[-empyre-] Welcome to May: Boredom: Labor, Use and Time

[B. Bogart]

Hello Murat,

I think of prediction as a description of what is likely to occur next
that is explicitly not occurring now. A definition does not seem to
involve any inherent sense of time.

When I wrote my previous message I was wondering whether a fetish video
that contained no explicit sexual acts, but only the correlated fetish
implements and bodies, would be pornography. To a person that does not
respond sexually to whips or rope, the film may not be considered
pornographic. To a person who does, it might be. I suppose all this
means is that definitions are context dependent. Prediction is exactly
about learning (temporal) contexts.

Of course, as predictions are so engrained in our cognition, we have
plenty of cultural descriptions that refer to expected occurrences over
time. It's hard to imagine a definition of justice that does not depend
on conclusion where misdeeds in the past lead to punishment in the
present or future.

You ask:
> ...in what ways, if any, if your predictions are empirical and not
> purely deductive?

That is a very good question. I would say that predictions are learned
from experiences and thus empirical. What are deductions? If we mean
logical inference, then they still depend on a structure of relations
between atoms. In the case of prediction, these relations are based on
proximity in time over many iterations. In deduction where do these
relations come from? I suppose what I'm saying is that while deduction
appears to be non-empirical, it may actually depend on an underlying
structure learned from embodied experience of the world, and thus just
as dependent on empirical data as prediction. My logic is rusty, so my
understanding of deduction may be too simplistic... Perhaps restating
the question may make this easier.

Ben