I just watched the debate, and I was absolutely stunned by Dillahunty's incompetence. His strategy was to (a) repeatedly deny a theorem of the probability calculus and (b) falsely accuse you of misrepresenting him. What a total moron. It's a damned shame that young atheists look up to him.
(Believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever called someone a "moron" on the internet. But it's well-deserved in this case.)
My one critique for you is this: Dillahunty leaned heavily on his double-sixes example. You should have taken several minutes to explain what was wrong with the example in your rebuttal, rather than trying to address every point he brought up in his opening statement. Most YouTube audiences don't know what "prior probability" means, so although your response to the example was utterly decisive, it went over most viewers' heads.
(Okay, maybe I have one other critique: although the anthropic argument is a good argument, it's almost impossible for laypeople to understand. I'm a PhD student in philosophy who's read several books about infinity and Bayesian epistemology, and it took me a long time to see the force of the argument. The other arguments you gave were much easier to understand; although I don't think Dillahunty is a moral realist, the argument from moral knowledge would have made a nice substitute for the anthropic argument in this debate.)
This was a pretty unsatisfying debate to me as member of team atheist. I was only listening to it in the background so maybe my assessment is a little off, but my impression is that a lot of time was taken up by Dillahunty repeating in various ways that we have no empirical evidence from which we can determine a list of potential causes of the universe and what their probability distribution should be, nor it seemed in his view could there be any such evidence obtainable from within the universe (hence the story about how if God showed up and told us he created the universe, how would we know he was *really* God rather than just a powerful alien?). And so without that empirical evidence from which to determine a probability distribution of universe-causes, any reasoning based on the assumption that *there is* some probability distribution of universe-causes (in particular one that includes God as a viable option) is invalid in his view. I think.
And since that disagreement was never really clearly communicated and understood, you two spent a lot of time talking past each other.
Yes they both talked past each other. Matthew seemed to misundertand the proposition that Matt was making: Given A, B is more likely, but it does follow not follow that given B, A is more likely.
This just results in a Popper/Hume skepticism of the Bayesian formation that results in SIA, and all of the conclusions Matthew has following.
Matthew's argument here reminds me of the XKCD comic "Dependency".
"God would like to create life because it's good" "God would like to create consciousness because it's good"
Not a single shred of evidence was given for those claims. One could claim that those are obvious and don't need justification. But this move is not available to the theist sadly.
Because the theist affirms that God is fine with letting insect suffering, child cancer, etc. happen, so the motivational system of God is a complete black box and nothing can be said about it.
It's a combo of harking and special pleading/selective focus. Like in fine tuning we have an observation that we can calculate physical constants to some degree of mathematical precision. Then this is used as an priori reason for God wanting the universe to be in this state, and for some reason this is also the a priori state of being fine tuned besides multiple other a priori possibilities like God making life in a universe where there is no stable ontology to show off his metaphysical prowess or making measurements continuous rather than discretized to a few decimal points.
"Because the theist affirms that God is fine with letting insect suffering, child cancer, etc. happen, so the motivational system of God is a complete black box and nothing can be said about it."
I love this type of genius level Bayesian reasoning. Here are just a few tiny details this type of analysis misses:
1- Bayesian reasoning requires one to consider all evidence - not only the parts that you like.
2- If ANY evidence contradicts with your hypothesis your posterior (confidence in your hypothesis after having factored in the evidence) drops to exactly 0 and no amount of subsequent supporting evidence will change that.
And the we find these exquisite gems in the post:
"In contrast, God is the simplest possible kind of mind—simply one without limits." - just because something is infinite does not imply it is unique or simple (Feel free to consult any sufficiently advanced maths textbook).
"The world has three kinds of things: abstract objects, like numbers; the material world; and minds." - sure if immaterial minds or abstract objects that exist independently of minds and matter are your sort of thing.
"Minds can’t reduce to the physical world, because no amount of matter alone is enough by itself to produce a mind. " - just a few kilos seems to be enough (reach above your neck to verify).
"But if you think your existence is likelier if more people exist, and infinitely more likely if infinity people exist, then from the fact that you exist, you should think with certainty that there are infinite people. But this logic doesn’t stop at infinity"— just bask in the light of infinite perfect logic.
