Q&A: Coordinating Understanding/Idea with the World
Coordinating Understanding/Idea with the World
Question
With God’s help
Hello Rabbi,
I have a somewhat unclear question that I tried to clarify some time ago, but you didn’t really address it, except in a way that was too general, and there are also contradictory references to it on the site.
The question is about the relation between the intuitive-ideal realm and reality. (And not necessarily between the act of thinking and the ideal realm, which is a separate topic.)
For the sake of clarification, I gave the example of repeatedly taking out of a bag a large number of green balls in succession (so that it seems to us like a recurring pattern), while at the bottom of the bag there are red balls. (And we would think a green ball will come out, even though that isn’t true.)
So you referred to the fact that according to intuition it is indeed correct to think that the current state will continue, not because of actual familiarity with the concrete bag, but as part of methods of deciding under conditions of lack of knowledge.
But since you hold that this method of deciding is also more probable to be right (brings us closer to the truth),
then one must assume there is some process supervising the relation between the ideal realm and reality, so that it reflects what is right to think in a case of lack of knowledge.
(That is, that most concrete situations in the world fit the continuation of the previous state.)
1. Do you agree up to this point? If so, how is this done??
2. And even if that coordination does take place, insofar as this rule is so broad (based on all the events that occurred throughout the world at all times), one can ask how suitable its estimation is for use when it is based on an almost infinite number of events… while the number of values the idea contains is binary (the current state will continue or it will not).
So its deviation from the truth sounds almost not useful for a concrete case, just like if they did a survey in Israel and claimed that the ruling party is Likud, while that would not at all reflect the person standing in front of me… like the Rabbi.
Answer
Sh,
I don’t see any new question here compared to what we already discussed between us, and I answered you as best I could. If you don’t accept the answer (I don’t understand why, but that is of course your right), that’s legitimate. But why raise the same question again? And in a new thread no less. I’ll answer now, but I won’t continue with this unless there is something new here.
The question of how our intuition is coordinated with the world is discussed by me at length in my books, especially Two Carts. Some attribute it to evolution, but I disagree. In my view, this is the hand of God, who saw to equip us with an intuitive capacity that would help us recognize the world we live in.
And it is not correct that this necessarily refers to most situations in the world. It refers to a situation in which there is a collection of balls in a bag without a specific plan. When you have no other information, it makes sense to treat the bag as though it has a random composition. It may be that most bags in the world were filled according to some specific plan, but there is still no point in relating to a specific plan if I know nothing about it.
Take for example a random person on the street whom you ask for the time, or how to get to some place. Usually you believe his answer. But he may be a liar. If I have no other information, I treat him as a truth-teller. True, it may be that in this particular place it is populated mainly by liars, but if I have no such information, I don’t worry about that. About people in general throughout the world I have no information, and still I assume that most of them do not lie in such a situation.
The same is true of the bag. I have no information about the full range of possible compositions of bags in the world, and not even about the full range of compositions of bags from which every ball I’ve taken out so far has been green (although here I do assume that indeed, among that group of bags, most have contents that are entirely green). But in the absence of information, that is the correct way to relate to it. It stands to reason that if they filled the bag with balls and everything that came out until now was green, then everything is green (otherwise how did it happen that everything I took out until now, by chance, was green?). If someone arranged the balls so that all the balls on top are green and underneath them are red, then you are right. But from my familiarity with the world, it is not likely that this happened. It is more likely that everything is green. It is not that I made statistics based on cases. This comes from experience and generalizations based on what I have encountered until now and my familiarity with the world. I do not know of a calculation that can be made to support this, and still, that is what is reasonable to think in such a situation.
You cannot ignore reality: factually, our inductions work in many cases. Not always, of course, but this is not a shot in the dark; it is an informed guess or decision-making under partial information.
Discussion on Answer
I’ll repeat myself one last time: my claim is that intuition is a kind of cognition. Just as I do not ask about a correspondence between what I see and the world, so too I do not ask about a correspondence between intuition and the world. I simply see that this is so, and that’s it.
By the way, evolution certainly can develop a faculty for ideas if it is useful for survival.
Grounding induction in induction is of course circular. I’ve written that more than once. I claim that it works because I see that it does, and that’s it. I’m not trying to ground it in anything.
But that’s enough. I’ve completely exhausted this.
Thank you very much!
1. First of all, here in the answer you use several different principles from what you presented last time—such as the principle of causality, the use of generalizations, the simpler explanation, and so on.
In contrast to what you said last time, where you used a general principle that is something like a Talmudic presumption—as you put it there—”I mean a more general proof, what is right to do in the absence of information.”
I of course agree that our feeling is that we would claim the next ball in the bag will be green. Even though I don’t know how to conceptualize this well enough, and I’m also not asking how intuition is coordinated with the world, and it is quite clear that evolution has no ability to develop an ideal faculty that is not part of the physical plane (as opposed to sight and hearing, for example), just as it is also not sufficiently able to explain how emotions developed or how souls were implanted, for one who is a dualist.
Rather, the question is of course according to your own approach, since you claim that this understanding is achieved through an intermediary framework—Platonism—and not according to Kant’s approach, where certain ideas are found within us a priori.
But if so, the question is whether you think there is synchronization between those ideas and the world, and how this is done, because even according to your own approach their content must be synchronized from the world! (The question is whether you agree with that, and how it is done.)
For example, you said, “here I do assume that indeed, among that group of bags, most have contents that are entirely green.” But the obvious question arises: how do you assume that….
And likewise there is a mistake in the argument you wrote, which is built on causality and Occam’s razor: “It stands to reason that if they filled the bag with balls and everything that came out until now was green, then everything is green (otherwise how did it happen that everything I took out until now, by chance, was green?).” Clearly, in order to claim this, one must assume synchronization between the world of ideas and the world, (and not only between understanding and the world of ideas), otherwise that mistake is exactly like the mistake whereby, following a sequence of measurements, it is reasonable to assume that the next measurement will continue along the straight line that you mentioned in the article.
I hope this is clearer now.
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2. Why indeed do we assume that in the absence of information, we treat the bag as having a random composition? (This is a general question, of course, that could apply to almost anything.)
3. Of course the continuation of this move is that you will usually present two possibilities, where the one you regard as more probable explains the bag. (Seemingly, this is where the synchronization I’m talking about is needed), and the second possibility is that it is completely random and also of low probability (the balls could be of all kinds of colors, so why did only green ones come out).
But you can always present a third possibility, such as: there are 999 green ones in the bag, and from that point on there are 999 red ones. If we give it the same probability as the first possibility, that all the balls are green, then it too can explain the data we received, and in such a case the first would have no advantage over it at all! So why don’t we propose that possibility too? (Of course if so, we’ll never get out of the number of possibilities that can explain the trend line, just like the question I directed to you above.)
So isn’t synchronization necessary?….
4. The problem is that if the synchronization is so good, then the question arises how we would be mistaken in that example of the bag where someone “hid” a red ball at the bottom and we don’t know about it… But then an excuse for that starts to sound a bit ad hoc and apologetic, no?
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By the way, I agree that factually our inductions work in many cases.
But I think I came across a counterargument that this argument is circular. (It uses the same method to prove itself)….