This time I disagree with Eliezer...this experiment won't convince me that 2+2=3...wouldn't even convince me that physical maxim "everything goes somewhere" is wrong...I would find where the earplugs are (even if they sublimated). That still don't make that an "imutable belief".
There's nothing wrong in switching lexically 3 and 4 ( S(2) = 4; S(4) = 3; S(3) = 5 )...sounds unuseful, and don't attack Peano's axioms. That would make me believe in 2+2=3.
To stop believing in the integer numbers, it's needed to prove an inconsistency in Peano's axioms (even if their representation is physical, inside the brain), and this experiment doesn't prove that.
If the 2+2=3 gets usual in every empirical test I do, as suggested in this article (no matter how absurd it can seem to be), I wouldn't stop believing in the integer numbers: I would have a NEW number system (axioms/definitions) with this characteristic (2+2=3). That's a new model, and what was empirically falsified before, was the link between the old model and the physical reality I could notice, but not the old model itself.
I've got curious about paraconsistent logics in this case...
Nice, but the difference with this "belief" is that you're talking about sensory "counting" (visual grouping), and I was talking about the numbers themselves, as models for games, other phenomena, etc., and not just as a "counting" tool.
In the 1+1=3 example, to define the cardinality, he/she used the Peano's axioms, didn't he/she?
I don't see the "visual sensory counting" as the only use for "2+2=4", that's why I don't think this experiment would refute such a priori content.
Another idea: let Ann be a girl with hemispatial neglect in a extinction condition. Ann has problems detecting anything on the left, and she can possibly see 2+2=3 as idealized above, due her brain damage. Will she think that 2+2=3? I don't think so...but if she does...will that be a model for all "integer numbers" aplications? I think in "integer" as a framework for several phenomena, other models, other knowledge, not only the counting one.
For the minds that see 2+2=4 as something patently absurd, because 2+2=3 is part of their intuitive arithmetic, these minds probably won't see the 2+2=4 even when brought to a world like ours. After a time in the 2+2=4 world, they probably won't forget that 2+2=3, unless the 2+2=3 wasn't modeling anything else. But the 2+2=3 was modeling something in their past history, at least the counting principle of their world. So they still have the 2+2=3 belief in their lives while they remember their past. If they forget their past, the 2+2=3 belief might became unuseful, but that still don't make the 2+2=3 an absurd or replaced by the 2+2=4: there are 2 number systems here.
For me, 2+2=3 isn't an absurd. That might be seem as a "common sum with a 3/4 multiplier" or a "X + Y = X p Y/X" where "p" is our common sum and "/" is our division, etc.. This way, like the 1+1=3 example above, only overloads the "+" operator. But, again, this "+" isn't the same from the "2+2=4"