Jellymatter

This is a post about the “Projected Mind Fallacy”, as named by Edwin Jaynes. Roughly, the projected mind fallacy is the mistaking of uncertainty about the world for a property of the world itself. In other words, thinking that God plays dice. Unfortunately though, it’s not as simple as this and I feel that it’s interpretation deserves some discussion. It is not obvious exactly what should count ‘the world itself’/the non dice playing God/reality, the rest of this post is about how I think this question should be answered (and some other stuff).

Mind projection fallacies can often be spotted by their absurdity: If I had a bag of snooker balls it would be ridiculous to think that the balls exist in some kind of mixture of colours until I pick them out an look at them. Surely the balls are objectively some colour whether or not I decide to look at them. It is (if one accepts the mind projection fallacy) fallacious to say that that the balls that have an indeterminant colour, when in fact, it is just me who doesn’t know which one I will pick out. It is often stated as the confusion of ontology with epistemology, but these words don’t really help anyone understand it.