All math pays rent.
For all mathematical theorems can be restated in the form:
If the axioms A, B, and C and the conditions X, Y and Z are satisfied, then the statement Q is also true.
Therefore, in any situations where the statements A,B,C and X,Y,Z are true, you will expect Q to also be verified.
In other words, mathematical statements automatically pay rent in terms of changing what you expect. (Which is) the very thing it was required to show. ■
In practice:
If you demonstrate Pythagoras's Theorem, and you calculate that 3^2+4^2=5^2, you will expect a certain method of getting right angles to work.
If you exhibit the aperiodic Penrose Tiling, you will expect Quasicrystals to exist.
If you demonstrate the impossibility of solving to the Halting Problem, you will not expect even a hypothetical hyperintelligence to be able to solve it.
If you understand why you can't trisect an angle with an unmarked ruler and a compass (not both used at the same time), you will know immediately that certain proofs are going to be wrong.
and so on and so forth.
Yes, we might not immediately know where a given mathematical fact will come in handy when observing the world, but by their nature, mathematical facts tell us exactly when to expect them.
In practice, most of the time people figure out what to connect it to later. More precisely, most of it probably doesn't connect to anything, but what does connect to stuff usually isn't found to do so until much later than it is invented/discovered.
Some ungrounded concepts can produce your own behavior which in itself can be experienced, so it's difficult to draw the line just by requiring concepts to be grounded. You believe that you believe in something, because you experience yourself acting in a way consistent with you believing in it. It can define intrinsic goal system, point in mind design space as you call it. So one can't abolish all such concepts, only resist acquiring them.
For any instrumental activity, done to achieve some other end, it makes sense to check that specific examples are in fact achieving the intended end.
Most beliefs may have as their end the refinement of personal decisions. For such beliefs it makes sense not only to check whether they effect your personal experience, but also whether they effect any decisions you might make; beliefs could effect experience without mattering for decisions.
On the other hand, some beliefs may have as their end effecting the experiences or decisions of other creatures, such as in the far future. And you may care about effects that are not experienced by any creatures.
Elizer, your post above strikes me, at least, as a restatement of verificationism: roughly, the view that the truth of a claim is the set of observations that it predicts. While this view enjoyed considerable popularity in the first part of the last century (and has notable antecedents going back into the early 18th century), it faces considerable conceptual hurdles, all of which have been extensively discussed in philosophical circles. One of the most prominent (and noteworthy in light of some of your other views) is the conflict between verificationism and scientific realism: that is, the presumption that science is more than mere data-predictive modeling, but the discovery of how the world really is. See also here and here.
Rooney, as discussed in The Simple Truth I follow a correspondence theory of truth. I am also a Bayesian and a believer in Occam's Razor. If a belief has no empirical consequences then it could receive no Bayesian confirmation and could not rise to my subjective attention. In principle there are many true beliefs for which I have no evidence, but in practice I can never know what these true beliefs are, or even focus on them enough to think them explicitly, because they are so vastly outnumbered by false beliefs for which I can find no evidence.
I, too, am nervous about having anticipated experience as the only criterion for truth and meaning. It seems to me that a statement can get its meaning either from the class of prior actions which make it true or from the class of future observations which its truth makes inevitable. We can't do quantum mechanics with kets, but no bras. We can't do Gentzen natural deduction with rules of elimination, but no rules of introduction. We can't do Bayesian updating with observations, but no priors. And I claim that you can't have a theory of meaning which deals only with consequences of statements being true but not with what actions put the universe into a state in which the statement becomes true.
This position of mine comes from my interpretation of the dissertation of Noam Zeilberger of CMU (2005, I think). Zeilberger's main concern lies in Logic and Computer Science, but along the way he discusses theories of truth implicit in the work of Martin-Lof and Dummett.
It's amazing how many forms of irrationality failure to see the map-territory distinction, and the resulting reification of categories (like 'sound') that exist in the mind, causes: stupid arguments, phlogiston, the Mind Projection Fallacy, correspondence bias, and probably also monotheism, substance dualism, the illusion of the self, the use of the correspondence theory of truth in moral questions... how many more?
