Causality, Randomness and Induction

@ughaibu,

ughaibu wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
It makes no sense to say that since all the prior configurations have been all true that somehow the grid owes you a false. That's the gambler's fallacy.
If a gambler watches the roulette table and, observing a string of reds, backs the black in the belief that it's overdue, that gambler commits a gamblers fallacy. But, backing the red, in the belief that it's having come up so far is inductive justification for the belief that it'll continue coming up, commits the same fallacy.

Quite right which is why the vindication of induction is necessary.

We have two possibilities, either regularities will continue into the future or they will not. If they do then induction, which is taking past regularities and projecting them into the future, is the best method for predicting the future. If they don't then induction is no worse than random guessing. Since we don't know which will happen to be our future, the most pragmatic choice is to rely on induction.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

ughaibu wrote:
backing the red, in the belief that it's having come up so far is inductive justification for the belief that it'll continue coming up, commits the same fallacy.
Since we don't know which will happen to be our future, the most pragmatic choice is to rely on induction.

Nevertheless, it's an example of gamblers fallacy, so I dont think it's justified by stating that it's as good as guessing at random, and I think it's unreasonable to ignore the success of induction.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

Since there is no connection between one configuration to the next, every configuration is just as likely.

I agree with this. Please see my post #4,280,891 above.

Night Ripper wrote:

It makes no sense to say that since all the prior configurations have been all true that somehow the grid owes you a false.

It would commit the gambler's fallacy if there were only one "true" and one "false" configuration. But in the case of the universe, there are vastly more "false" (= irregular) configurations than "true" (= regular) ones.

If I flip a coin 10 times and it comes to rest on its edge every time, I would expect it to come to rest on one of its faces (heads or tails) the 11th time. Not because of its earlier behaviour, but purely because of the high probability on the present flip. So the gambler's fallacy does not apply.

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@ACB,

It is not a random Universe. Just because Heisenberg says so doesn't make it so. In essence the problem is that we cannot observe subatomic particles as one photon will know an electron off its orbit. As you know one cannot observe an object if that act of observation disturbs the object which in this case is true. So Heisenberg used statistics to guess its position. It is Heisenberg's quest to guess the position of the electron. The electron carries on regardless of Heisenberg's observation.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

We have two possibilities, either regularities will continue into the future or they will not.

No, we have a vast number of possible configurations, and regularities will continue into the future in only a tiny minority of them.

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@ACB,

ACB wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
We have two possibilities, either regularities will continue into the future or they will not.
No, we have a vast number of possible configurations, and regularities will continue into the future in only a tiny minority of them.

I think it'd be helpful if you were both more specific in what you're talking about. The strings of coin tosses are fine for talking about simple probabilities, but it's not clear how they relevantly model the "regularities" and "configurations", so it's unclear what these terms refer to.

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@ACB,

ACB wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
We have two possibilities, either regularities will continue into the future or they will not.

No, we have a vast number of possible configurations, and regularities will continue into the future in only a tiny minority of them.

That's the gamblers fallacy. You're treating each configuration as connected.

1 Reply

@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

ACB wrote:
No, we have a vast number of possible configurations, and regularities will continue into the future in only a tiny minority of them.
That's the gamblers fallacy. You're treating each configuration as connected.

I dont understand why you think this. Instead of coins, consider a pair of dice: http://www.random.org/dice/?num=2 If the dice show 4 and 6, then that is our initial "regularity". According to you, the best strategy is to bet on the next roll being 4 and 6, but the chance of such a roll occurring is 1/36. So, our only rational option is to not bet. Thus induction is not justified.

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@ughaibu,

ughaibu wrote:

So, our only rational option is to not bet.

That doesn't work in reality. You have to bet. You're always betting. When you sit down in a chair you are betting that you won't fall through the chair to the floor.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

ughaibu wrote:
So, our only rational option is to not bet.
That doesn't work in reality. You have to bet. You're always betting. When you sit down in a chair you are betting that you won't fall through the chair to the floor.

So how do you account for my success with such bets? In terms of dice, it seems that I'm exploiting an observed bias.

