For Moonwood and KTR

[Moonwood the Hare]

I find a large chest filled with small boxes and I open a box at random and find that it contains 107 red marbles. What is the probability that all the other boxes contain 107 red marbles. On the basis of that one find I have no way of predicting whether the other boxes contain marbles or whether they are red. The probability remains at zero. Suppose I open a second box and find this contains 113 green marbles. I know more than I did because I have falsified the claim that all the boxes contain red marbles. This has not changed the probability at all. Single observations do not raise the probability above zero and in terms of mathematical probability even if there are a thousand boxes and I have opened 999 of them and they are all full of red marbles the probability that the final box will contain red marbles remains at zero.

Suppose someone intervenes at this point and, holding a gun to your head, says, "What color are the marbles in the final box? Answer the question! If you don't answer, or if you answer incorrectly, I'll blow your brains out!" What would your answer be?

If you're like the rest of us, I think you'd say the marbles in the final box are red. But why? If the probability that the marbles in the final box are red is ZERO, what makes virtually all of us, if our lives depend on it, answer that those marbles are red? If it's not probability, then what is it? Surely, the marbles might NOT be red, but, after the first 999 contained red marbles, would you predict any OTHER color for the marbles in the final box? Of course not! But WHY not? Why do we think that answering "red" is our best chance for keeping our brains inside our heads?

Do you think our unconscious minds nearly instantly go through all those reasoning processes you outlined in the rest of your post and determine that red is the best answer to the question, given the information we have? If so, what would you call that? If we're not somehow "calculating the odds" that the marbles in the final box are red, then what ARE we doing? It's not intuition, it's not pure guess work, it's not the same as flipping a coin... so what is it?

Jim

Well I'd say it's a personal judgement, a gut reaction, and that it is totally right to go with your gut reaction especially in a life or death situation; I think our evolutionary programming has prepared us to do that and do it well. I would say ultimately science rests on personal judgement that it is not purely objective and that there is nothing wrong with that. I think Popper's is the best attempt to square science and reason and ultimately it fails. Science is not a purely objective purely rational activity.

[JustJim]

Well I'd say it's a personal judgement, a gut reaction, and that it is totally right to go with your gut reaction especially in a life or death situation; I think our evolutionary programming has prepared us to do that and do it well. I would say ultimately science rests on personal judgement that it is not purely objective and that there is nothing wrong with that. I think Popper's is the best attempt to square science and reason and ultimately it fails. Science is not a purely objective purely rational activity.

I agree it's a personal judgement, but I don't think it's quite the same as a "gut reaction," which I understand to be an emotion-based or intuitive response to something. I think there's something there upon which we almost automatically base our quick assumption (and hope!) that the final box contains red marbles. I just don't know what that 'something' is. Is it some kind of innate logical assembly of the data that is similar to, but clearly divorced from (and even sometimes running contrary to) mathematical probability? I don't think we just "know" that the final box will contain red marbles; in fact, we "know" it might NOT. But "to be safe" we would predict that the marbles are red - and then scrunch up our eyes and cross our fingers as the box is opened.... Maybe it's "faith" -- (just kidding... sorta).

Do you have any thoughts on how that process might work in our thinking? I think evolutionary success (via natural selection) is a good start, since it's obvious that people who are able to flaunt the mathematical probability of ZERO for a box of red marbles and intentionally PREDICT that they're red would have, in the gun-to-the-head situation, a better chance at survival and reproduction. This is a fascinating thing, I think.

Jim

[Moonwood the Hare]

Well I'd say it's a personal judgement, a gut reaction, and that it is totally right to go with your gut reaction especially in a life or death situation; I think our evolutionary programming has prepared us to do that and do it well. I would say ultimately science rests on personal judgement that it is not purely objective and that there is nothing wrong with that. I think Popper's is the best attempt to square science and reason and ultimately it fails. Science is not a purely objective purely rational activity.

