BEYOND A SHADOW OF A DOUBT

      Say one day you give the order that no one should turn off the
lights in the room.

      A while later you come back and the lights are off and you want to
know who did it.

      No one owns up but Susan says Joe was the last one in the room so
he must have done it.  So now are we certain that Joe did it?

      Joe denies he did it though.

      Then Joe goes and dusts the light switch for finger prints and
finds that Tom's prints are on it and so is it certain that Tom did it?

      But Tom denies he did it.

      Then Tom goes to the video camera in the room that recorded the
area and the tape shows that Bill did it and wiped his prints clean and
put Toms prints there from an earlier lift, so now are we certain Bill
did it?

      But Bill denies it too.

      Then Bill goes to the next room where John was sitting during all
this, and he says he saw Mary go to the VCR closet and replace the tape
that was running there with another one, so the video tape may be a
phoney through computer graphics etc and the real one is gone.

      Question: Are we certain who did it yet?

      If we find the *REAL* video tape will we be certain who did it?

      No, because maybe God or some alien beings wrote false data on the
tape while it was recording to implicate an innocent party.

      "Oh but's thats *RIDICULOUS*, the data on the real video tape is
good enough for me!"

      What does "good enough for me" mean?

      It means "Good enough for me to place my bets and be comfortable
with the consequences right or wrong."

      Does it mean you are perfectly certain.

      No.

      Why?

      BECAUSE CERTAINTY IS IMPOSSIBLE in this situation.

      There can ALWAYS be an unknown third part messing with the data
thus falsifying it.

      The Proof calls this the Third Party law and formalizes it with the
statement,

      Learning with Certainty about Cause by Looking at Effects of that
Cause is impossible.

      One can argue "Yeah but this third party is the exceptional claim,
why should we consider it?"

      Well for practical purposes you probably shouldn't worry about it
too much, but for philosophical purposes, claiming certainty for an
uncertainty is a high crime worthy of a few years in hell when your time
comes, so we need to use more stringent standards.

      "Good enough for me" != Certainty

      Certainly.

      Homer

Wed Sep  5 12:59:06 EDT 2018