Tim Scarfe: belief

Transcript context

…Well, I I think that that sentence ended on a rather definitive statement with which I don't think we could well, I would agree. The rest of it, is it all you're asking like the the the scientific anti realist if it's all instrumental. So yeah. Yeah. It's it's all instrumental. Right? I mean, we you know, we we the things that we care about are the things that that you know, again, back to affordances. Right? So, you know, we need to understand causal relationships at the scale that we can manipulate. Right? That's what that's what matters most. Right? Because that allows us to have effective actions in the world in which we actually live. To the extent that we care about other scales, right? It is because simply wish to expand our domain of influence, right? The mind is quite an interesting example. So let's say I want to move my hand and my mind willed it so it's top down causation. Now I can't act in the world of my mind, but it seems macroscopically intelligible. We think about our minds. So maybe the mind is a special case. Don't know. Well, the mind is a special case. I'll agree with that. I think of like downward causation from well, guess from an instrumentalist perspective, right? It's like I'm not saying downward causation is the thing. I'm saying that downward causation is 1 of is is like how it all works. I would take it from more from the perspective that downward causation, if discovered, downward causation is what justified your macroscopic assumption. So what do I mean by that? I mean that like suppose I'm in the following situation, I got a bunch of microscopic elements and they're all doing stuff and I'd like to draw a circle around them and call that a macroscopic object. Now I am justified in doing so if that particular description of the macroscopic, at the macroscopic level, right, has the downward causation property, right? It is a way of sort of saying, was a good, that circle you drew, that was a good circle, right? Because it summarized the behavior of the system as a whole, right? In a way that rendered the microscopic behavior irrelevant for further consideration. Right?…

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