Matt writes: "Consider the discovery of dark matter. Scientists believe it exists because light from faraway galaxies seemed to be bent as if affected by gravity, but the places giving off the gravitational field didn’t release any light. In addition, the speed of galactic rotation seemed to indicate more mass than we could observe. Scientists came to believe that there was dark matter—a kind of invisible matter that exerted gravity—because it explained these otherwise puzzling facts about the world."
Dark matter is not some *thing* that was discovered. Dark matter is a hypothesis that explains certain observations about galactic rotation and other things that were inconsistent with Einstein's theory of gravity and the observed amount of matter present. The Dark Matter hypothesis proposes that there exists an exotic form of matter that does not interact with electromagnetic radiation, but does with gravity. OTOH, the may be an alternate gravity theory that can explain these new observations and everything Einstein's theory does. No one had found such a theory yet, Abd no one has found dark mark either. So when people talk about "dark matter" they are referring to this problem of mismatch between established theory and observations.
If there actually is dark matter, this is not described by the Standard Model. This model only described normal matter, with is like 6% of the universe. So, when you use the fine-tuning argument, you are referring to constants in models designed to explain observations of 6% of reality.
It's a hypothesis that posits the existence of a thing--an invisible gravity-releasing kind of matter. It's different from theories that deny that thing exists but say that modified gravity explains the data.
Yes. it is a hypothesis. It is not a real thing. It is a purely theoretical construct that may not exist at all. The problem with dark matter and dark energy is these comprise 94% of the universe. If we can only observe 6% of the universe from which all of our science comes, how can we say we know what the physical constants of the universe are? The fine-tuning argument simply ignores 94% of the universe assuming the physics obtained from the remaining 6% is what counts. How do you know this?
Well I was wrong here, I looked into it further, Dark matter is *not* a hypotheses or theory. It is a *problem* needing explanation. There are a number of observations that have been made than cannot be explained by the physics we have. These observations are consistent with a phenomenon that interacts gravitationally with normal matter, but does not interact with photons. Since all we can "see" (observe) are photons this phenomenon is undetectable the normal way we see things (that is, it is dark). Since normal mass interacts gravitationally, as does this phenomenon it is similar to mass in that respect. And since it is dark, one combines these two things together to get "dark matter" as the name for this problem.
This doesn't mean there is some "stuff" our there that is dark matter. There may be, dark matter could be some sort of exotic particle, or it could be something else. There are many theories that try to explain the dark matter observations.
(1) Whether there are objective facts about what one’s priors ought to be. If there aren’t, and if priors are just descriptive facts about a person’s level of confidence, then this might create some (albeit perhaps minor) problems.
(2) Claims about what it’d be good for God to do may be vulnerable to concerns about normative/moral realism.
"If there aren’t, and if priors are just descriptive facts about a person’s level of confidence, then this might create some (albeit perhaps minor) problems."
Advice for being persuasive to an audience: you appear dishonest. Your speed does not suggest competence on a subject necessarily- it suggests a desire to quickly move on. People who are not as adept at your statistical moves are as likely to be unimpressed, and since they did not follow, you failed to persuade them there too.
Personally: I would be more likely to weigh your analysis more heavily if you did not appear to dodge the question, and if you did not layer so many other assertions after the one you are asked about. Unfortunately, regardless of whether you are or are not correct, your style Feels dishonest, feels like you are trying to bury your opponent rather than engage, and is therefore less persuasive to me.
Three questions I still have from that debate:
You lose moral standing by throwing the Holocaust stuff in there. It makes you appear to be trying to do a thought stopper (who could possibly argue the Holocaust was not bad?!) instead of genuinely engage the question. But even with that, Water bears, bacteria, hydrogen atoms, aliens, none of those things have reason to “full stop” think it was bad, and we have no reason to conclude that a deity, if it exists, thinks any particular way about life or suffering. Your argument that “some things are just bad full stop” appeared to go no further than “I am asserting this”. Matt’s assertion that “we think it’s bad because it’s suffering that centers us” felt more persuasive.
