I think if you avoid something long enough you can develop an aversion to it for that reason alone. I'm a coeliac, so I avoid gluten. At first, after diagnosis, I missed various foods I couldn't eat. But not any more, quite the opposite!
That's loopy. Strangely so.
Setting aside the undermining of the inference, another problem with the BB scenario is that a typical observer should not expect to see such a relatively ordered world. So our evidence does undercut the idea that the BB scenario is valid. I don't think it undercuts psychological disharmony.
We do NOT reject BBs as a skeptical scenario just because we shouldn't expect to exist in 5 minutes, and that's absurd. That is not what is going on with the BB scenario.
The things you highlight may be analogous. But that is not what makes BBs a problem. What makes BBs a problem is that predicting that we should be BBs undermines that very inference, so we cannot opt to accept that we are BBs. We can opt to accept psychological disharmony. (Or to be functionalist).
Still waiting for your return, @philipgoff.bsky.social!
I'm still asking myself if we are dancer. Profound.
But why avoid those cosmologies? It's because if we are BBs, then everything we know is unjustified, including anything that leads us to think we are BBs. I don't see an analogous motivation for avoiding psychophysical disharmony.
Contrast this with the Boltzmann Brain problem if you take the sort of cosmology that predicts them seriously. That's a genuine issue that demands a response. We can't just dismiss it because it's wildly skeptical.
We can dismiss that because there is no reason to think it is the case. Can we dismiss the problem of psychophysical harmony? If so, how? If not, then it's not a wildly skeptical scenario, and it could be true.
You don't get to say it's a conceptual possibility that I don't think is actual, so it's not that you're proposing a skeptical scenario, and still insist that it demands an explanation that it is not the case.
Maybe we are all vegetables that are dreaming of being human. We could be pomegranates. Or dragon fruit. Or bananas. There are many more ways to be fruit than to be human. So we have a problem to explain. Or we don't.
It's either a skeptical scenario that can be dismisses without explanation, or a serious problem that demands an explanation. As Keith says, you can't have it both ways.
Or, sorry, got the examples mixed up. He asked if the world could have been created 5 minutes ago as well as the Matrix thing.
You tell 'im Keith! I've been saying the same thing to him over on Substack, then he gave me the same 5 minutes ago point. philipgoff.substack.com/p/debating-e...
Maybe if there is some way you could pose it as a question?
Congrats!
And the output of a crappy animation script would look exactly the same as a massive high-res uncompressedAVI file of that animation. You're comparing the output of a simple program with a recording of the output of a simple program. Make BB sound like the Royal Philharmonic and I'll be impressed.
If you don't care about the output being any good, you could write a small program to produce some sort of crappy animation that takes a movie script as an input. To have it actually follow the script would be a tall order, but it could if nothing else use it as a random seed.
Very big! I'm not saying it will fit on a floppy, but it could at least be deterministic and so give a similar user experience.
Also WAV is uncompressed, so it's not a great measure of information complexity. You can write a program that produced gigabytes filled with the letter A in very little space, but it will compress to nothing. Try compressing your WAV and that will give a better comparison.
The point is that not all the information is in the blueprint. The system that interprets it adds a huge amount to it. In the near future you probably will be able to get an AI to deterministically produce a movie from a script. It may not be as good, but BeepBox isn't the Royal Philharmonic either.
I think it's related, though. The difference between beepbox and a team of people making a movie is that the former is deterministic and repeatable and it has much easier job to do. Another analogy might be DNA and a whole organism.
Yeah, and how come a movie script is like a couple hundred kilobytes, but even a well-compressed 4K blueray rip is gonna be literally a million times bigger? What's up with that?
Maybe we can all agree to that?
Maybe this disagreement is more about degree of certainty? If Philip had said "I doubt science is going to resolve it because I think the problem is of another category" then we might all agree this is fair? Sure, science *might* resolve it. But it's OK to articulate reasons for doubt.
I wouldn't want to foreclose on those research programmes. Let them go ahead and see what they come up with. But I'm going to claim that they are not going to solve it, because I think Dennett is right. And I think Philip is doing something similar. I think it's a fair claim to make.
If you are right about consciousness, then I don't think science is going to resolve it. The conceptual work needed was already done by Dennett. If Philip is right, then science isn't going to do it either. Science is going to succeed only if someone like Anil Seth is right.
I don't think that's analogous to what Philip is asking for, though. As I understand it, Paley just didn't see a way for nature to produce what looked like design -- he thought it was preposterous. But not a category mistake.
You've sort of lost me here, Keith. Design seems to me to be more a hypothesis about the origin of life rather than a conceptualisation of what life is. Though I'm open to the idea that Paley would have perceived some sort of category mistake in trying to explain life with physical science.