I think you're being too hard on the English professor, though. I suspect literary labels do have something to do with the contents of a book, no matter how much nonsense might be attached to them. But I've never experienced a college English class; perhaps my innocent fantasies will be shaken then.
Michael V, you could say that mathematical propositions are really predictions about the behavior of physical systems like adding machines and mathematicians. I don't find that view very satisfying, because math seems to so fundamentally underly everything else - mathematical truths can't be changed by changing anything physical, for instance - but it's one way to make math compatible with anticipation.
It's amazing how many forms of irrationality failure to see the map-territory distinction
Should have been "how many forms of irrationality result from failure...". Sorry.
I agree with those who say it's okay to figure things out later. If my music professor says a certain composer favors the Aeolian mode, I may not be able to visualize that on the spot but who cares? I can remember that statement and think about it later. Likewise with phlogiston, I have a vague concept of what it is and someday the alchemists will discover more precisely what's going on there.
Too much cognitive effort would be spent if, every time I thought about linear algebra, I had to visualize the myriad concrete instances in which it will be applied. I bet thinking in abstractions results in way more economical use of thinking time and thinking-matter.
Mark: Believing that beliefs should be grounded anticipates that there is absolutely no change in anticipation if one were to change these free floating ideas. Of course this doesn't really answer your question because it just restates the definition of 'free floating beliefs' in different words. This belief actually follows from Eliezers belief in Occam's Razor, which predicts that when faced with unexplained events, if one creates a set of theories explaining these events, any predictions made by the simple theories are more likely to actually happen tha...
Jan: Occam's razor is not so much a rule of science but an operating guideline for doing science. It could be reduced to "test simple theories first". In the past this has been very useful in keeping scientific effort productive, the 'belief' is that it will continue to be useful in this way.
This led to a fun read of "occam's razor" wikipedia entry. Hickum's dictum in particular was a great find (generalized beyond medicine, it could be that explanations for unexplained events can be as complex as they damn well please). As a practical corrective, it seems to me that probability theory suggests that the best accessible explanation to us for unexplained events is in the set of simpler theories, but is probably not one of the absolute simplest.
Eliezer once wrote that "We can build up whole networks of beliefs that are connected only to each other - call these "floating" beliefs. It is a uniquely human flaw among animal species, a perversion of Homo sapiens's ability to build more general and flexible belief networks.
The rationalist virtue of empiricism consists of constantly asking which experiences our beliefs predict - or better yet, prohibit."
I can't see how nearly all of the beliefs expressed in this post predict or prohibit any experience.
"Alchemists believed that phlogiston caused fire"
How is that different than our current belief that oxygen causes fire?
The absence of oxygen isn't much like a substance whose release is fire:
etc.
You're giving phlogiston qualities no one who held that theory gave it. If you want to call the absence of oxygen phlogiston, okay, but you aren't talking about the same phlogiston everyone else is talking about. Moreover, thinking about fire this way is clumsy and incompatible with the rest of our knowledge about physics and chemistry.
We already had a conception of matter when phlogiston was invented... and phlogiston was understood as a kind of matter. To say the phlogiston is really this other kind of thing, which isn't matter but a particular kind of absence of matter is both unhelpful and a distortion of phlogiston theory. The whole point of the phlogiston theory was that they thought there was a kind of matter responsible for fire! But there isn't matter like that.
Now by defining phlogiston as the absence of oxygen you might be able to model combustion in a narrow set of circumstances-- but you couldn't fit that model with any of your other knowledge about physics and chemistry.
In short neither the original kind nor your kind of phlogiston exist.
Because one of these allows you to make predictions, and the other doesn't. Saying "fire has a cause, and I'm going to call it 'phlogiston'!" doesn't tell you anything about fire, it's just a relabeling.
The hypothesis went a little deeper than that. "Flammable things contain a substance, and its release is fire" lets you make many predictions — e.g., that things will burn in vacuum, or that things burned in open air will always lose mass (this is how it was falsified).
I loved this post, but I have to be a worthless pedant.
