but it doesn't prove your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am. On the other hand, if I walk over the bridge and it doesn't collapse, it falsifies your belief that the gods have promised universal collapse for bridge-walking at 2am, but does not prove my belief that fairies will always hold up bridges for me. "All models are wrong, but some models are useful."
- dang 7y agoRelated from 2018: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043954 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17043954
- beaner 7y agoI don't think all axioms are "merely asserted rather than defended". For example, one axiom is the existence of existence, which cannot be denied, because any question, doubt, skepticism, reason, point, or imagined counterargument is something that exists and is within existence. Another is consciousness. To grasp that existence exists, or make any attempt to reason either way about the proof or truth of anything, is itself an expression of consciousness. Existence exists, and so does consciousness capable of conceiving that. Start there and work down.
- arketyp 7y agoYes, this is the lumine naturali of Decartes! The undoubtable doubt was presented and the rest is history. Needless to say it has been contended against, but the heritage of this line of reasoning as a foundation for epistemology cannot be disputed.
- fsargent 7y agoConsciousness can very easily be an illusion. Existence too. Ever tried doing science while dreaming?
- j88439h84 7y agoWhat's the next step after those?
- guscost 7y agoIsn’t a circular argument just an axiom with (unnecessary) extra parts?
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jimmySixDOF 7y agoIf you understand, things are just as they are; If you do not understand, things are just as they are. — Zen Proverb.
- zw123456 7y agoIt reminds me a bit of Godel's Incompleteness Theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor...
- danidiaz 7y agoPyrrhonism. n. An ancient philosophy, named for its inventor. It consisted of an absolute disbelief in everything but Pyrrhonism. Its modern professors have added that.—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil's Dictionary
- cryptica 7y agoWhere there are gaps in your own knowledge, truth becomes about trust and relevance. I don't know that e = mc^2 but I trust scientists that it is the case but it doesn't matter to me much either way; I would not participate in any argument about this subject because although my level of trust is strong, I personally have nothing at stake whether this fact is true or false (it is not relevant to me). People who have a huge ego tend to think that every fact they know is a crucial part of their personal identify; these people tend to avoid saying "I dont' know" because doing so would be an admission that their information sources (which they see as extensions of themselves) are not trustworthy and are therefore low value (which would bring down their own self-worth).
- psychoslave 7y agoWell, it doesn't matter to you if it's true, but at least if it's true that it sufficiently adequately models the world to allow all the technologies derived from it. Of course, most human don't care about it directly, but it impacts their live nonetheless.
- russellbeattie 7y agoGiven it took Whitehead and Russell 300 pages to logically prove that 1 + 1 = 2, I think we can all go ahead and assume any supposition stated in less detail is naturally flawed and incomplete, including this one.
- Rerarom 7y agoIn foundations of math that mathemati ians actually use (such as ZF), you don't need 300 pages to show 1+1=2.
- russellbeattie 7y agoLogically, that makes sense, but since this thread is about logic, not math, it doesn't. (Unless you're saying logic and math are the same, in which case I would need to see a rigorous proof in order to believe you.)
- Rerarom 7y agoThis is basically a simple theorem about graphs.
- psychoslave 7y agoIf you can demonstrate the possibility of proving any truth, you just proved it, you are done. If you can demonstrate the impossibility of proving any truth, then you just demonstrated that you can prove some truth, thus it is false that it is impossible to prove any truth. Finally, if you can neither disprove nor prove the impossibility of proving any truth, you just don't know whether it's possible or not; in which case the honest posture is agnosticism. Oh, and if you admit that an honest posture is desirable when pursuing truth, you just bootstrapped a ground that allows to growth (relative and sound) truth allied to virtue. That might not be as satisfying as "acquiring some absolute truth", but personally I feel that for my humble human capacities and needs, that's not too bad.
- maxfan8 7y agoThis argument is a classic example of the vicious circle principle [1]. The self-referential nature of this interesting argument makes it somewhat meaningless (from a logical perspective). [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicious_circle_principle https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vicious_circle_principle
- cryptonector 7y ago> The self-referential nature of this interesting argument Self-referential symbolic statements are at the core of Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
- hanche 7y agoYes, but that self-reference happens outside the formal language, not within it. Gödel encoded formal statements in the language as integers, and thus turned the question of provability into statements of arithmetic. If the formal system is powerful enough to let you reason about arithmetic, you can thus trick the system to be self-referential, but only via this mechanism external to the system itself.
- psychoslave 7y ago
- foobarbecue 7y agoNot to be confused with Munchhausen syndrome...
- klyrs 7y agoMathematicians peddle in absolute truths, under contract. The truths are not facts: they're logical fabric between axioms and conclusions. You can change the rules of logic, you can change your base axioms, but doing so only changes the set of reachable conclusions.
- downshun 7y agoA parallel in defining words. A word dictionary has to be self referential, or you need an ever increasing vocabulary, or just accept some axioms that don't require verification (you know what a word like cat is by some interaction escaping out of the context of word descriptions) Another parallel https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X8aWBcPVPMo we were computationally evolved to make sense of the world... and making sense is a computation
- mannykannot 7y agoOnce one accepts that no rational argument is more true than its axioms, this seems unremarkable.
- classified 7y agoThrough the thicket of your stacked negations I find it difficult to make out what it is that you intended to say. I guess nobody could deny that no thing isn't really nothing that doesn't fail to exist, don't you disagree?
- mannykannot 7y agoHa! I tried to resist saying that no-one should attempt parody without bearing in mind the caveat that one should avoid making the target look less deserving of it than one's counterpoint, but failed, no?
- classified 7y agoI was by no means my intention to make my counterpoint look less deserving of the same parody, and it seems I succeeded?