Following from that, your answer to Matt on the question of Evil, basically, how can a perfect being with the goal of creating maximum happiness allow so much suffering- your answer seemed to be “when you factor in an infinite afterlife of happiness” basically then there would be more happiness than unhappiness, but 1. You certainly appear to an audience to have asserted an additional thing existing to get out of that pickle (and it sure seems to have an unfalsifiable shape. “Happiness is evidence of a god that values happiness” “what about suffering?” “A god who values happiness would create an afterlife of maximum happiness that outweighs mortal suffering”. So happiness is evidence for but unhappiness is not evidence against) and 2. When later you were asked about the vast harshesness of space, you suggested that this god creates lots of things, and it would be bad for aliens to conquer other civilizations, so space is harsh to keep them apart… when certainly seems to me to warrant the followup: so do aliens not have afterlives? Or else, why did got not create some barrier on earth to keep humans from from doing the bad thing of conquering each other?
I am not extremely well versed on either statistics or fallacies, but I find the puddle fallacy extremely persuasive, and no assertion of how improbable you find the universe to be seems to defeat that? I appreciate that you sort of acknowledged that proof of a multiverse (and therefore that all those universes where the constants weren't right fizzled and we are in the one that succeeded) would help falsify your argument, but then you appeared to add caveats?? And I still was sitting there like. This seems to be a central issue you two went back and forth on, and I do not feel you adequately dealt with the fact that if the constants were different, if that's even possible, then we wouldn't know because we wouldn't exist. Like, the probability I exist is not astronomical. It is 100%. Because I exist. The probability I Would Have Existed Given Changes In The System might be low, but this IS the system, and the result is me, and you, etc. That's the evidence we have, the one experiment we have seen.
And , a last thing, you frequently asserted that science was on your side, but my experience with the scientific method is that we do not confirm a hypothesis, but rather fail to reject, based on Predictive power. In this way, we can still use scientific method with things we can't test in a lab, or in our lifetimes, because we can say “if this hypothesis is accurate, we should expect to see this evidence in this location” and if we do, then we proceed forward. Predictive power, not just explanatory power, is valuable.
To use you guys’ poker and card analogies, I came away from that debate still feeling like you were failing to engage with the fact that that, Yes, the probability of a specific hand or deck is low, but they are equally low, and if we are not looking for a specific hand, then we would not find any unlikely outcome any more unlikely than any other
Agnosticism is not a particularly interesting philosophical position in 99% of cases.
Saying "we can't be definitively sure of a given response to the question" is always a pretty good argument -- but it's also usually very boring. Not that there are no interesting arguments definitively *for* uncertainty, but it's too easy to fall back on "there is insufficient evidence to draw a strong conclusion on this matter"
The argument instead devolves to an epistemic one: does it make more sense to instead adopt a position *under uncertainty*, i.e., to say that provisionally you think theism or atheism is more likely but you do not profess certainty, or does it make more sense to operate as though you have no position on the matter?
As an agnostic, I'm open to admit that God may exists. My problem is the leap from the general logical, theological, etc , arguments about the existence of God, to then affirming the truth of a specific brand of organized religion, which are mostly about social control, tribalism and business.
I laughed out loud when Matt asked if you understood hypotheticals. Earlier in the debate when you brought up the "made by god with love universe" his first response was something along the lines of "this is a made up sci fi scenario that's nothing like the real world!". He also mentions later in the debate all the "fantastical scenarios" you've brought up 😆.
>Just as if you’re rational you won’t be racist, as racism is irrational
This is like saying if you're maximally silly you won't be racist as being racist isn't silly. I just don't see what either of the involved concepts have to do with each other absent some specified circumstance where they come into conflict, like you're told to be very silly but not racist or very rational but not racist.
>The theory that the world is infinite has a higher prior than the theory that the world is exactly 10 quadrillion light-years across because infinity is a less arbitrary size.
I don't agree and I don't see an a priori reason for choosing one over the other, nor do I think I could conceive of one where the same problem (no a priori reason to accept it over another option) wouldn't rearise.
I just watched the debate, and I was absolutely stunned by Dillahunty's incompetence. His strategy was to (a) repeatedly deny a theorem of the probability calculus and (b) falsely accuse you of misrepresenting him. What a total moron. It's a damned shame that young atheists look up to him.
(Believe it or not, this is the first time I've ever called someone a "moron" on the internet. But it's well-deserved in this case.)
My one critique for you is this: Dillahunty leaned heavily on his double-sixes example. You should have taken several minutes to explain what was wrong with the example in your rebuttal, rather than trying to address every point he brought up in his opening statement. Most YouTube audiences don't know what "prior probability" means, so although your response to the example was utterly decisive, it went over most viewers' heads.