If you drop a ball off a 120-m tall building, you expect impact in t=sqrt(2H/g)=~5 s. But that would be when the second-hand is on the 1 numeral.
What about knowledge for the sake of knowledge? For instance I don't anticipate that my belief that The Crusades took place will ever directly affect my sensory experiences in any way. Does that then mean that this belief is completely worthless and on the same level as the belief in ghosts, psychics, phlogiston, etc.?
Wouldn't taking your chain of reasoning to its logical conclusion require one to "evict" all beliefs in everything that one has not, and does not anticipate to, personally see, hear, smell, taste, or touch? After all, how much personal sensory experience do you have that confirms the existence of atoms, for example?
DP
You write, “suppose your postmodern English professor teaches you that the famous writer Wulky Wilkinsen is actually a ‘post-utopian’. What does this mean you should expect from his books? Nothing.”
I’m sympathetic to your general argument in this article, but this particular jibe is overstating your case.
There may be nothing particularly profound in the idea of ‘post-utopianism’, but it’s not meaningless. Let me see if I can persuade you.
Utopianism is the belief that an ideal society (or at least one that's much better than ours) can be constructed, for example by the application of a particular political ideology. It’s an idea that has been considered and criticized here on LessWrong. Utopian fiction explores this belief, often by portraying such an ideal society, or the process that leads to one. In utopian fiction one expects to see characters who are perfectible, conflicts resolved successfully or peacefully, and some kind of argument in favour of utopianism. Post-utopian fiction is written in reaction to this, from a skeptical or critical viewpoint about the perfectibility of people and the possibility of improving society. One expects to see irretrievably flawed characters, i...
Would you consider Le Guin's The Dispossessed to be post-utopian? I think she intends her Anarres to be a good place on the whole, and a decent partial attempt at achieving a utopia, but still to have plausible problems.
I think it's both. "Brave New World" portrays a dystopia (Huxley called it a "negative utopia") but it's also post-utopian because it displays skepticism towards utopian ideals (Huxley wrote it in reaction to H. G. Wells' "Men Like Gods").
I don't claim any expertise on this subject: in fact, I hadn't heard of post-utopianism at all until I read the word in this article. It just seemed to me to be overstating the case to claim that a term like this is meaningless. Vague, certainly. Not very profound, yes. But meaningless, no.
The meaning is easily deducible: in the history of ideas "post-" is often used to mean "after; in consequence of; in reaction to" (and "utopian" is straightforward). I checked my understanding by searching Google Scholar and Books: there seems to be only one book on the subject (The post-utopian imagination: American culture in the long 1950s by M. Keith Booker) but from reading the preview it seems to be using the word in the way that I described above.
The fact that the literature on the subject is small makes post-utopianism an easier target for this kind of attack: few people are likely to be familiar with the idea, or motivated to defend it, and it's harder to establish what the consensus on the subject is. By contrast, imagine trying to claim that "hard science fiction" was a meaningless term.
Indeed. Some rationalists have a fondness for using straw postmodernists to illustrate irrationality. (Note that Alan Sokal deliberately chose a very poor journal, not even peer-reviewed, to send his fake paper to.) It's really not all incomprehensible Frenchmen. While there may be a small number of postmodernists who literally do not believe objective reality exists, and some more who try to deconstruct actual science and not just the scientists doing it, it remains the case that the human cultural realm is inherently squishy and much more relative than people commonly assume, and postmodernism is a useful critical technique to get through the layers of obfuscation motivating many human cultural activities. Any writer of fiction who is any good, for instance, needs to know postmodernist techniques, whether they call them that or not.
How is this not just a simple arguement on semantics (on which I believe a vast majority of arguements are based)?
They both accept that the tree causes vibrations in the air as it falls, and they both accept that no human ear will ever hear it. The arguement appears to be based solely on the definition, and surrounding implications, of the word "sound" (or "noise" as it becomes in the article) - and is therefore no arguement at all.
"Or suppose your postmodern English professor teaches you that the famous Wulky Wilkinsen is actually a "post-utopian". What does this mean you should expect from his book? Nothing."