I agree it's a personal judgement, but I don't think it's quite the same as a "gut reaction," which I understand to be an emotion-based or intuitive response to something. I think there's something there upon which we almost automatically base our quick assumption (and hope!) that the final box contains red marbles. I just don't know what that 'something' is. Is it some kind of innate logical assembly of the data that is similar to, but clearly divorced from (and even sometimes running contrary to) mathematical probability? I don't think we just "know" that the final box will contain red marbles; in fact, we "know" it might NOT. But "to be safe" we would predict that the marbles are red - and then scrunch up our eyes and cross our fingers as the box is opened.... Maybe it's "faith" -- (just kidding... sorta).

Do you have any thoughts on how that process might work in our thinking? I think evolutionary success (via natural selection) is a good start, since it's obvious that people who are able to flaunt the mathematical probability of ZERO for a box of red marbles and intentionally PREDICT that they're red would have, in the gun-to-the-head situation, a better chance at survival and reproduction. This is a fascinating thing, I think.

Jim

Jung would call it intuition. By that he means that sensory data is processed through the unconcious mind. I had a friend who was a strict anti-superanaturalist and just for a laugh he started doing tarot readings and to his surprise found they were amazingly accurate. He asked me how this could be possible and wanted an explanation that was compatible with his world view. I suggested that he was picking up clues from people's behaviour and unconciously processing them and at the time he was happy with that. But to be honest I believed then and believe now that he did have psychic powers, and he would now agree. I think this intuitive processing through the unconcious does at some point slip over into something that at least in terms of our present knowledge does not have a scientific explanation but I wouldn't want to be dogmatic about that. I have another friend who sees auras and I asked her once if when two people had that gift they both saw the same colours and she said no. So I assume that when people do this they are picking up these cues and the brain is translating what they pick up into visual stimuli.

With probability then I think we do something like informal probability sums in our head all the time and if people say that scientific theories are probably true they just mean it in this informal way then I have no problem as long as they realise that this is a personal judgement. The great philosopher of science Michael Polany demonstrated, succesfully I believe, that all of science did in the end depend on these personal judgements which ultimately are acts of faith. I think a lot of people are troubled by the idea of allowing personal judgement into science because it makes the whole thing seem arbitrary and subjective howeverI don't think this follows - there are subjective and objective aspects to scientific theories and between those two there are social aspects where knowledge depends on a community of minds. I think the quest for impersonal and objective knowledge is just a sign that in western culture we ahve lost touch with an important part of ourselves.

From Popper's perspective, we make probability predictions about events not about truth claims. So if I know the relevant laws of physics I can predict the probability of a bridge collapsing under a particular strain. However I cannot assess the probability of the laws that enabled me to make that prediction being true as anything above zero. That is to say the least counter-intuitive.

[JustJim]

But to be honest I believed then and believe now that he did have psychic powers ... I have another friend who sees auras ... I assume that when people do this they are picking up these cues and the brain is translating what they pick up into visual stimuli.

What other possibilities do you think there are to explain things like psychic powers and auras? Why do you rule those other explanations out in favor of believing people actually DO possess psychic powers and really DO see and interpret auras accurately? How do you avoid being accused of being gullible and willing to believe any ol' silly ass thing anyone claims, so long as it sounds interesting and mysterious - 'cuz that's what it surely sounds like to me. Psychic powers? Auras? Next you're gonna say you believe in chakras and voodoo spells!

With probability then I think we do something like informal probability sums in our head all the time and if people say that scientific theories are probably true they just mean it in this informal way then I have no problem as long as they realise that this is a personal judgement.

I agree that's what people usually are saying, and that it is a personal judgement. How do you explain that some such personal judgements (such as predicting red marbles in the final box) are nearly universal? Why do virtually all of us stick our noses up at mathematical probability in favor of our personal judgements in situations like that? Or even in less potentially life-threatening situations?

Jim

[Moonwood the Hare]

But to be honest I believed then and believe now that he did have psychic powers ... I have another friend who sees auras ... I assume that when people do this they are picking up these cues and the brain is translating what they pick up into visual stimuli.

