Only what I'm saying isn't yours. It comes from outside your head. Surprise, novelty.

So Hume's premises should be accepted over others because he is "doing psychology?" — Count Timothy von Icarus

Not at all. We know induction is invalid. Hume presents an empirical answer, not a logical one. If you have a better, present it for consideration. We might apply a bayesian calculus to choose between the options...

You brought up solipsism, claimed it for yourself.

I've shown the problem with solipsism, over the last few pages. Your asking me a question shows that you are not a solipsist. You want my answer. Therefore I exist... :wink:

What sort of proof could make sense? What could be clearer to you than that you are reading this now? The doubt you pretend to is unjustified.

Just because an asserted dogma leads to skepticism and materialism doesn't make it "humility." — Count Timothy von Icarus

You seem to miss the bit where Hume is talking about the psychology of knowing, not the logic - having shown that the logic isn't of any use in justifying an induction.

You expect a deductive logic all the way down. So when it isn't there, you invent it.

You've badly misunderstood Hume.

You asked:

how do you say a process of scientific inquiry normally begins? — apokrisis

I replied:

the unexpected — Banno

If you wanted to use your own answer, why bother asking the question...? You are choosing to carve a very human process so that it fits your pet theory, by choosing a starting point. You are the one playing games. Consider:

Something catches the attention as it seems to suggest a causal connection. — apokrisis

Yes! Again, we are not disagreeing with what's been said; I'm just pointing out that this is not logic.

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic. — Banno

You already have your causal relation, before you start on the logic of checking it. You bring it in to confirm your bias. That's the criticism.

I agree with both here. — unenlightened

:grin: As do I! Abduction is not a formalisable process that can provide an algorithmic answer to Hume's scepticism.

This is hopeless. — Copernicus

Yep.

Your theory. You tell me. But if you are stuck, try 's "exception" - the unexpected.

Strawman... — apokrisis

...is what folk claim when they don't have a reply.

Odd of you to quote back to me from an article that supports the view I just set out. If there was a point, you dropped it somewhere. If there is something you think relevant in that block of text, set it out.

Here's a bit you left out:

It is a common complaint that no coherent picture emerges from Peirce’s writings on abduction.

Have a look at the article on Abduction, as well, for a slightly wider field of view - it might help you come to terms with what is going on here.

You got nuthin'. Fine.

Peirce developed on Hume's scepticism, as did Popper, Feyerabend, and any one else with an empirical leaning. They didn't reject Hume, so much as have a go at explaining how we do make scientific progress despite the difficulties Hume noted. Peirce's contribution is noteworthy, but far from central, and certainly not the Grand Cathedral you pretend to.

Your approach is preaching rather than thinking, a gran lie with a few bits of truth thrown in to keep the masses confused.

Abduction doesn’t define a relation of consequence between premises and conclusions; logic requires a structured notation, absent from abduction. Abduction might be a good name for a psychological process, but it ain't a logic.

The problem with this topic is in reasoning that if we find some benefit of an action, or a future beneficial state, that proves it's a selfish action. — Mijin

Yep. If we said instead that any action can be described in selfish terms, few would protest; it's be a rare action that had no benefit to the actor. The fallacy is framing this as an account of the intent of the actor, or worse, as the only intent.

So just the usual game of duck and dodge. :up: — apokrisis

I'm here. Offer a clear critique, and I will reply.

Just to be clear, here's my opine on the abductive response to the OP, as stated:

What is abduction, and how does it help? And the answer is quite vague. Abduction is little more than an attempt to formalise confirmation bias. It's presented as "given some evidence, infer the hypothesis that would best explain it" where "best" is left ill-defined. This leaves it entirely open to arbitrarily inferring any explanation to be the best. — Banno

I stand by it. And I don't think anyone here has presented a clear enough account of abduction to give me pause.

By “we”, you mean you. You can’t admit in public to your errors of thought. And so you must thus construct a world in which I am in the wrong for most likely being right.

If you could poke a hole in my reasoning, you would leap at it. Instead you must feign a moral victory in the pose: “Well who could ever understand this guy anyway. Am I right guys? Hey, am I right!”. — apokrisis

More about me. What fun!

In order to address your argument, it would have to be clearly expressed. You have done so in other threads, and I've addressed it. But here - it's a mess. The bits that make sense I pretty much agree with. The rest, when you try to set it out, collapses under it's own weight. That's the problem with tinsel as a construction medium.


