The weathercoin

For example, getting out of the bus at the wrong stop.

Yes, what I do may be illogical, for sure, but that doesn’t mean that what is written is false.

What’s an example of this?

But you’ve made it clear that you choose to bet, to frame your process and have a process that is like betting, not predicting, not having beliefs about the future. Predicting is illogical in your schema. Beliefs in general, including those about the future, are illogical. It seemed implicit that you made this change to not be illogical and hence what you were doing is not in that category. You’re not predicting you’re betting. You are not in that illogical process category seemed implicit.–though maybe I’ve misunderstood this last post.

What you’ve written may or may not be false, but I think in the end it undermines any claims of it being logical. Because what you have written unfolded in time. At any given now one can only be reading or thinking about one part of the argument. So, most of the argument is either in the future or the past and you have no access to that. You have memories of one part and expectations of the other, but no access. So the argument itself cannot really be known. And when you talk about the argument, refer to it above as ‘what you have written’ you are referring to something not there in that moment. So, you have no access to it. The argument leads to a radical skepticism which undermines itself or at least undermines it demonstrating anything to any human reader or listener or maker. They cannot accept it as correct and consider it knowledge as they oscillate between understand what they think it said and realizing they can’t know what it said.

I don’t know what your example, the getting out of the bus at the wrong stop, is an example of. I’m not sure what you are responding to with that.

OK, you bet that your underwear are in their usual drawer. You didn’t make a prediction. You didn’t have a belief that that’s a much more likely place than in the freezer. Your bet isn’t based on beliefs. It’s the product of an illogical process that you follow, again and again. But since I don’t share your premises, the thinking that led to my way of deciding where to look for my underwear is not illogical. Even if it involves beliefs and I am even willing to call them predictions.

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Yeah, but not just in ‘my schema’ (whatever that is), but without that caveat.

Yeah, it ‘unfolded’, meaning that it is in the past. If so happens to a future exist, it will become the past, yes. That doesn’t get in any contradiction.

I said that eclipses are astronomy, not that they are caused by Astronomy, they happen under certain conditions.

Rain happens under certain conditions, randomness is not a condition nor can it be described as a cause, it is an occurrence -randomness does not a predictor make.

The mind being played tricks on, is something else altogether.

Eclipses are not astronomy. Astronomy is the science that deals with eclipses.

You seem to think that all has causes, am I right?

If you want a less family-friendly version, you have two Stern-Gerlach experiments, and the last output of one the day prior is the first output of the other the next day, every day, for any finite number of days.

Pseudoai says that predicting anything is illogical, and that falls apart long before you get anywhere near a quantum experiment.

Start with what “illogical” means. It means your reasoning is invalid: the conclusion doesn’t follow from the premises, or you’ve contradicted yourself. It doesn’t mean you might turn out to be wrong. It doesn’t mean that your theory must know causation. He has an epistemology. His epistemology has premises. If other people have other premises, but their reasoning from those premises is logical, they are being logical. If I predict rain tomorrow because of how pressure systems have behaved before and it turns out sunny, I wasn’t being illogical. Some premise I was working with might have been false false or incomplete OR given the nature of empirical prediction, this time the prediction was wrong. Unless I am claiming certainty, which would be an illogical conclusion from my premises or I have an incorrect premise. That’s a mistake about the world, not a mistake in logic. An argument that needs those two to be the same thing isn’t much of an argument.

His case also hangs on an assumption: that to predict anything I must have a correct theory of how the future relates to the past, or must assume nature is uniform. But that’s a premise, not a rule of logic. If I start from a different premise, or don’t hold that one at all, nothing illogical has happened. And I don’t need certainty. I’m not saying the sun will rise tomorrow the way a theorem follows from its axioms. I’m estimating likelihoods, and a likelihood can be well supported without being guaranteed. To be clear, I’m not claiming induction has been shown to be deductively valid. I’m saying that not being deduction isn’t the same as being illogical, and that’s all I need.

Which brings us to deduction, where his argument starts eating itself. The unstated idea is that deduction works and induction doesn’t, and heres why. But deduction is fallible too. Give it a false premise and it hands you a false conclusion with total confidence. Validity only means the structure is right. Nobody gets truth for free.