- antsoul 7y agoIn this article, Zizek brings the Munchhausen story to show how he differs from Nietzsche on deep philosophical grounds. https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-fall-that-makes-us-like-god-part-i/ https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/the-fall-that-makes-us-lik... It's been my mind for a while now, and I'm still not sure with whom I stand here. Roughly, Zizek says : Any kind of mental breakdown that changes you will be related to your subsconscious. Nietzsche : Lol, when you reach my level of psychosis, you really have to pull yourself out all by yourself.
- heinrichhartman 7y agoThe way that Mathematics and approaches this is, using the Axiomatic way. You can view this as a game: Let's make some assumtions / axioms, and see what we can build with it. The most popular axiom set is Zermelo-Fraenkel-style Set Theory [1], but there are other choices which have been explored. Note that, there a no claims about absolute truth or reality here. We just play a game in our minds. The most fundamental question about the game, that we can ask is "Is this game consistent". Goedel found out, somewhat unfortunately, we are not able to answer that question from within the game [2]. However, sofar no intrinsical inconsistencies (paradixies) have been found. Now, it turns out, that the ZF-Mathematics game is a very useful game, since it allows us to model certain aspects of reality. E.g. Newtons Mechanic, allows us to forecast how planets move in space. The Natural Sciences (Physics, Chem., Bio) and Engineering are essentially about how to model reality with mathematics. The way to do that is the empirical scientific method [3], where hypothesis are formed, experiments are designed and evidence is collected. So the question of "truth" does not really arise. It's just: (A) Mathematics is an interesting mind-game to play. (B) Mathematics has been used very successfully to model and predict our preceived reality. That's all you can ask for. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo–Fraenkel_set_theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zermelo–Fraenkel_set_theory [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theorems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gödel%27s_incompleteness_theor... [3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Empirical_evidence
- samirillian 7y agoYet the question of truth was indeed important to Godel, a lifelong Platonist. So it was the will to truth that brought us here in the first place Moreover, this tool-theory of truth that you proffer still runs on some concept of truthiness. All these system share a similar paradox to this trilemma: let's assume there is such a thing as truth, but the condition of that assumption seems to be the impossibility of proving it with any system produced by such a will to truth.
- heinrichhartman 7y agoIt may well be that the search for "truth" has brought us here. However, we found out that "truth" is always a relative. It has to be rooted in assumptions/axioms. So I would say, it runs on, good choices of axioms and the ability to perform logical deductions. Set Theory is an attempt to come up with axioms that are so simple that no-one who is not completely out of it's mind would doubt their "truth". This is stuff like: - There exists a set - Two sets are equal if all their elements are equal - We can form subsets from sets, by picking out elements The only exception is the axiom of choice, which is less intuitively evident, but a technical necessity to build and reason about infinite sets like the real numbers.
- classified 7y agoGottfried Benn once said, style is superior to truth because it carries proof of its existence in itself (other than truth which always requires external proof). For someone who wasn't a logician or a mathematician, I find this remarkably insightful.
- OliverJones 7y agoThanks to Karl Popper, the scientific method asks that hypotheses be falsifiable. When a scientist makes a claim, she then does everything she can think of to disprove it. Stage II clinical trials of novel drugs are like this. The hypothesis is "this stuff cures baldness and is otherwise harmless." The experiment is an elaborate attempt to disprove the claim, with enough subjects to avoid the small "n" effect and control-subject randomization to avoid the wishful-thinking effect. Science tries to avoid claims that things are true. "Not false" gets us a long way. That avoids the Münchhausen logical trap.
- jfengel 7y agoThere are problems with falsificationism, as well. You don't really reject theories based on a single falsifying data point. Sometimes you reject the data point as fake or misinterpreted. Sometimes you modify your theory and replace it, but it's unclear that that's different from the goalpost-moving of astrologers and homeopaths. Falsification is a good stake in the ground that allows scientists to work, but it's unclear if it's actually a step towards the epistemology represented by the Munchausen trilemma. Scientists have a notion that it allows them to work "toward" Truth-with-a-capital-T, a notion which both feels right and has produced high standards of living. Those may be better goals than Truth-with-a-capital-T, which may be unavailable.
- faeyanpiraat 7y agoThe whole discussion here is quite depressing.. in an enjoyable way.
- chasing 7y agoI'm going to stop paying my bills. We'll see how far this "demonstrate the impossibility of proving any truth" really goes.
- billpg 7y ago"You would never attempt to prove that 1+1=2, as 2 is defined as the value of 1+1."
- artsyca 7y agoY'all it's best to understand the universe for what it is an immense perpetual motion machine We often think of perpetual motion as set it and forget it once it's set in motion it continues forever but of course this isn't feasible Have you ever considered that a truly perpetual motion is one that never needs to be set in motion that always is in motion? This is precisely the bootstrapping argument in essence so a small measure of faith is needed We can rely on our perception to be reality for all intents and purposes and begin reasoning with base assumptions and not over analyze the starting conditions too much
- yamrzou 7y agoBelief does not necessarily come from provability. Wittgesnstein's On Certainty contains some interesting thoughts in this regard. Quoting a few extracts: "If you tried to doubt everything you would not get as far as doubting anything. The game of doubting itself presupposes certainty." "Giving grounds, however, justifying the evidence, comes to an end." "At the foundation of well-founded belief lies belief that is not founded." "The child learns to believe a host of things. I.e. it learns to act according to these beliefs. Bit by bit there forms a system of what is believed, and in that system some things stand unshakeably fast and some are more or less liable to shift. What stands fast does so, not because it is intrinsically obvious or convincing; it is rather held fast by what lies around it."