Thursday, July 24, 2008

Probability of truth

Following on from the previous post
I think most philosophy is more of the .35/.33/.32 nature - i.e if you take a strong position you have excluded most of the possibilities but you cant have a particularly useful opinion that includes more than half of them.

take for example epiphenominal qualia.
one might argue that one had a .6 confidence in dualism and .4 in physicalism (assuming the two options include everything)
now we assume that we have .6 confidence in epiphenominal qualia vs .4 in non-epiphenominal qualia.
now we actually only have .36 confidence in epiphenominal qualia .4 in physicalism and .24 in non epiphenominal qualia.
now maybe we can in fairness divide the probability of physicalism being true into various forms of physicalism.

the two things we learn here is that to have a position that has much information we need to be willing at least in theory to accept a probability of less than 50% and that if you are focusing on comitting to the most likely option the answer you give may depend on what the question is.

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