What other possibilities do you think there are to explain things like psychic powers and auras? Why do you rule those other explanations out in favor of believing people actually DO possess psychic powers and really DO see and interpret auras accurately? How do you avoid being accused of being gullible and willing to believe any ol' silly ass thing anyone claims, so long as it sounds interesting and mysterious - 'cuz that's what it surely sounds like to me. Psychic powers? Auras? Next you're gonna say you believe in chakras and voodoo spells!

I'm sure there are many possibilities and in general people will interpret things in terms that are compatible with their worldview. There are people who stop being materialists in the face of overwhelming evidence against that view but this evidence if we can call it that is usually person relative. In general I think people can always find materialistic explanations and they are always worth looking for. I don't try to avoid being accused of being gullible; generally I put that down to insecurity in the person making the accusation. But I like to explore and be open to possibilities as much as I can

With probability then I think we do something like informal probability sums in our head all the time and if people say that scientific theories are probably true they just mean it in this informal way then I have no problem as long as they realise that this is a personal judgement.

I agree that's what people usually are saying, and that it is a personal judgement. How do you explain that some such personal judgements (such as predicting red marbles in the final box) are nearly universal? Why do virtually all of us stick our noses up at mathematical probability in favor of our personal judgements in situations like that? Or even in less potentially life-threatening situations?

Jim

Well the simplest explanation is the one given by B. F. Skinner that this is a matter of conditioning. An organism will always respond by expecting continuity and more of the same because survival depends on it. Reasoning away from that is quite unnatural, the really surprising thing is that we can do it not that we usually don't.

[mitchellmckain]

I find a large chest filled with small boxes and I open a box at random and find that it contains 107 red marbles. What is the probability that all the other boxes contain 107 red marbles. On the basis of that one find I have no way of predicting whether the other boxes contain marbles or whether they are red.

That is correct. There is no way of calculating the probability of a particular result. The only calculation we can make is the probability of choosing red given that a certain number of the boxes contained red. If the numbers are the same for any other colors present then it is the same probability for all colors. But if 106 boxes contained green marbles then the probability of choosing red was very small and thus senarios like that not very likely.

The probability remains at zero.

That is incorrect. Zero is a probability calculation and there is no basis for such a calculation.

Suppose I open a second box and find this contains 113 green marbles. I know more than I did because I have falsified the claim that all the boxes contain red marbles. This has not changed the probability at all.

This has not changed what probability? It is true that the elimination of the possibility that all boxes are red provides us no information at all regarding the remaining boxes. But like before we can calculate the probability of choosing different colored boxes given various distributions, which is smaller if the number of one color greately exceeds the number of the other color.

Furthermore, if the second box contained red marbles then we can calculate the probability of choosing a second box of red marbles given that only a particular number of boxes contain red, and this means that some possibilities will be more likely than others.

Single observations do not raise the probability above zero and in terms of mathematical probability even if there are a thousand boxes and I have opened 999 of them and they are all full of red marbles the probability that the final box will contain red marbles remains at zero.

Incorrect. We can calculate the probability of opening 999 boxes of red marbles given that 1 box does not contain red marbles and the result is a probability that is so vanishingly small that the supposition that the last box does not contain red marbles just isn't very credible.

Suppose someone intervenes at this point and, holding a gun to your head, says, "What color are the marbles in the final box? Answer the question! If you don't answer, or if you answer incorrectly, I'll blow your brains out!" What would your answer be?

If you're like the rest of us, I think you'd say the marbles in the final box are red.

I guess I am not like the "rest of us". I would refuse to answer the question on simple grounds that anyone using a gun like that should not get what he wants. Either he will not use the gun and therefore there is no need to answer or he will use the gun and that tells us that this is not a good person and that we cannot trust any promises that he makes anyway.

But of course this is extraneous to your intent and so we can imagine a more reasonable senario and I have already explained why giving an answer of red is much more reasonable.

