The idealist can make this move, but there is also the possibility that experience just ceases. Other people will infer that the falling piano or oncoming car killed you. The examiner might say poor sap didn't even feel it.

So the idealist has to include the possibility that not looking will result in no longer experiencing, for no reason at all, since there is no unperceived death event. — Marchesk

The possibility of 'not experiencing' doesn't make any sense to the subjective idealist. For the subjective idealist semantically reduces the meaning of what is meant by a cause to the collection of observations that are said to verify it. Hence the idealist cannot make sense of the postulation of a cause that he cannot consciously verify.

In conclusion the subjective idealist is a solipsist who cannot make sense of the statement "I am mortal". Yet why should this be absurd by your criteria? After all, the solipsist is not only against holding views that he cannot disprove, he is even against attributing meaning to such views.

We have of course no reason to assume that our discrete representations are literally representative of a discrete reality undergoing state transitions, for we never observe precise and static states undergoing transition, rather we just see a fuzzy dynamic procession that we carve up into neat pieces for sake of approximate analysis.

So perhaps you argument should be interpreted as a modus-tollens that leads to a rejection this assumption, rather than an argument for a separate mental substance. I'm not even sure how introducing an overseer solves the problem without introducing it at another level.

Subjective idealists rightly insist that our definitions of physical objects must in some way semantically reduce to our observations and interrogative practices, such that "to be is to be perceived" is a logical truth.

Realists are right to point out that subjective idealists are naive if they think that the semantics of physical objects reduce to atomic acts of perception.

Once realists and idealists recognise the semantic holism in our translation of observations into causes and vice versa, they ought to realise they are speaking past one another and making complementary arguments.

I still have no idea what you mean by this. Warrant is what makes epistemology normative. To say that such and such belief is warranted is to say that you can and should believe such and such. What is vacuous about this? — SophistiCat

I'm saying that if there are no objective criteria, i.e. physical criteria, for ascribing to agents propositional-attitudes pertaining to prediction-making, then it makes no objective sense to discuss agents as needing epistemological warranty for induction, since applications of rules of induction is then in the eye of the beholder, for example the community the agent belongs to who selectively interprets his behaviour as prediction-making for their own concerns.

In other words, I am suggesting that to follow a rule of induction is no different to following any other rule; it is a normative principle pertaining to language-games, but not in any way that is significant to metaphysics or epistemology.

But Hume represents the nominalist turn of thought. He was not a pragmatist in the sense of arguing for the reality of the general or universal. He was an atomist in regards to empirical sense data. So his epistemology reflects a particular brand of metaphysics. — apokrisis

Whether or not Hume was an atomist is irrelevant, as Goodman's new riddle of induction illustrates.

If today one person sees an object as green, and another person sees it as grue (i.e. currently green up until some future time t, then blue afterwards), then their principles of the uniformity of nature are different.

As this illustrates, the so called 'principle' of the uniformity of nature is relative to one's ontology, and hence so is one's principle of induction. And regardless of whatever this ontology is, the infallibility of induction relative to this ontology cannot be non-circularly justified, nor empirically defended.

In my opinion a better way to understand Hume, is to say that whatever one uses as a principle of induction it is impossible to distinguish good from bad inductions without pain of circularity.

Of course warrant is normative. How can you say that it is both normative and vacuous? That seems contradictory. — SophistiCat

Sorry, i meant warrant being epistemologically vacuous.

That is a very contentious proposition, and in any case, I don't see how it bears on warrant. No one denies that we do think - and behave - inductively (except maybe Popperians). — SophistiCat

Because if induction is a vacuous notion then to insist upon warrant is to insist upon nothing. I'm with popper, but feel he didn't quite go far enough to dissolve the issue of warrant into being a non-issue.

Suppose that someone described themselves to be a gambler, but that they always bet on the least frequent outcome without offering any justification and regularly lost. Is there any difference between describing them as a being bad gambler vs denying that they are in fact a gambler?

Is there a clear distinction between predicting badly vs not making a prediction?

Doesn't the difference entirely rest upon the normative and hence subjective context by which we judge behaviour to be future-anticipating?

