On 11 Nov 2010, at 02:37, Brent Meeker wrote:
On 11/10/2010 4:54 PM, Rex Allen wrote:
<snip>
Put succinctly, if we have knowledge we must accept beliefs only
because we understand them to be true; but if determinism is correct,
then we automatically accept whatever beliefs that our constituent
micro-particles impose on us. It might be the case that those
micro-particles coincidentally make me believe true things, but the
truth would not be the ultimate causal agent acting upon me.
Whatever truth is, it isn't a causal agent.
There is plausibly no sense to see truth as the ultimate "causal" agent.
But self-referential correctness relatively to our most probable
(computational) histories might be, and this is part of truth.
We have good reason to believe that our brains are not so bad
dynamical mirror of the most probable consistent neighborhoods.
Like we have good reason to trust an altimeter in a plane.
When beliefs separate from knowledge, we leave the normal worlds, and
the dreams become less and less sharable, up to some consciousness
'backtracking', probably.
Eventually beliefs work *because* they are (self) determined, like
'free-will' can be seen as relative partial self-determination.
In science, we never know when we have knowledge, except perhaps on
arithmetic, but even there I am not entirely sure.
Determinism would be a problem if it was entailing 100% correct self-
determination, but that does not exist, for logical reasons.
Bruno
http://iridia.ulb.ac.be/~marchal/
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