Here is a test case for explanationist stories about initial priors, on which a more explanatory theory has a higher initial prior. Consider these hypotheses:
The universe is not created or governed by reason, has a finite lifetime, and has low initial entropy.
The universe is not created or governed by reason, has a finite lifetime, and has low final entropy.
Causation goes from past to future, so absent some kind of foresight involved in the initial conditions, initial conditions are more explanatory than final conditions. Now, presumably there is a nice one-to-one correspondence between worlds where (1) and (2) hold, so absent an explanationist bias in the priors, we shouldn’t have a preference between (1) and (2).
This is just a test case, but I have to confess I don’t have any direct intuition comparing the probabilities of (1) and (2). I like explanationism, so I have a theory-laden reason to assign a higher probability to (1) than to (2).
1 comment:
I’m not sure that explanations trigger my intuitions (and cause them to give out points for explanatory power) until I have some sense of what is being explained. Sure, I’ll grant that 1. is going to be more explanatory of *something*. But what’s that mean to my intuitions? They don’t care until they can at least latch onto a phantasm representing the explanandum.
Post a Comment