When I first read this I thought, "Huh? Surely it tells you something, because I already have beliefs about what 'utopian' probably means, and what the 'post' part of it probably means, and what context these types of terms are usually used in... That sounds like a whole bag of reasons to expect certain things/themes/ideas in his book!"
But I think ...
But why do beliefs need to pay rent in anticipated experiences? Why can’t they pay rent in utility?
If some average Joe believes he’s smart and beautiful, and that gives him utility, is that necessarily a bad thing? Joe approaches a girl in a bar, dips his sweaty fingers in her iced drink, cracks a piece of ice in his teeth, pulls it out of his mouth, shoves it in her face for demonstration, and says, “Now that I’d broken the ice—”
She thinks: “What a butt-ugly idiot!” and gets the hell away from him.
Joe goes on happily believing that he’s smart and beautifu...
This post probably changed the way I regulate my own thoughts more than any other. How many arguments I have heard never would have happened if everyone involved read this...
Based on this, I would very much like to make a variant of Monopoly, with beliefs/theories in place of properties, and evidence for money. Invest a large chunk to establish a belief, with its rent determined by sophistication and usefulness of prediction, ranging from Aristotelian physics to relativity, spermatists & ovists to Darwinian evolution, and so on. Other players would have to give you some credit when they land on your theories, and admit that they give results.
This would also be a great way to teach some history of science, if well designed.
Of course, the analogy becomes interesting when you consider what corresponds to the cutthroat capitalism...
I don't understand how the examples given illustrate free-floating beliefs: they seem to have at least some predictive powers, and thus shape anticipation - (some comments by others below illustrate this better).
The phlogiston theory had predictive power (e.g. what kind of "air" could be expected to support combustion, and that substances would grow lighter when they burned), and it was falsifyable (and was eventually falsified). It had advantages over the theories it replaced and was replaced by another theory which represented a better under
I think that this is really a discussion of explanatory power, of which scientific causation is one example. All theories attempt to explain a set of examples. Scientific theories attempt to explain causation in natural phenomena, thus their "explanatory power" is proportional to their predictive power. A unified theory of forces at the planetary and subatomic levels would explain more examples than any do now, thus it would have great explanatory power.
Yet causation isn't the only type of explanatory relationship. Causation implies time and eve...
Wonderful exposition of versificationism (I meant verificationism lol, but I won't change it cause I like the reply bellow). I do have a question though. You said:
It's tempting to try to eliminate this mistake class by insisting that the only legitimate kind of belief is an anticipation of sensory experience. But the world does, in fact, contain much that is not sensed directly.
Well yes, we don't directly observe atoms (actually we do now but we didn't have to). But it is still save to say that if a belief doesn't make predictions about future sensory...
A related epistemology that is popular in the business world is PowerPointificationism, which holds that the truth of a proposition should be evaluated by how easily it can be expressed in PowerPoint. Due to the nature of PowerPoint as a means of expression, this epistemology often produces results similar to those of Occam's sand-blaster, which holds that the simplest explanation is the correct one (note that unlike Occam's razor, Occam's sand-blaster does not require that the explanation be consistent with observation).
Good article. Some thoughts:
I probably constrain my experiences in lots of ways that I don't even know about, but I don't think there's always a way to know whether a belief will constrain your experiences, even if it is based on empirical (or even scientific) observation. Isaac Newton's beliefs constrained all of our beliefs for centuries. Scholars were so unwilling to question classical mechanics that they came up with this "ether" stuff that could never be observed directly, and thus didn't further constrain their experience, but had the ni...
I understand that having beliefs that are falsifiable in principle and make predictions about experience is incredibly important. But I have always wondered if my belief in falsifiability was itself falsifiable. In any possible universe I can imagine it seems that holding the principle of falsifiability for our beliefs would be a good idea. I can't imagine a universe or an experience that would make me give this up.
How can I believe in the principle of falsifiability that is itself unfalsifiable?! I feel as though something has gone wrong in my thinking but I can't tell what. Please help!
I have read this post before and have agreed to it. But I read it again just now and have new doubts.
