Posted: Dec 16, 2011 3:53 am
Welcome to the boards JLowder.
I have a couple of quick questions regarding that comment response you just made to Paul on your message board, I hope you don't mind if I take a couple of specific claims as fragments rather than the whole text:
Is there a justification for this claim? If for example we make the same claim about an item for which we do have evidence that it is likely to not remain the same colour, do you still suggest that we should prefer the former hypothesis than the latter? (Say, for example, an emerald left for the next 100 billion years.)
I wonder if you could perhaps be a bit more precise about what you mean by the term "intrinsic probability" here? The mathematical term from probability theory is usually given as something like:
I would like to draw attention to the fact that this relates to countable sample spaces in discrete probability distributions specifically.
Whilst it seems that one can link probability theory to what it is rational to believe based on the evidence via say Cox's Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%27s_theorem) it is reasonably clear from assumption 3 that one needs a single objective derivation of the probability* of the existence of a god to assign it a non-zero likelihood and it is far from clear that any such derivation can be found - indeed the oft cited principle of indifference expressly cannot be used as it demands (unsurprisingly) a symmetry between the options to which we are to be indifferent.
*to be clear the method of derivation need not be singular, but rather the estimated probabilities of all such methods must be equal.
I have a couple of quick questions regarding that comment response you just made to Paul on your message board, I hope you don't mind if I take a couple of specific claims as fragments rather than the whole text:
JLowder wrote:Two examples will, I hope, help to make this point clear. First, compare the hypothesis that emeralds will remain green in the future to the hypothesis that they will sooner or later change from green to blue or from green to some other color. The former hypothesis is more probable than the latter, not because (or not just because) we have evidence that color changes of this sort never occur. Rather, it is intrinsically more probable because it attributes objective uniformity over time to the world while the latter hypothesis attributes objective change.
Is there a justification for this claim? If for example we make the same claim about an item for which we do have evidence that it is likely to not remain the same colour, do you still suggest that we should prefer the former hypothesis than the latter? (Say, for example, an emerald left for the next 100 billion years.)
JLowder wrote:This simply confuses the distinction between intrinsic probability and what Draper calls "predictive power." No physical evidence is relevant to predictive power, NOT intrinsic probability.
I wonder if you could perhaps be a bit more precise about what you mean by the term "intrinsic probability" here? The mathematical term from probability theory is usually given as something like:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_theory wrote:Modern definition: The modern definition starts with a finite or countable set called the sample space, which relates to the set of all possible outcomes in classical sense, denoted by Ω. It is then assumed that for each element x in Ω, an intrinsic "probability" value f(x), is attached, which satisfies the following properties:
I would like to draw attention to the fact that this relates to countable sample spaces in discrete probability distributions specifically.
Whilst it seems that one can link probability theory to what it is rational to believe based on the evidence via say Cox's Theorem (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cox%27s_theorem) it is reasonably clear from assumption 3 that one needs a single objective derivation of the probability* of the existence of a god to assign it a non-zero likelihood and it is far from clear that any such derivation can be found - indeed the oft cited principle of indifference expressly cannot be used as it demands (unsurprisingly) a symmetry between the options to which we are to be indifferent.
*to be clear the method of derivation need not be singular, but rather the estimated probabilities of all such methods must be equal.