If a man's beliefs are identified with his non-verbal behaviour, then it is no longer clear to me when he isn't making an induction. Which suggests that epistemological warrant for induction might not be needed simply because it is vacuous to even speak of consenting to 'ceremonies' of induction, for if all behaviour can be regarded as future-anticipating then induction is just another word for behaviour.

It won't be, because it's infinite. — BlueBanana

I used to think that way, but that is to dogmatically assume that mathematics must serve practically intelligible purposes, as opposed to purely fictive or aesthetic purposes.

Yes, the aesthetic reasons for defining finitely unconstructable hierarchies of infinitely large numbers are entirely subjective, practically meaningless and involve a degree of self-deception i.e. are what many irreligious non-platonists would call "bullshit", yet for some reason it is still fun.

For some reason, convincing oneself that it is possible to exhaust countable infinity say via a non-standard construction of the integers, can produce pleasant feelings of expansiveness.

The fact that infinite cardinals do not represent our intuitions of the relative sizes of countably infinite sets shouldn't feel problematic. After all an infinite cardinal is merely one suggested measure of size. You're still free to think of A and B as having different sizes and could even create your own formal definition of size satisfying this purpose.

Unless a definition rules something out it isn't useful.

There are a huge number of both partially-overlapping and distinct uses for the word "entity", e.g in software-modelling, psycho-analysis, law, supernatural fiction,....

Each particular use rules out something as not being relevant to the considered application.
So in conclusion, we can ask "what is an 'entity' in this particular context?" but not "what is an entity in general?".

It is better to follow Wittgenstein's example and argue that logic reduces to the practical use of ordinary language with additional constraints to describe a more precise (but not infinitely precise) collection of states of affairs and associated behaviours.

If for any sentence written in logic we cannot think of a use for it, then we can signify this by baptising its negation with the name "logically-necessary".

Yes, I see how you arrived at your statements with regards to reference, given a causal reference theory, what I'm saying is that you do not have to adopt a causal reference theory at all. If your references are merely descriptivist, or even mediated, but in some non-causal way, then a sentence can refer to a determined future by reference to the predictions of the users, which are a current state. — Pseudonym

But how can descriptivism be irreducible to the causal theory of reference if causal determinism is true? I don't see what non-causal semantic options are available to the causal determinist. Either his utterances reduce to their causes, or they do not.

All I can fathom is that for the causal determinist, predicting the future is synonymous with responding automatically to the past, hence the determinist has no reason to believe that his future-contingent beliefs amount to anything except for disguised summaries of his past experience.

The situation seems analogous to the determinist going for a walk backwards so that he only sees where he has walked and saying in response to his observations "this is determined" "now this is determined", which is to say nothing meaningful, and with the determinist having no idea what he is about to walk into.

Unless a determinist asserts retro-causality (which would seem to nullify his position), I don't see how it is possible to both accept what the determinist says and to understand his sentences as being future-referring. Hence if he is correct, I can only understand him as describing the past which is essentially to say nothing of predictive value.

Where precisely does this argument go wrong?

Let the following proposition S represent a theory of causal determination:

S: "For every event A, the state of A is determinable by a particular function of the states of all prior events {B,C,D,...} "

If S is true then it is vacuous and says nothing:

Proof:

1) Causal determination implies that the causal theory of reference is true.

2) The causal theory of reference implies that signification of future events is the signification of past events in disguise.

3) Therefore if S is true, its meaning is fully determined by past events and refers only to past events.

4) Therefore if S is true, S is equivalent to asserting that the past is describable by a function.

4) The past is identical with itself, and hence constitutes such a function of description.

5) Therefore if S is true, S says nothing.

Think of the following example. You like vanilla ice cream more than chocolate one. Of course choosing vanilla ice cream is a rational choice. You buy the ice cream and decide to put it in garbage bag which is irrational. Of course you use your freedom to do this. The question is what is the point of free will when it could lead to absurdity in our decision. — bahman

I didn't think the idea of free will consisted of having a point, but rather consisted in there being no external fact-of-the-matter that precisely determines one's choices, either because of under-determination of choices relative to external matters of fact, or because the 'externality' of the determining matters of fact in relation to one's mental state is disputed under an extended-mind thesis which renders talk of determined choices as meaningless.

