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There's a puzzle in philosophy, where a philosopher points to a bear and says, "That's a bear". Except it's only a life-size cardboard cutout of a bear. But beh
by cynicalkane 2y ago
There's a puzzle in philosophy, where a philosopher points to a bear and says, "That's a bear". Except it's only a life-size cardboard cutout of a bear. But behind the cutout is a real bear. Is the philosopher speaking the truth when he points and says there's a bear there?
Steve Jobs is appropriately highly praised, but by many people who don't know why he should be praised -- to them he's like a movie sort of figure, Elon Musk in his post-Twitter phase, a larger-than-life jerk who says smart words and allegedly does things. But Jobs actually is that sort of genius that a lot of wannabes pretend to be. So is he highly praised? Is the philosopher telling the truth when he points to the fake bear, having confused it for a real one but not knowing there's a real one behind it?
- lxgr 2y agoDoes the philosopher know that there’s a bear behind it? If not, it probably depends on your take on the Gettier problem :)
- defrost 2y agoThe modern take on that dilemma; What if it's a man hiding behind a bear cutout to appear less threatening?
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoVarious non falsified interpretations of quantum theory say there both is and isn’t a bear there until it is observed. So I say he’s right. And watch out, there’s a bear behind you.
- lxgr 2y agoI think most philosophers would be fine with treating "there is no bear there" and "the amplitude of the probability density function of a bear is negligibly low there" as the same statement for this discussion :) An entire bear spontaneously tunneling across a large distance or spontaneously forming out of vacuum fluctuations is really, really quite unlikely.
- dumbo-octopus 2y agoDon’t confuse the event with the distribution. An event always either has or hasn’t occurred, no further statement can be made. It’s only in bulk that one can talk about distributions. But in this contrived anecdote, there is only one observation, one event.
- lxgr 2y agoSome distributions are definitely relatively stable over time, so you can absolutely make predictive statements about the future given past observations. That's true for both biological bear population dynamics and movement patterns and for quantum tunneling bears :)
- dumbo-octopus 2y ago> you can absolutely make predictive statements about the future given past observations Only if you accept that as true axiomatically.
- hoseja 2y agoAnd then he tried curing cancer with fruit juice.