I still agree that beliefs should pay rent in anticipated experiences. But I am not sure any more that the examples stated here demonstrate it.
Consider the example of the tree falling in a forest. Both sides of the argument do have anticipated experiences connected to their beliefs. For the first person, the test of whether a tree makes a sound or not is to place an air vibration detector in the vicinity of the tree and check it later. If it did detect some...
Suppose someone, on inspecting his own beliefs to date, discovers a certain sense of underlying structure; for instance, one may observe a recurring theme of evolutionary logic. Then while deciding on a new set of beliefs, would it not be considered reasonable for him to anticipate and test for similar structure, just as he would use other 'external' evidence? Here, we are not dealing with direct experience, so much as the mere belief of an experience of coherence within one's thoughts.. which may be an illusion, for all we know. But then again, assuming that the existing thoughts came from previous 'external' evidence, could one say that the anticipated structure is indeed well-rooted in experience already?
I was reading those 'what good is math?' and 'what good is music' comments. You can determine what if any 'system' is good or bad based on the understanding or misunderstanding of the variables involved.
i.e: one does not have any use for math if they do not understand any of the vast variables associated with the concepts of math. Math cannot be any good to this person who doesn't understand.
This principle applies to any 'system' whether it be math, music, love, life... etc.
If a belief turns deadbeat, evict it.
This might be challenging because our beliefs tend to shape the world we live in thus masking their error. Does anyone have any practical tips for discovering erroneous beliefs?
What about things I remember from long ago, which no one else remembers and for which I can find no present evidence or record of besides those memories themselves?
Then what does this belief not allow to happen—what would definitely falsify this belief? A null answer means that your belief does not constrain experience; it permits anything to happen to you.
What if I had the belief that a certain coin was unfair, with a 51% chance of heads and only 49% chance of tails? Certainly I could observe an absurd amount of coin flips, and each bunch of them could nudge my belief -- but short of an infinite number of flips, none would "definitely" falsify it. Certainly in this case, I could come to believe with an...
Another example of these types of questions: "If a man who cannot count finds a four-leaf clover, is he lucky?" (Stanisław Jerzy Lec)
Or suppose your postmodern English professor teaches you that the famous writer Wulky Wilkinsen is actually a "post-utopian".
Suppose you, an invisible man, overheard 1,000,000 distinct individual humans proclaim "I believe that Velma Valedo and Wulky Wilkinsen are post-utopians based on several thorough readings of their complete bibliographies!"
Must there be some correspondence (probably an extremely complex connection) between the writings, and, quite possibly, between some of the 1,000,000 brains that believe this? The subjectivel...
What evidence is there for floating beliefs being uniquely human? As far as I know, neuroscience hasn't advanced far enough to be able to tell if other species have floating beliefs or not.
Edit: Then again, the question of if floating beliefs are uniquely human is practically a floating belief itself.
Interesting post. However, I do not agree completely in the conclutions on the end.
I am a student in math science, what involves me into an enviroment of researchers of this area. In this way, I am able to see that this people's work is based on beliefs that 'does not exists', I mean, they work on abstract ideas that generally only exists in their minds. And now I wonder, does their efforts 'does not pay rent'? They live from structures and stuff that, in the most of the cases, cannot be found in 'real life', and so, according to the article's conclution, ...
If we extend the concept of making beliefs pay rent to structures in computer memory, then AIs could better choose which structures are more valuable than they cost when many objects are shared in an acyclic network. Each object at the bottom could cost 1, and any objects pointing at x equally share the cost of x plus 1 for themself. If beliefs are stored in these memory structures, then a belief would be evicted when its objective cost exceeds some measure of its value, and total value would be in units of memory available. When some beliefs are evicted, ...
Wulky Wilkinsen is a “post-utopian.” What does this mean you should expect from his books? Nothing. The belief, if you can call it that, doesn’t connect to sensory experience at all.
I don't believe this is a good example. That information actually can change your anticipation.
By knowing that information you can expect the book will be set in a post-utopian world. By anticipating that you can maybe take better notice at the setting and how exactly the world is post-utopian.
