I am not sure a random number contains "information" necessarily just because some of its random sequence matches something else. Information is only useful if it's accessible - if pi contains your genetic sequence, that's not usable information because you have no idea where in pi to look for it. Can it be classed as "information" within pi if there's no plausible way for someone who wants that information to access it?

Pi contains the information about the ratio of diameter to circumference - I'm not convinced of the other type of information.

But problem is that you do not KNOW that thus your belief is unjustified — SpaceDweller

How do you know it's unjustified? You said beliefs are justified if they're true and unjustified if they're false. You can't know I'm unjustified unless you also know my house isn't there.

Seems like you're intuitively separating justification and truth too, just like me and Banno

To my understanding Banno does not agree with you — SpaceDweller

He said the following words:

It's not hard to think of examples in which you believe something that is true, but your belief is unjustified, or you believe something with a justification, but it's not true.

I believe my house is going to still be there when I get home. I think I'm pretty justified in that. Some people in the world, in history, maybe now, believe the same thing about their house, and have exactly as much justification for their belief as I do, and some of those people *are wrong*. Some of those people are going home to a house that blew up from a gas leak, or something like that.

They're equally as justified as I am, and they're nevertheless incorrect.

So, with that in mind, the question I guess is, "Can you ever be justified in believing in a statement when that statement is false?"

or

"Can you ever be unjustified in beleiving in a statement that's true?"

Banno and I both say, YES, both of those things are possible.

idk what "belief in false" means.

I believe or disbelieve statements. Those statements can be true or false. But if I believe in a statement, and that statement is also false, I would never word that as "I believe in false". I would word that as "I believe in that statement, and <later when I discover it's false> I was wrong about that belief. I was incorrect."

If It helps, I'll reword a piece of my previous post:

I said: The article doesn't say "you're justified when it's true, and youre unjusitified when it's false".

Reword it to, "You have a justified belief when it's true, and an unjustified belief when it's false".

I keep on not saying the word "belief" explictly in my post because it seems like it's contextually unecessary - we're talking about beliefs, so everything I'm saying has "belief" as a contextual basis. Would you prefer it if I used the word 'belief' explicitly every time? I can do that if that's what you like.

Yes, I understand. We are talking about beliefs. Everything I'm saying is about beliefs.

I'm not disagreeing with the JTB article. The article doesn't say "you're justified when it's true, and youre unjusitified when it's false".

I'm disagreeing with you, because you're saying that.

Nuh — Banno

You might be getting confused by who you're disagreeing with here. Those aren't my thoughts, those are the paraphrased thoughts of the person I'm speaking to.

You reduced this to simply "Justified <-> True" which is false because belief condition was omitted from equation. — SpaceDweller

It's not ommitted, it's a given. We're talking about a belief.

No.
Not for "any belief" but only those beliefs that are true first are then justified, while beliefs that are false first are then unjustified. — SpaceDweller

What beliefs don't fit into one of those two boxes?

That tripart seems to be doing exactly what I'm doing - separating "justified" and "true". It doesn't seem to me to support what you're saying. Otherwise, the third line would be unecessary.

Sorry but this makes no sense to me, how could "true" statement be superfluous? — SpaceDweller

If what you say is right, that Justified <-> True, then it's pointless to say both. One or the other will suffice, because it implies the other. That's what I mean by "superfluous". Redundant.

And the "J", justification condition makes only sense if both belief and truth are fulfilled, that is, you believe true is indeed true, which justifies your belief that something is true.

On another side if you believe something that's not true then your belief is not justified — SpaceDweller

If that were how people were using the word 'justified', then either the T or the J would be superfluous in JTB. I don't think many people think that way.

I certainly don't think that way. Someone could have a justified belief that's false.

IQ is between 57% and 73% heritable. What other vaguely defined concepts are vaguely heritable, and how vaguely heritable are they?

That may not be as impressive as it sounds, give that the definition of the concept of IQ is itself fraught with contention. — Joshs

That makes it more impressive. How many other vaguely-defined concepts do you know of that are very heritable?

Or consider this alternative example: instead of saying "that domino fell because the number 7 is prime", we can construct, in principle, a domino computer that calculates if a particular move is check mate, given a particular position.