(Okay, maybe I have one other critique: although the anthropic argument is a good argument, it's almost impossible for laypeople to understand. I'm a PhD student in philosophy who's read several books about infinity and Bayesian epistemology, and it took me a long time to see the force of the argument. The other arguments you gave were much easier to understand; although I don't think Dillahunty is a moral realist, the argument from moral knowledge would have made a nice substitute for the anthropic argument in this debate.)
His audience is full on psychopolitics of trauma pilled
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-psychopolitics-of-trauma
This was a pretty unsatisfying debate to me as member of team atheist. I was only listening to it in the background so maybe my assessment is a little off, but my impression is that a lot of time was taken up by Dillahunty repeating in various ways that we have no empirical evidence from which we can determine a list of potential causes of the universe and what their probability distribution should be, nor it seemed in his view could there be any such evidence obtainable from within the universe (hence the story about how if God showed up and told us he created the universe, how would we know he was *really* God rather than just a powerful alien?). And so without that empirical evidence from which to determine a probability distribution of universe-causes, any reasoning based on the assumption that *there is* some probability distribution of universe-causes (in particular one that includes God as a viable option) is invalid in his view. I think.
And since that disagreement was never really clearly communicated and understood, you two spent a lot of time talking past each other.
Yes they both talked past each other. Matthew seemed to misundertand the proposition that Matt was making: Given A, B is more likely, but it does follow not follow that given B, A is more likely.
This just results in a Popper/Hume skepticism of the Bayesian formation that results in SIA, and all of the conclusions Matthew has following.
Matthew's argument here reminds me of the XKCD comic "Dependency".
Adelstein is so lost on this topic...
"God would like to create life because it's good" "God would like to create consciousness because it's good"
Not a single shred of evidence was given for those claims. One could claim that those are obvious and don't need justification. But this move is not available to the theist sadly.
Because the theist affirms that God is fine with letting insect suffering, child cancer, etc. happen, so the motivational system of God is a complete black box and nothing can be said about it.
You noticed that too. A blizzard of assertions.
It's a combo of harking and special pleading/selective focus. Like in fine tuning we have an observation that we can calculate physical constants to some degree of mathematical precision. Then this is used as an priori reason for God wanting the universe to be in this state, and for some reason this is also the a priori state of being fine tuned besides multiple other a priori possibilities like God making life in a universe where there is no stable ontology to show off his metaphysical prowess or making measurements continuous rather than discretized to a few decimal points.
I found it so odd that a suffering-focused utilitarian would make such an argument.
I'm not sure if he's making these arguments seriously, given his other stated views.
"Because the theist affirms that God is fine with letting insect suffering, child cancer, etc. happen, so the motivational system of God is a complete black box and nothing can be said about it."
How does this follow?
I love this type of genius level Bayesian reasoning. Here are just a few tiny details this type of analysis misses:
1- Bayesian reasoning requires one to consider all evidence - not only the parts that you like.
2- If ANY evidence contradicts with your hypothesis your posterior (confidence in your hypothesis after having factored in the evidence) drops to exactly 0 and no amount of subsequent supporting evidence will change that.
And the we find these exquisite gems in the post:
"In contrast, God is the simplest possible kind of mind—simply one without limits." - just because something is infinite does not imply it is unique or simple (Feel free to consult any sufficiently advanced maths textbook).
"The world has three kinds of things: abstract objects, like numbers; the material world; and minds." - sure if immaterial minds or abstract objects that exist independently of minds and matter are your sort of thing.
"Minds can’t reduce to the physical world, because no amount of matter alone is enough by itself to produce a mind. " - just a few kilos seems to be enough (reach above your neck to verify).
"But if you think your existence is likelier if more people exist, and infinitely more likely if infinity people exist, then from the fact that you exist, you should think with certainty that there are infinite people. But this logic doesn’t stop at infinity"— just bask in the light of infinite perfect logic.
Matt writes: "Consider the discovery of dark matter. Scientists believe it exists because light from faraway galaxies seemed to be bent as if affected by gravity, but the places giving off the gravitational field didn’t release any light. In addition, the speed of galactic rotation seemed to indicate more mass than we could observe. Scientists came to believe that there was dark matter—a kind of invisible matter that exerted gravity—because it explained these otherwise puzzling facts about the world."