1 Reply

@ughaibu,

ughaibu wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
ughaibu wrote:
So, our only rational option is to not bet.
That doesn't work in reality. You have to bet. You're always betting. When you sit down in a chair you are betting that you won't fall through the chair to the floor.
So how do you account for my success with such bets? In terms of dice, it seems that I'm exploiting an observed bias.

I've seen a guy betting on roulette and get 15 reds in a row. Randomness is weird and counter-intuitive. I'm not sure what you're asking me if you mean more than that.

The reason why we go with our bias is because random guessing isn't any better and possibly worse.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

The reason why we go with our bias is because random guessing isn't any better and possibly worse.

No it's not, it's because it works. The bias is something we observe, not anything in ourselves. The dice appear to be weighted.

1 Reply

@ughaibu,

ughaibu wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
The reason why we go with our bias is because random guessing isn't any better and possibly worse.
No it's not, it's because it works. The bias is something we observe, not anything in ourselves. The dice appear to be weighted.

It has worked. There's no reason to think it will continue to work. There's no way to tell if the dice have been weighted on a cosmic level. You might get a long sequences of double 6's but that doesn't prove anything because in the grand scheme of things we view only a tiny fraction of the rolls. You have no clue if it's still 1/36 in the long run or not.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

It has worked. There's no reason to think it will continue to work.

Sure there, thinking it'll continue to work is exactly what we're talking about. We think that it continuing to work, will continue to work, because we've observed it continuing to work.

1 Reply

@ughaibu,

ughaibu wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
It has worked. There's no reason to think it will continue to work.
Sure there, thinking it'll continue to work is exactly what we're talking about. We think that it continuing to work, will continue to work, because we've observed it continuing to work.

"It has been argued that we have reason to know that the future will resemble the past, because what was the future has constantly become the past, and has always been found to resemble the past, so that we really have experience of the future, namely of times which were formerly future, which we may call past futures. But such an argument really begs the very question at issue. We have experience of past futures, but not of future futures, and the question is: Will future futures resemble past futures? This question is not to be answered by an argument which starts from past futures alone. We have therefore still to seek for some principle which shall enable us to know that the future will follow the same laws as the past. "

Bertrand Russell.

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In other words, you're saying that because induction has worked, we can induce that it will continue to work but that relies on begging the question that induction will continue to work.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

In other words, you're saying that because induction has worked, we can induce that it will continue to work but that relies on begging the question that induction will continue to work.

That is exactly Russell's, (and Hume's) point. Once we assume that induction requires justification, we are in the quicksand. The question to ask is why we think that induction requires justification. What is supposed to be the matter with it? And that puts the issue into a new light. In philosophy we question assumptions. We do not just accept them.

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@Night Ripper,

Night Ripper wrote:

In other words, you're saying that because induction has worked, we can induce that it will continue to work but that relies on begging the question that induction will continue to work.

I dont see how it begs the question, because there is no argument stating that induction will continue to work, just as there is no argument that anything else, inductively supposed to continue to work, will continue to work. However, this is why we use induction, because we have observed that it works.

1 Reply

@ughaibu,

ughaibu wrote:

Night Ripper wrote:
In other words, you're saying that because induction has worked, we can induce that it will continue to work but that relies on begging the question that induction will continue to work.
I dont see how it begs the question, because there is no argument stating that induction will continue to work, just as there is no argument that anything else, inductively supposed to continue to work, will continue to work. However, this is why we use induction, because we have observed that it works.

And as Russell and Hume and others point out, to argue that it will work because it has always worked is to employ the very principle of induction that is at issue. Namely, the principle that we can infer from the premise that induction has always worked in the past, to the conclusion that it will continue to work in the future. So the principle of induction is used to justify itself. Of course, the question, "why do we continue to use induction?" is answered, and Hume and others point out, by the consideration that it has (mostly) worked in the past. But that answers the question, what motivates us to use induction. It does not justify its use. The question, "Why do we use induction" is ambiguous. It can either ask for the justification of the use of induction, or it can ask for the cause of our use of induction. Those are two separate questions. Which was why Hume, in the end, argued that since the question of justification was futile (since there could be no justification that did not beg the question) that our best bet was to become natural epistemologists and inquire into the the psychological nature of our use of induction.

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Causality, Randomness and Induction

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