The way you framed your original question implies that knowledge of one's personal preferences can play the role of such external matters-of-fact in the sense of weakly determining one's choices, whereby one still has a final say in which option to choose. Yet if I remember correctly, in another thread you disputed whether conscious choice was in fact possible on the grounds that in appraising the value of one choice, one is no longer aware of the value of the other choices. But if conscious appraisal of actions is not possible , then one doesn't have knowledge of one's personal preferences, and hence personal preferences cannot play the role of determining external matters of fact here, which as a consequence implies that one cannot conclude that one's choices are determined with respect to knowledge of one's preferences.

To attribute a belief to an agent is to explain the agent's actions in terms of folk-psychological ego-centric reasoning from the perspective of agent when the agent can be pragmatically considered to be maximising a utility function.

We do this all the time, even when describing computers that crash. "It believes the library object is in the wrong folder".

Unless one is a platonist, explanations of behaviour are no different to descriptions of potential behaviour. Nobody defines beliefs and other mental states in terms of the processing of neurological tokens but purely in terms of the overt potential behaviour that agents display that could be physically instantiated in an infinite number of ways.

Remember, neuroscientists can only be said to identify brain-states as constituting belief-states if such brain-states directly manifest the behaviour satisfying the definition of the belief. So functionalist ascriptions of belief-states are not in contradiction with logical-behaviourist definitions of belief, and in fact are dependent on them.

Does Excalibur exist? In terms of a role within literature, yes - hence the reason the question is meaningful and can be answered in spite of the absence of any particular sword being baptised with the name "Excalibur".

The question is, does thinking of names as designating roles rather than particulars resolve anything? For can't roles also be destroyed? and if they can, for example by burning all literature referring to Excalibur and through cultural amnesia, then isn't to say that "Excalibur exists as a role" also meaningless?

If the meaning of a name is the particular it refers to, then the name won't possess meaning until after the particular has been created, and the name will become meaningless if the particular is destroyed.

In which case, suppose "Luna" refers to the rock we know of as "the moon". Then to say "Luna no longer exists" or that "Luna will one day exist" is meaningless. Which in turn implies that "Luna exists" is at most vacuously true and says nothing.

Of course, this isn't how our existential predicate works when we use names. This implies that the meaning of names are not the particulars they refer to. Rather, names like "the moon" refer to roles that particulars play in a language-game. And the meaning of these roles is atemporal.

The premise of the OP is what ought to be in question, namely that there is a particular utility function U(a) that represents the value of the set of choices available to an agent, that can be identified independently of the choices the agent actually makes.

For if a utility function cannot be identified and justified independently of the choices the agent actually makes, then one's proposed function is at best describing the agents past history of decisions, which says nothing for or against the idea of the agent having determined vs free-willed choices.

And to merely ask the agent "which choice do you prefer?" before he appears to make a decision isn't to obtain independent information of his preferences.

The problem is, the Schrodinger Equation is empirically verified using ensembles of particles across independent and identical trials. So for the verificationist the meaning of the Schrodinger Equation is statistical and has no meaningful definition in terms of an individual particle.

The question "is the behaviour of this particle essentially determined or random?" is meaningless.

One can at best ask "can experimental outcomes on a collection of particles in similar circumstances to these test particles be used-to-determine how these test particles are likely to behave in terms of population averages"?

If the answer is yes, then what we have is a statement which says that the behaviour of some particles are useful-in-determining how other particles will behave. What we don't have are universal statements of determinism which are meaningless.

That is were we differ. Is it that, too? Is there something in the mind that is the belief, apart from the behaviour? Wouldn't that be a beetle? — Banno

Self-reported beliefs bear greatly on issues pertaining to the problems of private language, since in many cases a person's self-reported beliefs are misleading and are at best weakly correlated to their behavioural dispositions, especially if their self-reported beliefs fail to mention crucially relevant external correlates that might be unknown even to them.

For example, a manic-depressive who suffers Seasonal-Affective-Disorder might at one minute report that they hate their job and see no future for themselves when the sun is in, yet the next minute when the sun comes out they might report that they like their job and foresee a glorious future for themselves.