[JustJim]

I'm sure there are many possibilities and in general people will interpret things in terms that are compatible with their worldview. There are people who stop being materialists in the face of overwhelming evidence against that view but this evidence if we can call it that is usually person relative. In general I think people can always find materialistic explanations and they are always worth looking for. I don't try to avoid being accused of being gullible; generally I put that down to insecurity in the person making the accusation. But I like to explore and be open to possibilities as much as I can.

I think that's a good thing, so long as you remain skeptical enough to avoid swallowing things hook, line, and sinker without good reason or what you consider acceptable evidence to back up your willingness to believe. I think you've done that (remained skeptical) with your religious beliefs, even though I don't share them, which I'm sure is because we don't share the same ideas of what constitutes good reason or acceptable evidence (i.e., what is good enough reason for you isn't good enough for me, and what you might consider acceptable evidence, I might not.)

I guess if I had to pick a reason why all but the most contrary and unreasonable of us would predict that final box was full of red marbles, and say so in order to avoid being killed, I'd have to go with Jung and call it "intuition" of some sort. There's a reason why we make those choices, even if they don't fit laboratory standards for probability estimation. We really do, somehow, just "know" those marbles are most likely red, and that's the best choice to make if we don't want our brains blown out (or other real-life negative consequences of making wrong predictions).

But now that raises a question more applicable to why we're here on this forum: Is it reasonable to use those "we just know it" kinds of intuitions when it comes to whether gods exist or not? Many believers say they "just know" God is real (even if they disagree on the details). Should that be good enough? Or should we want more? Should we try to confirm our intuitive hunches and "feelings" like those? If not, why not? If so, how -- especially when God is almost always defined as immune to the usual means of observation and detection we apply to everything else in our experience?

I know those questions demand long, philosophical answers I wouldn't understand, but please give it a shot anyhow. Thanks!

Jim

[Moonwood the Hare]

Mitch I will grant your point that the probability of the last box being red is not really zero if zero means there is no possibility of the marbles being red. However unless we know the reason for the arrangement being what it is I don't think we have any basis to make probability calculations. For example if ten men run onto a field wearing red shirts and I hear someone else running from towards me down the tunnel I make think it is very probable that this one will also have a red shirt but instead he has a yellow jersey because they are footie team and he's the goalie. The same kind of pattern break might occur if there were 101 or even 1001 men on a team. All I am really doing here is re-stating the problem of induction and suggesting that it applies in quite small as well as vast populations.

[Moonwood the Hare]

I think that's a good thing, so long as you remain skeptical enough to avoid swallowing things hook, line, and sinker without good reason or what you consider acceptable evidence to back up your willingness to believe. I think you've done that (remained skeptical) with your religious beliefs, even though I don't share them, which I'm sure is because we don't share the same ideas of what constitutes good reason or acceptable evidence (i.e., what is good enough reason for you isn't good enough for me, and what you might consider acceptable evidence, I might not.)

I guess if I had to pick a reason why all but the most contrary and unreasonable of us would predict that final box was full of red marbles, and say so in order to avoid being killed, I'd have to go with Jung and call it "intuition" of some sort. There's a reason why we make those choices, even if they don't fit laboratory standards for probability estimation. We really do, somehow, just "know" those marbles are most likely red, and that's the best choice to make if we don't want our brains blown out (or other real-life negative consequences of making wrong predictions).

But now that raises a question more applicable to why we're here on this forum: Is it reasonable to use those "we just know it" kinds of intuitions when it comes to whether gods exist or not? Many believers say they "just know" God is real (even if they disagree on the details). Should that be good enough? Or should we want more? Should we try to confirm our intuitive hunches and "feelings" like those? If not, why not? If so, how -- especially when God is almost always defined as immune to the usual means of observation and detection we apply to everything else in our experience?

I know those questions demand long, philosophical answers I wouldn't understand, but please give it a shot anyhow. Thanks!

Jim

I think when there is a pattern our brains are conditioned to think it will repeat. I think there have been experiments on monkeys about this - that they expect something after a certain number of repetitions and get surprised when a pattern is not repeated. We can however overcome that kind of conditioning. We can do it through logical inference, and by experiment and hypothesis.