But a great article nevertheless.
I dont get it.Any belief could be said to "pay rent" if you can conceive a situation where it will be useful later on.
A general situation that I made up was.
Given any belief X and at least 2 people believe X,I always have utility in believing X(I think it should be knowing) as it helps me predict the actions of the other 2 people that believe in X.
Even in the example where the student regurgitates it onto the upcoming quiz-the belief had utility for him as he could use that to improve his grades(constraining reality in a way he wants it to be).
I...
Yes! And another way to think about the arguments about beliefs that aren’t predicting anything is that they are really about definitions. When I listen to people talk and argue, I often find myself thinking “well, this depends on how you define X”. For example, is sound something that a living creature perceives, or is it vibrations in the air?
Why is 'constraining anticipation' the only acceptable form of rent?
What if a belief doesn't modify the predictions generated by the map, but it does reduce the computational complexity of moving around the map in our imaginations? It hasn't reduced anticipation in theory, but in practice it allows us to more cheaply collapse anticipation fields, because it lowers the computational complexity of reasoning about what to anticipate in a given scenario? I find concepts like the multiverse very useful here - you don't 'need' them to reduce your anticipation as...
Then what is the difference between belief and assumption in our mental maps.
What about imagination? Is that belief or assumption or in-congruent map of reality.
Can imagination be part of mental processing without making us wrong about reality.
For instance, if I imagine that all buses in my city are blue, though they are red, can I then walk around with this model of reality in my head without a false belief? After all its just imagination?
Or is this model going to corrupt my thinking as I walk about thinking it, knowing full well its not true.
Furthe...
A couple of important limitations to the concept:
The concept assumes that beliefs should be tied to observable, testable phenomena. However, there are many important aspects of life and human experience (like emotions, subjective experiences, and certain philosophical or religious beliefs) that aren't easily observable or testable. The concept can be less applicable or useful in these areas.
It also doesn't address truth value: The concept encourages beliefs to be tied to specific anticipations, but it doesn't necessarily address the truth value of th...
...It’s tempting to try to eliminate this mistake class by insisting that the only legitimate kind of belief is an anticipation of sensory experience. But the world does, in fact, contain much that is not sensed directly. We don’t see the atoms underlying the brick, but the atoms are in fact there. There is a floor beneath your feet, but you don’t experience the floor directly; you see the light reflected from the floor, or rather, you see what your retina and visual cortex have processed of that light. To infer the floor from seeing the floor is to step back
There is a floor beneath your feet, but you don’t experience the floor directly; you see the light reflected from the floor, or rather, you see what your retina and visual cortex have processed of that light
But indeed, I experience the floor directly; the experience of the floor is not limited to visual perception but also involves direct sensory inputs. The sensation caused by gravitational pull and the counter-pressure from the floor are experienced directly. Additionally, the sound produced when stepping on the floor and the anticipation of the fl...
continue to pay rent in future anticipations. If a belief turns deadbeat, evict it.
I guess that "paying rent" was not only a metaphor xD. But it's really a good advice to cut back on everything that lacks practical use, when you're on tight schedule/budget.
There are patterns in how the world works. This is effective way in finding those patterns. The most optimal way of finding the right beliefs / patterns will not have any attachment to views - anticipating a result seems a little counterproductive to finding optimal patterns as it biases you to hold onto current beliefs.
Simply ask questions - explore and exploit working patterns.
Thus begins the ancient parable:
If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound? One says, "Yes it does, for it makes vibrations in the air." Another says, "No it does not, for there is no auditory processing in any brain."
Suppose that, after the tree falls, the two walk into the forest together. Will one expect to see the tree fallen to the right, and the other expect to see the tree fallen to the left? Suppose that before the tree falls, the two leave a sound recorder next to the tree. Would one, playing back the recorder, expect to hear something different from the other? Suppose they attach an electroencephalograph to any brain in the world; would one expect to see a different trace than the other? Though the two argue, one saying "No," and the other saying "Yes," they do not anticipate any different experiences. The two think they have different models of the world, but they have no difference with respect to what they expect will happen to them.