If somebody does not know of the real causes of the suffer's mood instability they might say that they do not understand the suffer's constant changes in opinion, i.e. that the sufferer is largely speaking a "private language". Of course, the main challenge of therapy is to convince the sufferer not to rigidly interpret their own mental state without further investigation of the external correlates of their moods.

Both Quine, Wittgenstein and Lewis Carroll have each denied that any statement is necessarily implied by any other. To paraphrase, any explicit representation of a rule divorced from the practices of a custom can be variously interpreted. For example, to interpret an arrow as pointing in a particular direction relies implicitly on a notion of "point" "base", and so on.

Hence what we mean by a "rule" cannot be represented independently of our case-by-case demonstration of it and our intentions. Rather, our behavioural demonstrations in concert with us presenting a signification of our actions to others and expressing normative reasons why they should follow our example, testing their understanding of our intentions and so on, IS the rule.

A strip of concrete isn't a path outside of an established custom for walking, and it is the intentions of the walking community that define what it means to say that it is necessary for pedestrians to stick to the path and that the path determines where they can walk.

The concrete path is also analogous to physical laws established by the scientific community. Their scientific observations in relation to their laws are like foot-prints that are discovered by the walking community to frequently wander off the concrete path.

Imagine if the elders of the walking community relaid, extended and widened the concrete path whenever foot-prints veered off the path in the hope that future walking would automatically abide by the path. This is analogous to the epistemology of science. But if the path is relaid whenever it is trespassed, would it now make sense to say that the movement of walkers is determined by the path (or vice versa)?

It doesn't make sense to refer to the semantics of expressions as being equivalent unless we can define what we mean by "equivalent semantic use" of expressions . A simple rule of syntactical equivalency as written in a dictionary is not sufficient.

I can imagine a lazy economist saying "men are working less because of the income effect" when he really means "men are working less because of particular income effects pertaining to gender which I presume are obvious and can't be bothered to elaborate".

So unless we are quibbling over dictionary definitions who nobody exactly conforms to in practice, I would describe the first example as a fallacy-fallacy.

As for the second example, suppose that a house security alarm is triggered by Burglars and Cats. If a house owner who is rarely burgled owns a cat that frequently triggers the alarm, it is in some circumstances rational for him to lower his belief of being burgled on hearing the alarm. This might be the case if he believes that the presence of his cat in his house and the presence of a burglar in his house are mutually exclusive possibilities.

Indeed, a common pattern i notice when reading political arguments is beliefs that elitist interests are mutually exclusive to common interests, or that a healthy welfare state is mutually exclusive to individual enterprise. So given this foundational belief of mutually exclusive causes, subsequently paradoxical belief revisions are perhaps understandable.

Are you saying that determinism requires something transcendental? and if so, what is this transcendental thing?

Or are you saying that determinism doesn’t require transcendental? And if not, then what allows the universe to be determined? It just is? — SonJnana

I'm saying that in ordinary language, physics and in mathematics, to determine something is to make a comparison. So it only makes sense to employ the concept when relating states of affairs or parts of the universe to each other. It doesn't make sense to describe the universe as a whole as being determined or undetermined.

I do not think this is true in any sense. Whilst is it almost impossible to describe determinism, or simply to talk about cause and effect without using transcendental ideas, that is not the same as saying that determinists rely on something transcendental for necessity of cause and effect to be to the case. — charleton

But causal necessity is neither empirically meaningful nor true by definition. There is no physical justification for causal necessity, and science has no need of the concept, for science is only concerned with describing regularity and predicting finitely ahead into the future. Indeed the history of science is nothing but a graveyard of falsified 'necessary' laws.

There is nothing mysterious about our use of the word "determinism", for it is never uttered in response to an infinite number of factual justifications. We merely use it to forcibly express our beliefs and ideals in face of under-determined and shaky evidence.

Determinism is true whether of not there are determinists, or compatibilists trying to describe the universe. Clearly determinism relies on inductive knowledge. but the claim of determinism can only be described by transcending the brute reality of cause and effect to conceptualise and vocalise the findings of indiuction. — charleton

Nobody has ever provided an irrefutable example of causal necessity that does not beg the question or that does not appeal to metaphysics.