His main move is that we have no access to the future, so we can’t know anything about it. Fine. We have no access to the past either, except through memory, and we all know memory is fallible. That matters, because every deduction takes time. By the time you reach the end of a three-line argument, line one is already in the past, and you’re trusting that you remembered it and judged it correctly a moment ago. Parts of the process are always out of reach while you’re working on the rest. Putting it on paper doesn’t fix that, because the paper doesn’t know the deduction. We’re not the paper. This may sound so obvious it is not worth saying, but I think people confuse what actually happens with having these things timelessly on paper and knowing it all at once. It’s a bit like the view from nowhere problem, but is not exactly the same. It’s a cousin to that. Our evaluating takes time, and anything that takes time has the same access problem he says rules out prediction. If no access to the future kills induction, no access to the past kills deduction, and he’s left with neither.

So how is he going to show our premises are false? Not by induction, he’s thrown that out. Not by deduction, since by his own standard that’s unavailable too. He’s disqualified every tool he’d need. And remember what he’s actually asserting, that we’re illogical. By his own criteria he can only say that if he can demonstrate all of his own premises first. Good luck. I’d like to see anyone, pseudoai included, prove every premise they base their arguments on. We don’t even need to bring in Gödel.

Then there’s the fact that he’s talking to me online. He has no access to me, my mind, my intentions, or whether I’m anything more than text on a screen. And it isn’t only temporal lack of access he’s complaining about. His criterion is access, full stop. If lack of access precludes knowledge, he’s undermined knowledge for himself. He has no grounds to generalize about other minds. He can’t even say “if other minds are like X, then they’d do Y,” because his own criterion destroys that deduction too. Treating this thread as a conversation with other reasoners is an inductive leap from patterns in text. He does the very thing he calls illogical every time he hits reply.

I’d say he’s landed in a very deep version of “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” He set out to knock down prediction and knocked out his own ability to argue, to know anything about us, and to call anyone illogical.

His latest stab, the Stern-Gerlach business, hurts him more. It’s either a real experiment or a thought experiment, and he loses both ways. If it’s real, then what it shows is a result repeated in the past, which is induction, the thing he says is illogical. Every run was a sample of past cases, and saying tomorrow’s particle will come out the same way is a prediction. If it’s a thought experiment, he has to show that imagining a setup tells us something about reality, and not just reality but a reality he has no access to, which by his own standard is off the table. A thought experiment only shows what the physics you feed into it dictates, and that physics was built from repeated observation, the very thing he’s disqualified. It gets worse. He didn’t run it either. All he has is a memory of something he read or was told, and memory is exactly the fallible, past-tense, no-access source he says we can’t rely on. He can’t cite any of it. So the example he brought to show prediction is illogical is something he can’t use, can’t verify, and can’t even claim to have seen. It’s a prediction in disguise, resting on memory and testimony, resting on the premise that nature repeats.

Predicting isn’t illogical per se. It can be wrong, and sometimes it is, but that’s a different charge, and the standard he uses to condemn it condemns everything he’s doing too. Most importantly, it condemns every criticism of induction and prediction.

I’m not sure what the advantage of being an irrational better is over being an irrational (or illogical) predicter. These are terms describing processes. We can change the term, but if the process is pretty much the same, I’m not sure what this move does. But perhaps the idea is to avoid claiming something one does not feel warrented in claiming. However, if someone tells me they predicted something, I don’t assume this means they followed a rigorous process or even an effective one. If someone tells me they bet, I don’t assume this either. If they bet a lot of money and they thought it was illogical, however, it might begin to affect my ever considering a long term romantic relationship or a business relationship with them. If they predicted something important and acted on their prediction, this also could lead me to be skeptical about merging my finances or life with them. But to me they are descriptive terms. But in this context if someone says they bet, I’d want to know what they risked and what their decision process was based on? If the predictions affect their behavior, I’d probably know the risks and wonder how they reached their prediction.

If one predicted the socks would be in the sock drawer and the other bet (in what sense) they were there, I would assume induction played a role and wonder why they were sounding so formal.

They have beliefs about where to find socks. They usually find their socks. Sounds like they have logical processes for finding their socks.

Next.

Quite the contrary. The problem is that you don’t have information about the future (for example, if some regularity will more or less persist or not)

You assumptions about me are wrong, but apart from that:

Yes: induction is logically invalid. Something logically invalid is illogical.

Anyway, that is not at stake here really.

If by whatever means you nail predictions or not makes no difference here.

I don’t think you understand what he was saying. He has different premises from you. You can only call it “illogical” AFTER you know what his premises are. Do you know what his premises are?