Dominos can make logic gates, which means the domino system is turing complete. We already have algorithms to calculate if a particular position is check mate, so it's possible, in principle, to set up a series of dominos such that the last domino will only fall over if, say, Queen to D4 is checkmate given a particular arrangement of pieces.

So, you set up your dominos, you knock down the ones you're supposed to to represent "queen to D4" or whatever, and you watch them go, and eventually the dominos stop falling, and either the final Domino has fallen or it's still standing.

You've seen it fall, so you say "that domino fell because queen to D4 is checkmate".

Seems kinda crazy to me. And yet... how computers work already is not too far removed from that, don't you think?

So, is it ok to say we know, knowing we may in fact not know? — Bylaw

this is poetic

May we say we know, knowing we may not know?

The T in JTB is kinda awkward. If someone says they believe something, they're already saying they think it's true. If someone says they're justified in believing something, they're saying they think it's true, and their thought is justified.

If the T in JTB is *required* before something can be knowledge, then we're left in this kind of weird limbo where we can say we "know" things, but if we're not 100% certain, we can't KNOW we know them -- and even if we ARE 100% certain, people can presumably be wrong about things they feel 100% certain about, so even with 100% certainty, you don't always "know" the things you say you know. Sometimes you say you know something, and you're wrong. You don't know it.

People don't communicate -truth itself-, they communicate their beliefs about the things they think are true.

"Knowledge" is a very funny word. People try to formalize it in all sorts of weird ways, but I think most people, when they say they "know" something, mean pretty much the same thing as "I believe it, and I'm really really really confident of my belief."

It can't go unnoticed how various people "know" things that contradict what other people "know" as well. Some people know that Jesus is King, other people know Muhammad was the last prophet, other people know Krishna is the eighth avatar of Vishnu.

So if we just look at how the word "know" is used, it's used to refer to extreme confidence (or even extreme faith). It's just a privileged type of belief, privileged specifically by the person with that belief such that they place it above beliefs they have that they don't call "knowledge".

I think it's amazing too, I would love to know what the first arrangement of self-replicating molecules actually was and how it formed.

I didn't even notice it said that when I posted it. I wasn't intending on bringing that conversation in here, whoops.

I think there is a difference, but I don't think if you zoomed in on a chemical there's anything you could find that would tell you "this thing is definitely alive". There's no different atomic behavior that you could notice and be like "yup, that atom definitely knows it's inside a living thing". The difference between life and non-life is macroscopic and emergent, and is effectively invisible at the atomic scale.

I think it might be related to the central issue. If we go back to that first moment of abiogenesis, then in my interpretation, a new chemical bond gets formed but it's still just chemicals being chemicals, they aren't yet necessarily doing anything particularly novel compared to what they were doing previously.

But under your interpretation, there must be a first moment where these unalive chemicals first started becoming subject to this "further principle" you mentioned. This might be the source of why you think it's a miracle, and I think it's chemistry. If there's a new principle that governs matter that's part of life, then there kind of IS something miraculous about when those chemicals transition from not being subject to that principle, Vs how they were before when they weren't subject to it.

I think it very much could be the (or a) central issue.

If you could prove atoms follow new principles when they're part of life, you pretty much have a guaranteed nobel prize.

Here's a nice little educational resource that says it explictly:

https://www.khanacademy.org/science/ap-biology/chemistry-of-life/elements-of-life/a/matter-elements-atoms-article#:~:text=Atoms%20and%20molecules%20follow%20the,part%20of%20a%20living%20thing.

Atoms and molecules follow the rules of chemistry and physics, even when they're part of a complex, living, breathing being. If you learned in chemistry that some atoms tend to gain or lose electrons or form bonds with each other, those facts remain true even when the atoms or molecules are part of a living thing. In fact, simple interactions between atoms—played out many times and in many different combinations, in a single cell or a larger organism—are what make life possible. One could argue that everything you are, including your consciousness, is the byproduct of chemical and electrical interactions between a very, very large number of nonliving atoms!

That's right. My mama used to say, Carbon is as Carbon does.

