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What is Evidence? — LessWrong

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Walking along the street, your shoelaces come untied. Shortly thereafter, for some odd reason, you start believing your shoelaces are untied. Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pupils of your eyes and strike your retina; the energy of the photons triggers neural impulses; the neural impulses are transmitted to the visual-processing areas of the brain; and there the optical information is processed and reconstructed into a 3D model that is recognized as an untied shoelace. There is a sequence of events, a chain of cause and effect, within the world and your brain, by which you end up believing what you believe. The final outcome of the process is a state of mind which mirrors the state of your actual shoelaces. What is evidence? It is an event entangled, by links of cause and effect, with whatever you want to know about. If the target of your inquiry is your shoelaces, for example, then the light entering your pupils is evidence entan

x What is Evidence? — LessWrong Noticing Confusion Anticipated Experiences Causality Epistemology Frontpage 252 What is Evidence? by Eliezer Yudkowsky 22nd Sep 2007 4 min read 63 252 The sentence “snow is white” is true if and only if snow is white. —Alfred Tarski To say of what is, that it is, or of what is not, that it is not, is true . —Aristotle, Metaphysics IV Walking along the street, your shoelaces come untied. Shortly thereafter, for some odd reason, you start believing your shoelaces are untied. Light leaves the Sun and strikes your shoelaces and bounces off; some photons enter the pu

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