We Turing Machines Can’t Even Be Locally Ideal Bayesians

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 5 (4):285-290 (2016)
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Abstract

Vann McGee has argued that, given certain background assumptions and an ought-implies-can thesis about norms of rationality, Bayesianism conflicts globally with computationalism due to the fact that Robinson arithmetic is essentially undecidable. I show how to sharpen McGee's result using an additional fact from recursion theory—the existence of a computable sequence of computable reals with an uncomputable limit. In conjunction with the countable additivity requirement on probabilities, such a sequence can be used to construct a specific proposition to which Bayesianism requires an agent to assign uncomputable credence—yielding a local conflict with computationalism.

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Beau Madison Mount
University of Oxford

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References found in this work

On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem.Alan Turing - 1936 - Proceedings of the London Mathematical Society 42 (1):230-265.
Undecidable theories.Alfred Tarski - 1953 - Amsterdam,: North-Holland Pub. Co..
Vexing expectations.Harris Nover & Alan Hájek - 2004 - Mind 113 (450):237-249.
Countable additivity and subjective probability.Jon Williamson - 1999 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 50 (3):401-416.

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