We're talking about abiogensis, which means the very first instance that a chemical arrangement formed something that we might choose to call "life" or at least some precursor to life. At that moment in time - the moment that that thing first happened - there was no big miraculous change in the atoms or chemicals involved. If we could narrow it down to a specific moment, we would find that at that moment, a chemical got bound to another chemical, and then... they just kept on behaving like normal chemicals. There was no sudden magic change from non life to life. If you looked at it with a microscope, you might not even notice something interesting happened at that moment of abiogenesis.

And I am not sure if atomic activity would change, perhaps atoms that are part of living things act differently. — NotAristotle

I can tell you right now, if you asked 100 physicists and 100 chemists, they would all say atoms do not change how they behave based on if they're in a "living" environment or not.

If an atom binds to some chemical inside a living thing, there's a way to make that atom bind to that chemical outside of a living thing

no, the particles don't go from non living to living. The particles are doing the same things they would always have done - atoms don't know they're part of a living thing. Avery atom and molecule in your body doesn't know it's part of a body, it's not behaving differently because it's part of a living thing. Any chemical reaction it has, it would be capable of having in principle even if it wasn't part of a living thing.

The distinction between living and non living is a useful one at certain scales, but at the scale of pure chemistry, I don't think there's a distinction between living and non living. Atoms just do what atoms be doin.

if miraculous means incredibly unlikely, then yeah, the first instance of life on earth was probably incredibly unlikely. However, given the number of planets there are in the universe, and how long the universe has been around, you have to acknowledge that there are many many many opportunities for the universe to achieve this incredibly unlikely thing.

If I'm trying to achieve a one-in-a-million thing, and I only get one go, it's very unlikely I'll get it. But if I have infinite chances and infinite time to try, it goes from being very unlikely to an eventual inevitability.

I hope so. Unfortunately no one has quite so interesting views of logic here as you do.

we were just about to get somewhere, that's a shame

I want to understand one thing and one thing from you only: can you always go from a implies b, to not a implies not b? Or can you only sometimes do that, but not always?

That's what the "general rule" question means, every time I've asked it. Can you always do it, or not always?

OK. You said this before:

So here already, it is clear that you have mistaken the very start of the point (a -> b) leads to (~a -> ~b) as a general rule. It is not a general rule at all. — Corvus

So that leaves me a little bit confused. Are you sure you want to say it's a general rule? Were you incorrect before when you said that it's not a general rule at all, and that that was a mistake from me to interpret it that way?

It has to be one or the other. Either (a -> b) leads to (~a -> ~b) as a general rule, or it's not a general rule. I would like clarity on this.

A→B ↔ ¬A∨B
¬A∨B ↔ B∨¬A
B∨¬A ↔ ¬B→¬A = ¬A -> ¬B ? — Corvus

I'm a little confused by this proof. You told me a few posts ago that it's not a general rule, but if this proof were valid, it would be a general rule.

If this proof were valid, A→B would always imply ¬A → ¬B - that's what I call a "general rule".

Would you mind clarifying that? Is this always applicable to all statements in the form of A→B, or is it not?

And you've acknowledged now as well that that doens't work in general

(a -> b) -> (~a -> ~b)

You said this isn't a general rule, which means there can be situations where (a -> b) is true, but (~a -> ~b) is not true, correct? Again, not to be interperted in the context of Cogito explicitly at this point, just in general. In general, there can be situations like that.

Okay, this sounds like you're acknolweding that your logic that you called Modus Ponens was in fact not Modus Ponens. I appreciate you acknowledging that.

(a -> b) -> (~a -> ~b) is not modus ponens, we can both agree on that now. Fantastic progress.

It's a shock to me that you call it modus ponens, which is a general rule, and then say now that it's not a general rule, without ever explicitly acknowledging that the thing you're doing is in fact not modus ponens. You writing the words "this logic is not modus ponens" would go a long way.

It is not a general rule at all. — Corvus

Oh, fascinating. That's not what it sounded like when you called it Modus Ponens, because Modus Ponens is indeed a general rule.

So you don't think it's a general rule, meaning you think there are scenarios where you can have an implication, a implies b, and yet not have the implication of (not a implies not b), is that right?

You can have (a implies b) without (not a implies not b), correct? In general, not specifically about the cogito.