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When Neil deGrasse Tyson says that I don't believe anything, I know that you believe that
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there is fear mongering over anything.
0:34
I don't believe anything.
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It's not, I don't say I believe anything.
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Your wincing is indeed justified.
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Now, it's not just the scientist.
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The insidious disdain for the usage of the word belief is echoed even here in this infamous
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Deepak Chopra exchange.
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Now, you stated before that, all belief is a cover-up for insecurity, right?
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Do you believe that?
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The statement that I don't believe anything is said so self-assuredly, so swiftly, so
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loudly, and with a tinge of condescension that you know something else is going on.
1:13
It's a semaphore for, hey, look how enlightened I am.
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Aren't I so rational, unlike those poor, unsound, religious folk?
1:22
So the phrase, I don't have beliefs is either trivially true, which you can read as empty.
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It's semantically confused, which is equivocating between belief and faith, or it's completely
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Now, let's work through this rigorously.
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In analytic epistemology, belief is a propositional attitude.
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It's a mental state with a proposition as its content, and then to believe X just means
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that you hold that proposition to be true.
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Now it doesn't mean that I hold this proposition true to be true, no matter what.
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It doesn't mean that you can't update your belief subject to new evidence.
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In fact, there's an entire field called Bayesian epistemology about belief updating.
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So when you say you have beliefs, it doesn't mean that you're a member of the Westboro
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The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy is unambiguous.
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Contemporary philosophers characterize belief as a propositional attitude.
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The key point is that belief doesn't have to imply faith nor certainty.
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You can believe you have a head.
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You can believe 2 plus 2 equals 4.
2:24
You can believe that Neil is more logical than the person that he's speaking to.
2:30
So those who say when you ask him, hey, well, what is it that you believe about so-and-so?
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They say, oh, me, I don't hold beliefs.
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Ask me a different question.
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They think that the word belief is some confession of irrationality.
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It's just a basic piece of furniture in your mind.
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If the scientist wants to say, I don't have beliefs, it would require a nonstandard definition
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of belief and thus muddle the conversation with uncharitable and unstated redefinitions,
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which is actually itself unscientific.
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So one of the more charitable interpretations of the no belief claim that this rational
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person is using is to say that belief means something like faith and faith to them
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means belief without adequate evidence or perhaps belief has some property of
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obstinate resistance to updating when encountering new evidence.
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But this is semantic equivocation.
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Standardly when people say and philosophers use belief at faith, they distinguish belief
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So that's a proposition.
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I'm holding p to be true.
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Or they can mean faith in, I can attitude, a trust-based, a trust-relation that could,
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although it doesn't have to involve resistance to change due to counter-evidence.
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By the way, Kierkegaard is important here because Kierkegaard has a similar sort of
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A rational or extra rational, whatever we want to call it, type of faith.
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There's a video here that I made about Kierkegaard that went quite viral, I'll link it on
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screen and in the description.
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Now the no belief rationalist can look up these words in the dictionary and I want to
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just take it a tad further by going to the Stanford encyclopedia.
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Richard Swinburne labels this the Thomas view of faith.
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The person of religious faith is the person who has the theoretical conviction that
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However, even Aquinas distinguished faith from ordinary belief.
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In theology, faith means one of these.
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So belief in propositions that are not fully seen or demonstrable, it could mean that, or
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it could also mean volition, a type of trust beyond mere ascent, and it could also mean
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that resilience to a certain kind of counter-evidence.
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When a philosopher hears someone that says, I don't believe I follow the evidence, the immediate
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responses, okay, following the evidence is just forming beliefs proportioned to that
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That's precisely what belief is.
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Most of my best ideas don't happen during interviews, they come spontaneously, most of
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the time in the shower, actually, or while I'm walking, until I had flawed, I would frequently
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lose them because by the time I write down half of it, it's gone.
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I tried voice capture before, like Google Home, and it just cuts me off in the middle.
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It's so frustrating.
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Most of my ideas aren't these 10-second sound bites, they're ponderous, they're long-winded,
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and I wind around, they're discursive, they're five minutes long, Apple notes, even Google
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keep the transcription there's horrible.
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But plot, let's me talk for as long as I want, and there's no interruptions, it's accurate
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captured, organizes everything into clear summaries, key takeaways, action items, I can even
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come back later and say, hey, what was that thread I was talking about regarding consciousness
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In fact, this episode itself has a plot summary below, and I'm using it right now over here.