This example is not relevant. The numbering system we use is analytically true, and established a priori on matters of fact devised by human cognition. Numbers are not phenomena that relate to causality, but have their own idealistic meanings. — charleton

It is relevant in the sense of highlighting the platonism responsible for intuitions of causal necessity. And your description of numbers as being analytically true, possessing idealistic meanings and being 'established' a priori on 'matters of fact' sounds close to an appeal to a transcendental principle of divine certainty rather than practical custom.

So now you are suggesting that you might not be determinist without a reason to believe in a transcendental function? — SonJnana

Sort of. i am saying that the grammar of determination involves a relation between two designated roles - the determiner and the thing determined. Determinists automatically assume the presence of something transcendental or external to any given custom or state of affairs, even when it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of something transcendental, such as when discussing the history of everything that is by definition said to exist.

One of the reasons for this tendency i suggest is because determinists and their mathematical cousins the platonists tend to treat ambiguity as being the same thing as incomplete information that is representative of something non-ambiguous and external to what is present.

For example, when we were taught the 'law' of addition in mathematics, each of us was presented with only a small number of examples of addition. Yet we insist on thinking that there is a predetermined and transcendental 'law' of addition that we are assenting to and that determines the truth of our arithmetical statements.

Now of course we are expected to generalise from presented examples and we possibly share innate tenancies to answer in similar ways. Pupils who behave appropriately on a small number of additional examples when tested are said to then "know" the law of addition.

Yet there are infinitely many examples of what we might call 'addition' that the world has never calculated and never will. Each of us gives different answers to addition questions when we are presented with suitably large numbers. Who gets to decide who is making mistakes here? God? An infallible super-computer locked up in a vault somewhere? the fallible teacher or the trusty calculator? Isn't it really the case that there is no transcendental justification or particular external justification we can give for what we call our 'mistakes' and 'correct' answers?

So it only makes sense to speak of a "law" of addition in very pragmatic sense. There aren't two things, namely our custom of addition and a platonic realm of addition that justifies our practices, and our law of addition is infinitely ambiguous. The law of addition is essentially a family of precedent laws, one law for each individual, where each of us continually extends our precedent law by citing earlier cases of addition that were accepted by our shared custom, where the judge is the success of our personal applications. But Platonists find this ambiguity and diversity of the concept hard to accept, so they invent a myth, a god, in order to pretend to themselves that things really are determined in a simple way for themselves and everybody else.

well, what exactly do you mean by "the same"?

When we ordinarily say that two things are the same, aren't we merely implying that we can substitute each for one another for some intended purpose?

Suppose we have no purpose for visually comparing two photographs. Is it even meaningful to ask ourselves "are they the same"? For what is the criterion of sameness here, and to what purpose is it being put to?

Perhaps in absence of any criteria of sameness, we might say they look the same, but are we really expressing a truth regarding their appearance to us, or are we merely expressing our ambivalence towards them?

If we were expressing a truth of their appearance to ourselves, wouldn't we would have to be literally superimposing their images on top of each other in our imagination?

and even if we could do that, wouldn't we still need some external criteria of correctness to compare our judgement against? for otherwise we wouldn't be asserting anything and would merely be creating a private definition to ourselves for the meaning of "looking the same to me" which would assert nothing positive or negative to ourselves in an epistemological sense.

So if self-identity over time is a concept analogous to judging the appearance of photographs with no external criteria of correctness, it is a meaningless concept.

On the other hand, if one is asking whether one is physically and functionally the same over time, the answer depends on the scale we are employing for our criteria of sameness, which is normally chosen according to our intended purpose.

If you are a determinist and determinism is your way of interpreting the information/code of the universe..... — SonJnana

Don't you mean to say that the very assumption that a code is representative of, or is generated by, a particular underlying function is what determinism means here?

To use our example, doesn't it mean that the determinist understands 010101010 as being generated by a particular function? Yet in my example, i explicitly defined that string to represent all of the current information that exists in that universe. So where is this ghostly 'particular' function that is proposed to exist over and above the string and control its existence supposed to live?