When I talk of just knowing or intuition I found a good example of this recently in Descartes. He says that his 'I think therefore I am' is not meant to be a logical inference because in order for it to be sound I would have to know that whatever experiences (thinks) exists and I can only know this by intuition. I experience myself thinking and existing and know that in my own case I had to exist in order to think and then infer that the same implies to others. So my knowledge that I exist is self evident to me prior to all inference. In the same way we know the basic truth of maths and logic like a thing cannot both be and not be in the same way at the same time, and in this way we know the laws of inference. For example I know by intuition that if A then B and B it does not follow that A and I know this even though it is often the case that if A then B and B that A is also the case. I may need to reflect on examples to this but I do not need evidence. So there is a type of knowing that does not depend on argument or evidence.

Why is it that I think religious truths are known in this way rather than through some kind of discursive method. Descartes would not have agreed. Although he knows that he himself exists in this way he feels God needs to be proved through argument and feels he has the arguments to do this. At their core religious beliefs are beliefs that something is non-dependant or self existent. It would take time to demonstrate that but it does seem to apply to every known religion. N H Baritone once thought he could give a counter example in the Buddhist idea that all things are interdependent but if the total array of existing things are interdependent then that total array does not depend on anything outside itself and so is non-dependent. If religious experiences are experiences of something as non-dependent we cannot get behind those experiences. We cannot reason that something must be non-dependent because it is not possible even in thought to isolate that thing from all other properties. We cannot imagine something that is just matter for example if we experience matter as non-dependent, we cannot imagine God as he is in himself free from all created properties or analogies. We understand God in this way because that is how we experience him. This would all need a lot more fleshing out but that is the gist of it.

[Keep The Reason]

What I want to know is why this thread has moonwood's and my name on it. It's long past anything to do with me at least.

[mitchellmckain]

Mitch I will grant your point that the probability of the last box being red is not really zero if zero means there is no possibility of the marbles being red.

Moonwood,

Let me explain the probability calculations I was talking about.

Baye's theorem says that the probability of A given B is equal to the probability of B given A times the probability of A divided by the probability of B.

In probability, when we have no information to the contrary, we typically assume that all possibilities are equally likely.

This means that given no information to the contrary we typically assume that the P(A)/P(B) is approximately 1 and thus by Baye's theorem probability of A given B is about equal to the probability of B given A.

This is why the calculation of the probability of choosing 999 red boxes given that there is one out of a 1000 that is not red has a bearing on your choice because Bayes theorem suggests that this is about the same as the probability of there being one out of a 1000 boxes of marbles that are not red given that you have choosen 999 boxes of red. This is exactly the sort of calculation that backs up Jim's very correct intuition that it would be foolish to expect the last box to be anything but red.

However unless we know the reason for the arrangement being what it is I don't think we have any basis to make probability calculations.

That is incorrect. Probability is a mathematics that always acknowledges that there is many things we do not know. When we roll a die, we don't know for absolute certainty whether there are powers at work controlling the die or not. Probability simply assumes that the likelihood of all the possible results are equally likely at any given time. So it is wrong to think the lack of the kind of knowledge you are talking about means there is no basis for a probability calculation.

For example if ten men run onto a field wearing red shirts and I hear someone else running from towards me down the tunnel I make think it is very probable that this one will also have a red shirt but instead he has a yellow jersey because they are footie team and he's the goalie. The same kind of pattern break might occur if there were 101 or even 1001 men on a team. All I am really doing here is re-stating the problem of induction and suggesting that it applies in quite small as well as vast populations.

This example is slightly different than the earlier one because you are not choosing which one to look at next. Thus in this example we have the added question of whether there is something else which is determining what comes next other than your own lack of knowledge of what the boxes contain. It doesn't change the fact that we can and do make probability calculations in such circumstances, but it does provide you an easy way of invalidating the calculation by adding in a fact that the calculation was not taking into account.