But now we have even more certainty, from Tim. In his reply to @unenlightened, that Hume claimed we cannot know anything...

those self-same premises preclude Hume's knowing that his theorizing is true. — Count Timothy von Icarus

Of course Hume would agree, if not in those terms - he understands that his own philosophy is based in the same empirical and psychological habits it describes. He's not offering a proof of scepticism, he's mapping out, with humility, what can be deduced and what cannot.

Completely arse backwards once more. — apokrisis

Perhaps.

In any case, you don't say why my "it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear" is arse backwards. Change "law" to "theory" if that suits your need to be rid of god, I won't object. So your claim is what - that we ought change the evidence to match the theory? Surely not.

Mumbling about patterns doesn't much cut it. The trouble perhaps is, like Dogberry, you are to clever to be understood. So we'll never know.

Perhaps that happens sometimes. — Janus

But hang on. Isn't it a methodological presumption in science that when we come across something that doesn't fit our expectations - an exception - that we change our expectations? That is, we modify the theory so as to explain the evidence...

So of corse there are no 'well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws"", as you say... because when they happen, it's good scientific practice to change the laws so as to make the exception disappear.

So are we to say that "the laws of nature are not merely codifications of natural invariances and their attributes, but are the invariances themselves", while also saying that we can change them to fit the evidence? Hows' that going to work? We change the very invariances of the universe to match the evidence?

Or is it just that what we say about stuff that happens is different to the stuff that happens, and it's better if we try to match what we say to what happens?

Assume I do. How can Newton be proven wrong about light if you know only what is in your head? Newton and light are in your head?

It's your epistemology. So you say that we can be certain that Newton was proven wrong... but that

we know nothing outside our heads — Copernicus

I'm just trying to work out how you keep both those ideas in the same head.

He was proven wrong. — Copernicus

Proven? Are you certain?

But you said...

That sounds like a charge without evidence. — Copernicus

Well, no. It's the consequence of your approach.

Your every act is selfish - so you claim. So what we want doesn't count, unless it matches what you want. We don't count.

So why should we do anything for you?

At the very least, you need to learn to play the iterative prisoner's dilemma.

What's wrong with social interaction? — Copernicus

You tell us. You want to be here. But you tell us that we don't count for anything. You shit were you eat.

define it — Copernicus

Supposing that all you need is a definition.

I have a vendetta against poor thinking.

You're free to give feedback. — Copernicus

No, since I don't exist.

I'm forced to accept the social contract involuntarily — Copernicus

You love it. You keep coming back for more. You don't have to be here, after all - go play Counterstrike or something - oh, wait, those are team games... Patience, maybe?

I'm sorry your living arrangements do not meet your needs. Perhaps if you asked nicely...

Oh, that'd require taking others into account...

Remember this?

If you start with the wrong question, you will get the wrong answer. While ethics concerns what I should do, the philosophical question at the core of political thought, modern or otherwise, is What should we do? It's about communal action. That it is about us is the bit that libertarians miss. — Banno

Worse for solipsists.

which is a subjective expression of oneself. — Copernicus

But for you, that's all there is...

I'm not in the mood for trolling, — Copernicus

You seem quite adept at it, even when not in the mood.

I'm quite serious. Your ideas are a nonsense, the result of a failure to realise that you are, like it or not, a part of a community, a member of a group - the very fact that you are writing in English belies your excessive faith in individualism.

Your need to post your ideas on this forum probably indicates that you know this, and are looking for a way out.

The fly and the bottle. But you probably will not get that reference.

I don't exist, so I can't deviate from the OP. Nor can I "swim in solipsism", whatever that might be.

This is the very same problem you aimed at yourself in the The Libertarian Dilemma
thread - the failure to acknowledge the other.

Your own acceptance of solipsism in a post to other people brings out clearly why you are a bit of a dill.

Your version of solipsism is not the one I follow. Something like anarchism vs libertarianism vs liberalism. Close, but different. — Copernicus

It's not my version - I don't exist. It's the reality of your realisation that you are the only mind, closing in on you.

So you are certain that you are never certain about anything. Cool. I'd say that problem was with coherence rather than certainty.

What I argued was that you can't betray your self — Copernicus

You are betraying yourself, by writing as if we were here. We don't exist. There is only what you have in your head.

