Jean Descole (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
scientificflair) wrote2012-12-08 12:39 pm
scientificflair) wrote2012-12-08 12:39 pm
007. [Audio/also a couple of other things.]
[AUDIO]
[More violin music over Descole's feed today; it's an incredibly simplified version of Song of the Stars - although really, someone ought to teach him the Jeopardy theme, considering how much that instrument gets whipped out when he's feeling like bombarding the network with both the fact that he can't hold all his feels, and he has something best described as "pseudo-philosophical what" to say.
As before, he plays for a while before the melody fades and shifts into something long and drawn-out, idling while he speaks; the sound is quieter, as though the violin has been directed away from the 'Gear a bit.]
There's a famous thought experiment that poses the following:
Imagine yourself standing outside a large field; you see, in the distance, what looks to you to be a specific animal - for simplicity's sake, let's say a bull. You then form the belief that there is a bull in the field. And you are correct - there is, indeed, a bull in the field. However, the bull is lying down behind a hill, just outside your line of vision; you can't see it from your current position. Moreover, what you actually saw was a tarp that had gotten tangled over a bush; from outside the field, it looked like a bull, but actually wasn't anything of the sort.
Again, you were factually correct, and you had a well-justified true belief that there was a bull in the field. However, can you really say you knew?
[He pauses for a moment, continuing to play quietly while he thinks.]
And if you were to find yourself in such a situation - where a belief is true and well-justified, and yet the proof of it being true isn't where you believe it is - would you say that your belief was any less valid?
[And with that, the feed cuts off.]
[PRIVATE TEXT TO FLUTTERSHY]
Miss Fluttershy,
I have something to ask you, should it not be an inconvenience.
[PRIVATE TEXT TO COLONEL ARCHER]
There's something that we need to discuss.
Now.
[More violin music over Descole's feed today; it's an incredibly simplified version of Song of the Stars - although really, someone ought to teach him the Jeopardy theme, considering how much that instrument gets whipped out when he's feeling like bombarding the network with both the fact that he can't hold all his feels, and he has something best described as "pseudo-philosophical what" to say.
As before, he plays for a while before the melody fades and shifts into something long and drawn-out, idling while he speaks; the sound is quieter, as though the violin has been directed away from the 'Gear a bit.]
There's a famous thought experiment that poses the following:
Imagine yourself standing outside a large field; you see, in the distance, what looks to you to be a specific animal - for simplicity's sake, let's say a bull. You then form the belief that there is a bull in the field. And you are correct - there is, indeed, a bull in the field. However, the bull is lying down behind a hill, just outside your line of vision; you can't see it from your current position. Moreover, what you actually saw was a tarp that had gotten tangled over a bush; from outside the field, it looked like a bull, but actually wasn't anything of the sort.
Again, you were factually correct, and you had a well-justified true belief that there was a bull in the field. However, can you really say you knew?
[He pauses for a moment, continuing to play quietly while he thinks.]
And if you were to find yourself in such a situation - where a belief is true and well-justified, and yet the proof of it being true isn't where you believe it is - would you say that your belief was any less valid?
[And with that, the feed cuts off.]
[PRIVATE TEXT TO FLUTTERSHY]
Miss Fluttershy,
I have something to ask you, should it not be an inconvenience.
[PRIVATE TEXT TO COLONEL ARCHER]
There's something that we need to discuss.
Now.
audio;
So, to use the bull example again — in a formal setting, I say, "there is a bull in that field." When asked to explain how I arrived at that conclusion, I would answer, "because I saw a bull in it." If we later investigated, we'd discover that there was indeed a bull there, rendering my conclusion true, but that what I had seen was a tarp, rendering my explanation false.
Diagrammed out that way, I can't see how I could use anything other than the flawed model, really — since I don't know it's flawed until we investigate, and I have no reason to believe that what I saw wasn't a bull. And while the outcome of it might be that I would have reason to question my bull-spotting skills in the future, that's a different consideration than whether or not there really was a bull there in the first place.
I hope you'll pardon my attempt at laying things out in this way; it's undeniably a complicated problem, and I admit I'm attempting to work through my own conclusions even as we discuss them.