It's tempting to try to eliminate this mistake class by insisting that the only legitimate kind of belief is an anticipation of sensory experience. But the world does, in fact, contain much that is not sensed directly. We don't see the atoms underlying the brick, but the atoms are in fact there. There is a floor beneath your feet, but you don't experience the floor directly; you see the light reflected from the floor, or rather, you see what your retina and visual cortex have processed of that light. To infer the floor from seeing the floor is to step back into the unseen causes of experience. It may seem like a very short and direct step, but it is still a step.
You stand on top of a tall building, next to a grandfather clock with an hour, minute, and ticking second hand. In your hand is a bowling ball, and you drop it off the roof. On which tick of the clock will you hear the crash of the bowling ball hitting the ground?
To answer precisely, you must use beliefs like Earth's gravity is 9.8 meters per second per second, and This building is around 120 meters tall. These beliefs are not wordless anticipations of a sensory experience; they are verbal-ish, propositional. It probably does not exaggerate much to describe these two beliefs as sentences made out of words. But these two beliefs have an inferential consequence that is a direct sensory anticipation—if the clock's second hand is on the 12 numeral when you drop the ball, you anticipate seeing it on the 1 numeral when you hear the crash five seconds later. To anticipate sensory experiences as precisely as possible, we must process beliefs that are not anticipations of sensory experience.
It is a great strength of Homo sapiens that we can, better than any other species in the world, learn to model the unseen. It is also one of our great weak points. Humans often believe in things that are not only unseen but unreal.
The same brain that builds a network of inferred causes behind sensory experience, can also build a network of causes that is not connected to sensory experience, or poorly connected. Alchemists believed that phlogiston caused fire—we could oversimply their minds by drawing a little node labeled "Phlogiston", and an arrow from this node to their sensory experience of a crackling campfire—but this belief yielded no advance predictions; the link from phlogiston to experience was always configured after the experience, rather than constraining the experience in advance. Or suppose your postmodern English professor teaches you that the famous writer Wulky Wilkinsen is actually a "post-utopian". What does this mean you should expect from his books? Nothing. The belief, if you can call it that, doesn't connect to sensory experience at all. But you had better remember the propositional assertion that "Wulky Wilkinsen" has the "post-utopian" attribute, so you can regurgitate it on the upcoming quiz. Likewise if "post-utopians" show "colonial alienation"; if the quiz asks whether Wulky Wilkinsen shows colonial alienation, you'd better answer yes. The beliefs are connected to each other, though still not connected to any anticipated experience.
We can build up whole networks of beliefs that are connected only to each other—call these "floating" beliefs. It is a uniquely human flaw among animal species, a perversion of Homo sapiens's ability to build more general and flexible belief networks.
The rationalist virtue of empiricism consists of constantly asking which experiences our beliefs predict—or better yet, prohibit. Do you believe that phlogiston is the cause of fire? Then what do you expect to see happen, because of that? Do you believe that Wulky Wilkinsen is a post-utopian? Then what do you expect to see because of that? No, not "colonial alienation"; what experience will happen to you? Do you believe that if a tree falls in the forest, and no one hears it, it still makes a sound? Then what experience must therefore befall you?
It is even better to ask: what experience must not happen to you? Do you believe that elan vital explains the mysterious aliveness of living beings? Then what does this belief not allow to happen—what would definitely falsify this belief? A null answer means that your belief does not constrain experience; it permits anything to happen to you. It floats.
When you argue a seemingly factual question, always keep in mind which difference of anticipation you are arguing about. If you can't find the difference of anticipation, you're probably arguing about labels in your belief network—or even worse, floating beliefs, barnacles on your network. If you don't know what experiences are implied by Wulky Wilkinsen being a post-utopian, you can go on arguing forever. (You can also publish papers forever.)
Above all, don't ask what to believe—ask what to anticipate. Every question of belief should flow from a question of anticipation, and that question of anticipation should be the center of the inquiry. Every guess of belief should begin by flowing to a specific guess of anticipation, and should continue to pay rent in future anticipations. If a belief turns deadbeat, evict it.