Class 7 Part 2: Uncertainty & Probability Theory: The Logic of Science: Logic Intuition Check

Class 7: Uncertainty & Probability Theory: The Logic of Science: Logic Intuition Check

This is ONLY Part 2. Rumble only allows 2 GB files, so I had to break this into two.

Lesson 7: Logic Intuition Check.

I'm starting to get some good questions. Some of them by folks who have clearly had training in probability and physics before.

These people will have the most difficult time following this Class.

For the very excellent reason that we, all of us, when confronted with new information seek to put it into buckets in our mind, if you will, buckets which we have formed over many years. This is entirely natural, and even helpful.

Unless those buckets are the wrong shape. Which if you have had training about "random variables", "p-values", and the like, are, I insist, wrongly shaped. Not always, and not always badly, but to some extent.

Review!

We have done so far, and ONLY what we have done, is this:

1. Posed some logical questions: could logic handle uncertainty?

2. Demonstrated the crucial differences between local and necessary truths;

3. That having a philosophy is inescapable, and that belief was an act, a choice;

4. That logic was a mix of subjectivity---picking premises and proposition of interest---and objectivity---rigorously showing the connection between the premises and POIs. That logic was only about those connections; that logic was therefore a matter of the mind and not things;

5.That induction and intuition were of at least five different kinds, and that induction provides our most certain knowledge (induction provides us with the rules of logic, for instance, as do axioms, for which there is no and can be no empirical proof); and that there was no escaping faith (at least that your senses were working properly at times);

6. That probability could be represented as a mathematical function, and we discovered the form of that function (Bayes's Theorem); that certainty was given by the number 1, and falsity by the number 0.

All questions will be answered in the following Monday's lecture.

Written lecture: https://www.wmbriggs.com/post/51635/
https://wmbriggs.substack.com/

Permanent class page: https://www.wmbriggs.com/class/