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My personal workflow is that I have an auto-flow feature enabled, so it sends me an email anytime
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Look, the fact that I can just press it and it turns on instantly, like right now, starting
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To assert, scientists don't use the word belief, and I'm a scientist, is itself to express
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The belief norm assertion, which is the view that's widely held in philosophy of language,
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says one must assert P only if one believes P.
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I spoke to a scientist on NPR, where she said something like consciousness is a universal
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principle, and then my question was, can you explain what you mean when you said that
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you believe consciousness is a universal principle?
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That NASA scientist retorted to me.
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So first you have to stop saying belief when you're talking to scientists.
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The only belief we put is in the hypotheses, we're formulating hypotheses.
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The problem is, just because you don't use the word belief, it doesn't mean you don't
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You're speaking to your friend, you tell your friend, look, friend.
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You have some idea of what truth is.
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They say, look, I don't even need to use the word truth.
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It is raining outside.
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I didn't use the word truth.
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You'd be absolutely correct to say to your friend, okay, but the fact that you've managed
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to say a sentence without some particular word doesn't mean that concept isn't implicitly
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It is raining outside is shorthand for it is true that it is raining outside.
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In the same manner, when Natalie Cabral said, I hypothesize that consciousness may be
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a universal principle, that's shorthand for I believe there's a non-zero chance that
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consciousness may be a universal principle.
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Of course, this avoids the question of what it even means to be a universal principle,
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but that's besides the point.
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When the scientists says something like, they think this is true or they think so and
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so is possible, they're committing to the truth or at least to the possibility of truth
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That's what assertion is, assertion presupposes belief or at minimum something functionally
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And as Thomas Campbell, who goes further and pathologizes belief.
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Belief is a problem.
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Belief gets in the way.
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Beliefs are always a problem.
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He then spends three hours defending to me that consciousness is fundamental, that fear
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Those are beliefs, dozens of them.
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My ears tend to go back when the scientist shares something in common with the guru.
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If you're sensing something contradictory here, I think you're right.
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To say, I don't have beliefs is itself an assertion, therefore asserting I don't have
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beliefs presupposes a belief, the belief that one doesn't have beliefs, it's like an undermining
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Now, an also note, there is an alternate view of truth, which is deflationary by saying
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truth is nothing more than some utterance of a statement.
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Crispin Wright, for instance, noticed you could flip this though, since the equivalence
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doesn't privilege a direction, but this is something for a future video, so subscribe
8:52
Now, a counter may be to reach for boss Von Frost's distinction between belief and acceptance.
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In the early 1980s, Von Frost and argued that science aims to give us theories which
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are empirically adequate, and acceptance of a theory involves as belief only that it
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is empirically adequate.
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The constructive empiricists accept theories, they commit to using them, they base further
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research on them and so on, but they may be agnostic as to what the theory is true about
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unobservables, but even Von Frost and doesn't eliminate belief, acceptance of a theory
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involves belief that is empirically adequate.
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The scientist still has beliefs.
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In fact, I spoke directly to Boss Von Frost and about this, it's a fantastic podcast,
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you should check it out, he's one of the most cited philosophers of science.
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He says, I believe many things, I believe that I had a father, I believe I wrote a book,
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could I be wrong, certainly, my beliefs could be false.
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Boss's point is more about the scope of rational belief in science, and it's not
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decidedly not about the elimination of belief from a scientist.
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Scientists can be epistemologically modest, maybe they should be, but they're not actually
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Of course you can use a vernacular synonym for belief, like I'm going to call it credence.
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And I should be careful here because belief and credence are only semantic synonyms,
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but they do remain distinct concepts in philosophy, particularly in basingism.
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Credence is a probability valued attitude, so a measure of confidence in some proposition
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I fully disbelieve this to number 100% say or number one, which is complete certainty.
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So the difference here is that you could say that I'm only going to say that I believe
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in X once my credence has passed some threshold.
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A scientist who says something like, let's say, I have extremely high confidence based
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on evidence in the theory of evolution, but I don't believe the theory of evolution.
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They're speaking incoherently.
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If we take belief in the standard sense, high credence is just belief.