Dark matter is not some *thing* that was discovered. Dark matter is a hypothesis that explains certain observations about galactic rotation and other things that were inconsistent with Einstein's theory of gravity and the observed amount of matter present. The Dark Matter hypothesis proposes that there exists an exotic form of matter that does not interact with electromagnetic radiation, but does with gravity. OTOH, the may be an alternate gravity theory that can explain these new observations and everything Einstein's theory does. No one had found such a theory yet, Abd no one has found dark mark either. So when people talk about "dark matter" they are referring to this problem of mismatch between established theory and observations.
If there actually is dark matter, this is not described by the Standard Model. This model only described normal matter, with is like 6% of the universe. So, when you use the fine-tuning argument, you are referring to constants in models designed to explain observations of 6% of reality.
It's a hypothesis that posits the existence of a thing--an invisible gravity-releasing kind of matter. It's different from theories that deny that thing exists but say that modified gravity explains the data.
Relevant: Dark Matter is not a theory by Angela Collier https://youtu.be/PbmJkMhmrVI
Yes. it is a hypothesis. It is not a real thing. It is a purely theoretical construct that may not exist at all. The problem with dark matter and dark energy is these comprise 94% of the universe. If we can only observe 6% of the universe from which all of our science comes, how can we say we know what the physical constants of the universe are? The fine-tuning argument simply ignores 94% of the universe assuming the physics obtained from the remaining 6% is what counts. How do you know this?
Well I was wrong here, I looked into it further, Dark matter is *not* a hypotheses or theory. It is a *problem* needing explanation. There are a number of observations that have been made than cannot be explained by the physics we have. These observations are consistent with a phenomenon that interacts gravitationally with normal matter, but does not interact with photons. Since all we can "see" (observe) are photons this phenomenon is undetectable the normal way we see things (that is, it is dark). Since normal mass interacts gravitationally, as does this phenomenon it is similar to mass in that respect. And since it is dark, one combines these two things together to get "dark matter" as the name for this problem.
This doesn't mean there is some "stuff" our there that is dark matter. There may be, dark matter could be some sort of exotic particle, or it could be something else. There are many theories that try to explain the dark matter observations.
The fine-tuning argument is based on the assumption that we can predict what the universe would be like if we altered its physics, which seems not to be true. If we can't make that kind of prediction, the argument needs to be thrown out. https://open.substack.com/pub/eclecticinquiries/p/the-fine-tuning-argument-cant-get?r=4952v2&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false
Two weak links in your argument:
(1) Whether there are objective facts about what one’s priors ought to be. If there aren’t, and if priors are just descriptive facts about a person’s level of confidence, then this might create some (albeit perhaps minor) problems.
(2) Claims about what it’d be good for God to do may be vulnerable to concerns about normative/moral realism.
"If there aren’t, and if priors are just descriptive facts about a person’s level of confidence, then this might create some (albeit perhaps minor) problems."
What problem would that create?
Advice for being persuasive to an audience: you appear dishonest. Your speed does not suggest competence on a subject necessarily- it suggests a desire to quickly move on. People who are not as adept at your statistical moves are as likely to be unimpressed, and since they did not follow, you failed to persuade them there too.
Personally: I would be more likely to weigh your analysis more heavily if you did not appear to dodge the question, and if you did not layer so many other assertions after the one you are asked about. Unfortunately, regardless of whether you are or are not correct, your style Feels dishonest, feels like you are trying to bury your opponent rather than engage, and is therefore less persuasive to me.
Three questions I still have from that debate:
You lose moral standing by throwing the Holocaust stuff in there. It makes you appear to be trying to do a thought stopper (who could possibly argue the Holocaust was not bad?!) instead of genuinely engage the question. But even with that, Water bears, bacteria, hydrogen atoms, aliens, none of those things have reason to “full stop” think it was bad, and we have no reason to conclude that a deity, if it exists, thinks any particular way about life or suffering. Your argument that “some things are just bad full stop” appeared to go no further than “I am asserting this”. Matt’s assertion that “we think it’s bad because it’s suffering that centers us” felt more persuasive.
