jockocampbell
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Yes on re-reading I see what you are saying.
Yes, thanks, and the standard mathematical description of the change in frequency of alleles over generations is given in the form of a Bayesian update where the likelihood is the ratio of reproductive fitness of the particular allele to the average reproductive fitness of all competing alleles at that locus.
What a wonderful post!
I find it intellectually exhilarating as I have not been introduced to Solomonoff before and his work may be very informative for my studies. I have come at inference from quite a different direction and I am hopeful that an appreciation of Solomonoff will broaden my scope.
One thing that puzzles me is the assertion that:
... (read more)Therefore an algorithm that is one bit longer is half as likely to be the true algorithm. Notice that this intuitively fits Occam's razor; a hypothesis that is 8 bits long is much more likely than a hypothesis that is 34 bits long. Why bother with extra bits? We’d need evidence to show that they
Excellent post.
I have pondered the same sort of questions. Here is an excerpt from my 2009 book.
... (read more)My father is 88 years old and a devout Christian. Before he became afflicted with Alzheimer’s he expected to have an afterlife where he would be reunited with his deceased daughter and other departed loved ones. He doesn’t talk of this now and would not be able to comprehend the question if asked. He is now almost totally unaware of who he is or what his life was. I sometimes tell him the story of his life, details of what he did in his working life, stories of his friends, the adventures he undertook. Sometimes these
The 'irreducible complexity' argument advocated by the intelligent design community often cites the specific example of the eye. It is argued that an eye is a complex organ with many different individual parts that all must work together perfectly and that this implies it could not have been gradually built out of small gradual random changes.
This argument has been around a long time but it has been well answered within the scientific literature and the vast majority of biologist consider the issue settled.
Dawkins' book 'Climbing mount improbable' provides a summary of the science for the lay reader and uses the eye as a detailed example.
Darwin was the first to explain how the... (read more)
I was also inspired by one of Dawkins' books suggesting something similar. It was some years ago but I believe Dawkins suggested writing a type of computer script which would mimic natural selection. I wrote a script and was quite surprised at the power it demonstrated.
As I remember the general idea is that you can type in any string of characters you like and then click the 'evolve' button. The computer program then:
1) generates and displays a string of random characters of the same length as the entered string.
2) compares the new string with the displayed string and retains all characters that are the same and in the same position.
3) generates... (read more)
I agree with your statement:
if we require 100% justified confidence to consider something knowledge, no one knows or can know a single thing.
However I think your are misunderstanding me.
I don't think we require 100% justified confidence for there to be knowledge I believe knowledge is always a probability and that scientific knowledge is always something less than 100%.
I suggest that knowledge is justified belief but it is always a probability less than 100%. As I wrote: I mean justified in the Bayesian sense which assigns a probability to a state of knowledge. The correct probability to assign may be calculated with the Bayesian update.
This is a common Bayesian interpretation. As Jaynes wrote:
In our terminology, a probability is something that we assign, in order to represent a state of knowledge.
You misunderstand me. I did not say it was
'known' the theory was true.
I reject the notion that any scientific theory can be known to be 100% true, I stated:
Perhaps those scientist from the past should have said it had a high probability of being true.
As we all know now Newton's theory of gravitation is not 100% true and therefore in a logical sense it is not true at all. We have counter examples as in the shift of Mercury's perihelion which it does not predict. However the theory is still a source of knowledge, it was used by NASA to get men to the moon.
Perhaps considering knowledge as an all... (read more)
I would be interested if you would care to elaborate a little.Syllogisms have been a mainstay of philosophy for over two millennium and undoubtedly I have a lot to learn about them.
In my admittedly limited understanding of syllogisms the conclusion is true given the premises being true. Truth is more in the structure of the argument than in its conclusion. If Socrates is not mortal than either he is not a man or not all men are mortal.
If science is falsifiable and therefore uncertain is any of it true? If not then I assume JTB must judge "scientific knowledge" to be an oxymoron.
If some scientific knowledge is true does that mean that the theory will not be revised, extended or corrected in the next 1,000 years?
Does truth apply to science? If not should "true" be included in our definition of knowledge?