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And by the way, you may have noticed, of course, the scientific methodology itself reflects
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beliefs, belief that the scientific method is reliable, belief that evidence constrains
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a theory, belief in modus ponens, etc.
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Quine actually had a concept of holism in his two dogmas of empiricism, where he places
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beliefs at the center of the, quote, web of belief.
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Now, counter example to the last few minutes is that you could take the fourth option.
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I gave for a few in the beginning, but let's say option one is I believe in X.
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OK, well, that's not a counter example, because I believe X is the case is exactly what
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How about option two, where you say, I don't believe in X?
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Now, this one's a bit tricky, because some people would say that this is a stand-in
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for I believe that X isn't the case, at least that's how we use the word in this option
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then isn't actually a counter example.
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Another option is you can be agnostic.
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You could say, I don't know, my mind isn't made up, whether that's because I don't
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think there's enough evidence to reach such a conclusion in either direction or what
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have you, but that still remains an attitude of belief.
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Now the last option here is the most interesting to me option for you could say that the matter
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at hand is independent of belief that belief has nothing to do with this, but then you
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could ask, well, what do you mean that belief has nothing to do with this?
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It seems like the first three options exhaust possibilities.
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However, consider a cup of water.
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You could ask, what's the electric charge of the cup of water?
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That's a sensible question.
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You could also ask, what's the total electric charge of the universe?
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Or you could ask, what's the electric charge of $55?
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Now, in that case, that latter case, it would be wrong to say that the electric charge
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of $55 is zero, or that it's 10 EV or 250 TEV or something like that.
13:56
As dollars have nothing to do with electric charge, assigning them an arbitrary number
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would just be a category error.
14:03
My present deliberation is that the only way someone could say that they hold no beliefs
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and be accurate is in this option for a sense.
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Now, some more objections that naturally come to mind is perhaps one could remain radically
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uncertain about everything, treating all propositions as guesses.
14:18
Even this doesn't eliminate belief.
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It's just describing fallabalism, so fallabalist belief.
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And even if you say something like 99.9% credence is required in order for me to say I believe
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in this, well, then to act in the world, such as crossing the street, eating food, does
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require something like 99.9% credence that you're not going to get hit by a car or poisoned.
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So I think that the charitable reading is that the scientist is saying, look, I'm not dogmatic.
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That's why I don't hold beliefs.
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But the best way to communicate that isn't to deny beliefs is instead to model epistemic
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virtues explicitly, saying I have no beliefs doesn't signal rationality.
14:56
To me, it signals confusion about one's own cognition, worse, it gives ammunition to
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those who claim scientists are in denial about their own presuppositions.
15:06
Now one could counter, hey, Kurt, historically speaking, faith meant trust or fidelity.
15:11
It's not exactly a propositional ascent.
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However, it does commit this etymological fallacy, confusing a word's current meaning
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To me, what matters is how belief functions in contemporary discourse.
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And also if we want to be a bit more technical, what does it mean in philosophy?
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No one thinks Neil deGrasse Tyson is channeling Aquinas.
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So what do I think is going on?
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Why do so many scientists almost boastfully state I don't use the word belief.
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I don't like beliefs.
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Some whole beliefs, beliefs are no part of me as a scientist.
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I think it's because there's an impulse to communicate, I'm not dogmatic.
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I update, I could be wrong.
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To me, the way to communicate that again is not by denying to have beliefs.
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You just state fallibleism.
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You're open to counter evidence.
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You're willing to update and you have precision about your confidence levels, perhaps.
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You do this with belief.
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I think it's like a demonstration of beacon of how rational they are by ostentatiously
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rejecting this term that they think has something to do with irrationality.
16:18
When actually it's the opposite, it's more irrational to claim you have no beliefs
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by any standard definition.
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In fact, by most accounts, you can't even use the word no, like knowledge, without believing
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in whatever you're knowing.
16:31
It's necessary for you to believe you have a mother in order for you to say you know
16:35
So my concise verdict is that scientists have beliefs.
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It's not innately irrational to have them pretending otherwise is linguistic posturing.
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It's entirely fine to say I believe electrons exist and I'm willing to change my belief
16:51
if the evidence shows me that I'm wrong.
16:53
That's entirely honorable.
16:55
That statement itself is not creatinous.
16:58
The scientist who says I hold no beliefs is confused about their own mind.
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