Of course the string was generated by something transcendental of that universe, for it was me who determined it. And of course I literally exist in the same physical world as the string i wrote, hence an outsider could represent me with a binary hash number, say #Sime and crudely represent my creative act by concatenating me and the string together in some way.

But then the same problem arises as before. To what principle can the determinist now turn to, in order to interpret my act of creating the string as being representative of some transcendentally predetermined act of creation? Presumably the "laws" of physics. But then after we encode our understanding of those laws as binary information and add them to the picture, the determinist has nowhere else to turn to justify his metaphysical determinism unless he appeals to the invisible hand of god, or insists upon a hard distinction between mind and matter, thereby interpreting physics as being a principle transcendental of consciousness.

I suspect that perhaps the physicists really mean something along those lines. They say infinite but if they had paid better attention in math class they'd say unbounded. — fishfry

Yes, provided they understand the use of "unbounded" in a given situation to mean
" a closed range of quantities cannot be specified here to satisfy our purposes".

Yes they are generalizations for generating new hypotheses for pragmatic purposes. However, as a determinist, if you are accepting those generalizations, then you are accepting that those generalizations also apply to the human. So for pragmatic reasons it would be rational to look at consciousness as though the generalizations that also apply to it. I don't see how you could interpret determinism in a way that gives you consciousness that also isn't dependent on the deterministic generalizations, unless you believe that consciousness isn't dependent on the brain (that it is some sort of soul). — SonJnana

It is because what we do and think partly 'determines' what we mean by something 'being determined'.

To see this, consider the following string, and imagine that it represents the history of a binary universe up to a present time

010101010

By definition this is currently all the information that the universe consists of. Now does it make sense to ask if this universe thus far is determined?

Imagine a determinist saying

"i can imagine the sequence oscillating forever and forever! 010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101010101..."

All i am saying is, the determinist has entirely expressed all that he means and the dots are where his determinism ends.

A psychological problem for non-beliefism:

is it psychologically plausible that one can pragmatically adopt unwarranted assumptions for sake of competitive advantage, say when gambling, while keeping his state of belief unattached from his risky decision making?

The phenomena of cognitive-dissonance suggests to me that the answer is generally no. Once we have a stake in the game, we can't help but believe what we want to believe.

Well, firstly nobody seems to agree on what Hume's arguments establish, but in my opinion:

Hume's argument against a logical justification for induction appears at first to be rather trivial. For he stated that the effects of a cause are not made true by the definition that constitutes what is meant by the cause.

Taking his snooker ball example, if the 'cause' is a cue-ball travelling towards the black ball, then there is nothing present in the definition of a 'travelling cue ball' that necessitates a particular movement of the black ball upon contact. But of course, if we saw the cue ball pass through the black ball we would likely revise our identification of the cue-ball, to say a ghost cue-ball. Hence our identification of types expresses our expectation of effects.

Hence Hume's argument against logical justification for induction might be rephrased by saying that one only 'believes' that one is seeing a travelling cue-ball as opposed to say a ghost-cue ball, where the certainty of this belief cannot be established purely via appeals to logic.

Hume also gave an argument against an empirical justification for induction, which boils down to the fact that in our repeated observation of causes and effects we do not in a literal sense see anything called 'necessity'. Hence we are under no purely empirical obligation to alter our beliefs in response to seeing anything.

But this shouldn't be taken to mean that Hume implies that induction is a misguided principle, or that there is no such thing as 'necessity' or that 'necessity' is meaningless, but only that what we mean by necessity cannot be grounded purely in terms of rules of logic and observations. In other words, when we speak of necessity we aren't merely appealing to stated rules of logic and observations, but also to our behavioural inclinations that includes what we think, say and do in response to what we call 'evidence'.

Hence Hume is merely forcing us to revise our understanding of what 'necessity' means so that it includes more things, namely our thoughts, our psychological preferences, our choices and our customs.

And the resulting picture should feel holistically positive in the sense of including our intuition and customs as integral components of the meaning of causation and determinism , whereby it is seen to make no sense to speak of 'free will' being an illusion or of being incompatible with determinism.