Following from that, your answer to Matt on the question of Evil, basically, how can a perfect being with the goal of creating maximum happiness allow so much suffering- your answer seemed to be “when you factor in an infinite afterlife of happiness” basically then there would be more happiness than unhappiness, but 1. You certainly appear to an audience to have asserted an additional thing existing to get out of that pickle (and it sure seems to have an unfalsifiable shape. “Happiness is evidence of a god that values happiness” “what about suffering?” “A god who values happiness would create an afterlife of maximum happiness that outweighs mortal suffering”. So happiness is evidence for but unhappiness is not evidence against) and 2. When later you were asked about the vast harshesness of space, you suggested that this god creates lots of things, and it would be bad for aliens to conquer other civilizations, so space is harsh to keep them apart… when certainly seems to me to warrant the followup: so do aliens not have afterlives? Or else, why did got not create some barrier on earth to keep humans from from doing the bad thing of conquering each other?
I am not extremely well versed on either statistics or fallacies, but I find the puddle fallacy extremely persuasive, and no assertion of how improbable you find the universe to be seems to defeat that? I appreciate that you sort of acknowledged that proof of a multiverse (and therefore that all those universes where the constants weren't right fizzled and we are in the one that succeeded) would help falsify your argument, but then you appeared to add caveats?? And I still was sitting there like. This seems to be a central issue you two went back and forth on, and I do not feel you adequately dealt with the fact that if the constants were different, if that's even possible, then we wouldn't know because we wouldn't exist. Like, the probability I exist is not astronomical. It is 100%. Because I exist. The probability I Would Have Existed Given Changes In The System might be low, but this IS the system, and the result is me, and you, etc. That's the evidence we have, the one experiment we have seen.
And , a last thing, you frequently asserted that science was on your side, but my experience with the scientific method is that we do not confirm a hypothesis, but rather fail to reject, based on Predictive power. In this way, we can still use scientific method with things we can't test in a lab, or in our lifetimes, because we can say “if this hypothesis is accurate, we should expect to see this evidence in this location” and if we do, then we proceed forward. Predictive power, not just explanatory power, is valuable.
To use you guys’ poker and card analogies, I came away from that debate still feeling like you were failing to engage with the fact that that, Yes, the probability of a specific hand or deck is low, but they are equally low, and if we are not looking for a specific hand, then we would not find any unlikely outcome any more unlikely than any other
I wrote a quick article debunking one of the many very problematic claims that Mattthew makes on this topic : https://benjamintettu.substack.com/p/keeping-matthew-adelstein-in-check
I’d be more interested in seeing him challenged on his decidedly tribal approach to a range of social issues
You might try debating an agnostic sometime. I think both you and Dillahunty are taking positions based on insufficient evidence.
Agnosticism is not a particularly interesting philosophical position in 99% of cases.
Saying "we can't be definitively sure of a given response to the question" is always a pretty good argument -- but it's also usually very boring. Not that there are no interesting arguments definitively *for* uncertainty, but it's too easy to fall back on "there is insufficient evidence to draw a strong conclusion on this matter"
The argument instead devolves to an epistemic one: does it make more sense to instead adopt a position *under uncertainty*, i.e., to say that provisionally you think theism or atheism is more likely but you do not profess certainty, or does it make more sense to operate as though you have no position on the matter?
As an agnostic, I'm open to admit that God may exists. My problem is the leap from the general logical, theological, etc , arguments about the existence of God, to then affirming the truth of a specific brand of organized religion, which are mostly about social control, tribalism and business.
I laughed out loud when Matt asked if you understood hypotheticals. Earlier in the debate when you brought up the "made by god with love universe" his first response was something along the lines of "this is a made up sci fi scenario that's nothing like the real world!". He also mentions later in the debate all the "fantastical scenarios" you've brought up 😆.
>why would particles moving about give rise to subjectivity?
Same reason they give rise to computation or any other macro phenomenon.
>Just as if you’re rational you won’t be racist, as racism is irrational
This is like saying if you're maximally silly you won't be racist as being racist isn't silly. I just don't see what either of the involved concepts have to do with each other absent some specified circumstance where they come into conflict, like you're told to be very silly but not racist or very rational but not racist.
>The theory that the world is infinite has a higher prior than the theory that the world is exactly 10 quadrillion light-years across because infinity is a less arbitrary size.
I don't agree and I don't see an a priori reason for choosing one over the other, nor do I think I could conceive of one where the same problem (no a priori reason to accept it over another option) wouldn't rearise.