Again, people, this argument (OP) is not based on solipsism. Don't get distracted. — Copernicus

Yeah, it is. All those threads about not caring for anyone else - that's all part of your realisation that you are alone.

Or that you are mistaken.

I never know FOR SURE. — Copernicus

You seem very certain 'bout that.

That's the general way of arguing. — Copernicus

Sure is. But you have no one to argue with. It's all in your head. So why use the "general form?"

If you are taking letters coming through a screen, then there exist letters and a screen. But no, you are a solipsist. There is only your mind, so the stuff I write here is somehow just part of that.

What someone from other universe or dimension sees me taking and giving is unknowable to me. — Copernicus

There isn't any one from some other universe or dimension - there is only you, trapped in your head, making me up.

I see solipsism as the idea that we know nothing outside our heads, which creates the outside experience for us. — Copernicus

See that "we"? There is no "we" in solipsism.

There is just you. I'm not here.

Isn't it odd, that even now, as you read this, you seem to be responding to something new - something from "outside your head"? Something unexpected, novel, hopefully even quite annoying. What Banno does out here is changing what goes on "inside".

Or am I just you, doubting your sanity?

The only selfless act would be when you deny yourself gratification, gain, achievement, everything. Including your decision to deny self-interest to achieve the gratification of having the liberty of denying self-interest or to serve your adventurous desire to test yourself, and the idea of doing it all in your head by serving yourself an intellectual ride. — Copernicus

You are a solipsist. There isn't any one here for you to talk to. You are on your own. There is no one here to care about your opinion, or even to read your posts.

Oh - you are one of the solipsists who think other people exits? They are surprisingly common. But not that coherent.

I suppose, from the point of view of a solipsist, the very idea of an unselfish act is incoherent.

I meant that as a statement of fact.

Well, I'll just leave you to it. — Ludwig V

For him, we don't exist, so you already have left him to it.

I guess I'm just Copernicus laughing at himself.

As a solipsist, that's the core of my worldview. — Copernicus

You're a bit of a dill, arn't you.

we have no well-documented occurrences of exceptions to nature's "laws" (invariance) — Janus

Isn't that simply because when we find such exceptions, we change the laws?

Sure. The point was that she uses a model theoretical approach to set out Hume's scepticism formaly.

Leave it. I'll think about a thread on that article.

See the paper Hume’s Law and other Barriers to Entailment

Page seven is pretty clear.

An analytic delight! :party:

AI now writing your posts. — apokrisis

Something you'd never do...

I'll leave you to it, insults and all.

...the openness of beliefs closed under ontic commitment. — apokrisis

:nerd:

Have fun.

A trolly is that from which one serves tea.

The Tram Problem, as first articulated by Philippa Foot, concerned double effect; it's not an attempt to juxtapose deontology and utilitarianism. But that's how it is sometimes used in undergrad introductions to ethics. The problem with modal moral quandaries generally is that one can always make them impossible to solve.That's why they make for long and often tedious threads.

Cheers, Apo. More about me. Thanks!

It is about the openness of beliefs closed under ontic commitment. — apokrisis

:wink: The grand edifice is tinsel.

Friston’s Bayesian mechanics, like any Bayesian scheme, formalises rather than solves Hume's answer to his scepticism.

Friston describes how an adaptive system maintains itself by predicting and minimising surprise, treating say the nervous system as a hierarchical Bayesian network that continually updates its internal model of the world to reduce the gap between expected and actual sensory input. Neurons encode probabilistic beliefs; learning occurs through adjusting these beliefs (priors) to improve future predictions. This formalises pattern recognition as an inferential process: perception and action both serve to confirm or refine the brain’s generative model.

Relating this to Hume’s scepticism, Friston doesn’t refute it so much as operationalise it. Hume doubted that we can justify inferring the future from the past; Friston shows how organisms predict the future by continuously revising expectations in light of prediction errors. The model gives a pragmatic, mechanistic account of such learning, not a logical justification for it.

Friston’s Bayesian mechanics is widely influential but still speculative. It’s accepted in the sense that its core idea, the brain as a prediction machine that minimises error, has strong support across neuroscience, psychology, and AI. But the claim that all cognition, life or the universe as a whole can be explained as “free energy minimisation” is speculative, overly abstract or perhaps even unfalsifiable.

So his ideas are accepted as a powerful framework for modelling cognition and perception but speculative as a general theory of life, the universe and everything.

Adding Pierce and such looks good, but lacks substance.