2. Ignoring the definition you manufactured above (which contrasts how belief is generally described) science obtains whether or not one chooses to believe in science... — ProgrammingGodJordan

The definition you've quoted is more or less the same, as is the psychological conception of belief as a behavioural disposition towards evidence, which of course is modelled as probability distributions over choices, actions and so on.

Furthermore, by the definition above one is said to be in a state of belief whether or not one has infallible proof. So really your statement boils down to the assertion of infallible belief. I think. Or are you saying that one should judge all beliefs as being fallible?

Obviously science does not consist of infallible beliefs and since there is not even a mathematical justification for a correct way to interpret evidence it seems one cannot eliminate the role of subjective decision making in the assessment of evidence.

There are no infallible proofs and to a certain extent they are subjective, except those which are said to be infallible by definition or by assumption.

1. No, I don't detect that I have confused "practical belief" with "religious faith" those things; in fact, I had long encountered scientism, which is near to the 'practical belief' you refer to.
However, scienticism does not underline belief's generally science opposing nature, contrary to "non beliefism". — ProgrammingGodJordan

If beliefs are defined as the assignment of probabilities to outcomes conditioned on one's partial knowledge, and if it is impossible to decide upon any particular probability assignment on the basis of one's partial knowledge, then for the purposes of acting one is forced to choose a set of probabilities, i.e. a model, without justification. Hence my referring to justified belief as practical belief.

You say no beliefs are necessary. Then let's suppose you are presented with an urn containing an unknown number of red and black balls and you have no other information. What is the rational choice of prior probabilities?

I think you are confusing the idea of practical belief with religious faith in scenarios pertaining to prediction and control. You've jumped the shark from a practically reasonable statement, to what a community would interpret to be a conceptual error.

In statistical decision theory, belief is the assignment of probabilities to possible outcomes, and in every instance it is impossible to assign definite probabilities without a priori assumptions. Science consists of the collection and evaluation of evidence in response to the beliefs states of the science community, which vary extensively for reasons pertaining to scientists having different knowledge, unconscious biases and so forth.

As a programmer, have you ever studied data-science? Tell me how I should decide upon what is 'the definitive' algorithm for winning a Kaggle competition, and how do i decide what it is, in such a way as to avoid any assumptions and hence belief?

Anthropomorphism is usually associated with a "projection" of some kind of substance into forms where it does not belong. These to me seem to be two different positions. I think the reason we do not attribute consciousness to robots and computers is due to an awareness of different forms of embodiment which do not operate in accordance with the principles of certain forms of life. — michael r d james

To my mind, the only problem with not attributing consciousness as a metaphysical substance to 'suitable' forms, is that there no longer seems to be a 'truth of the matter' as to whether or not other minds exist, since without positing consciousness as being a metaphysical-substance one collapses the distinction between defining what is conscious versus recognizing what is conscious.

One cannot avoid this problem by identifying consciousness with a type of life form, since theories containing 'types' of life forms are theories of metaphysical substance if they assert the objectivity of their categorical distinctions, yet if types of life-form are merely arbitrary constructs then we are back to there being no matter-of-fact about the existence or otherwise of other minds .

isn't trying to change one's own beliefs a bit like trying to tickle oneself?

One somehow needs to present evidence to oneself that reinforces the target belief, in such a way that one isn't reinforcing the opposite belief through the very act of selecting the right evidence.

Perhaps it is only possible in general to weaken existing beliefs, by putting oneself into novel situations that have the propensity to challenge one's existing beliefs to a certain extent.

Time is real. I have an argument in favor of it in here. — bahman

I don't quite follow that argument, because in practice no proposition is applied exactly with infinite precision, hence even the meaning of a 'precise' calculus remains ill-defined in application, whatever the intended precision of the signs.

Remember Heraclitus's argument, that no man ever steps in the same river twice. How does one insist that a single application of a sign refers to a single state-of-affairs without question begging? If one cannot insist upon such a thing, then can't we be said to be using the calculus on X->Y, regardless?

That is the price you pay for holding substance views of space-time, as if space and time were transcendental tape-measures being aligned to a table-universe.

So why not simply reduce talk of time to measured intervals between events? For presently observed change does not require a background notion of temporarily if one accepts present change as irreducible and fundamental.