Lastly, on the topic of epistemology, it is crucial to understand the perspectival nature of probability. This is very easily confused with subjective probability. There's only a small difference, which can be revealed by thinking about tigers. The dangerousness of a tiger is not subjective, in the sense that a tiger is not dangerous for a person far away and dangerous for a person in the tigers vicinity. The tiger is dangerous either way,

Zuboff’s empiricism draws upon Bayesian inference, in which Bayes’ theorem has an objective a priori status. One issue with this theorem is that it requires prior probabilities to update the probability of a hypothesis being true in light of new evidence. This has led some philosophers to adopt a subjectivist stance, arguing that ultimate prior probabilities cannot be known objectively and must instead be assigned based on subjective credences. Zuboff contends that these philosophers conflate subjectivity with perspectivity.

Zuboff's answer to the problem of scepticism:
"How can you know that your present experience doesn’t owe its existence to an artificial stimulation of your brain, disembodied in a vat, or to a merely chance and causeless occurrence of its pattern in the absence of any world or even any time outside of it? The classic scepticism regarding the possibility of intellectual justification for judgments about the character of the world beyond the present appearances in a mind,

What is knowledge? This question is at the heart of epistemology, since philosophers want to know what they can know. The classic account of knowledge involves that it must be justified, true, and believed. “Whenever a knower (S) knows some fact (p), several conditions must obtain. A proposition that S doesn’t even believe cannot be, or express, a fact that S knows. Therefore, knowledge requires belief. False propositions cannot be, or express, facts, and so cannot be known.

Zuboff's principle of highest probability can also deal with the new problem of induction:

"Nelson Goodman thought he had already dealt with Hume through making the sort of response to him that I labeled as bad. He had simply defined induction as rational despite his admission that he could give no justification for it in terms of necessary truth (like the justification I provide). It is in relation to his own solution that Goodman raises his famous ‘new riddle of induction’.

Vindicating the scientific method against the Duhem-Quine thesis:
One big problem, if one could only use falsification to establish fallible, conjectural truth, is that falsification itself cannot deductively falsify hypotheses nor theories. If you toss a coin a billion times and it lands on heads every time, it would still not be contradictory to claim that the coin is truly fair. One cannot deductively refute this hypothesis.

There are two logical solutions to the problem of induction. To find these solutions it is paramount to think clearly about the problem.
The problem of induction arises from the fact that after repeatedly observing "A is X," it remains non-contradictory to observe "A is not X." Therefore, we cannot conclude that "All A are X." The only thing we can logically establish from observation are falsifications: while observing "A is not X" is not inherently contradictory, asserting "All A are X" after such an observation would be contradictory.

The pursuit of knowledge is, at its core, a pursuit of truth. Zuboff notes that beyond critical rationalism and empiricism, many theories of truth attempt to counter skepticism by lowering the standards for what counts as truth. He writes: “These are self-refuting because it turns out that they can make no sense except as claims that these theories themselves are true according to the rejected higher standard.

The principle of perfect grasp is a type of ideal observer theory, making it cognitivist and subjectivist in nature. This means that ethical statements express propositions, which can be true or false, and where truth or falsity depends on people's preferences. This stands in direct opposition to non-cognitivism (such as expressivism), which asserts that ethical statements are not propositions and can only be honest or dishonest, but not true or false. To strengthen the principle of perfect grasp, we need to refute non-cognitivism.

Derek Parfit's famous thought experiment of the teletransporter imagines a person being teleported from Earth to Mars. For our discussion, let’s assume macroscopic teleportation is physically possible. Of interest to us is only what happens to our experience. Will we survive? The common view holds that teleportation would end our experience due to a discontinuity. But discontinuity doesn't end our experience in other cases, like sleep, coma, memory loss, near-death experiences or brain surgery.

There are many possible analogies to approximate the previously derived ethical rule:
"I ought to do what the universal subject would want to be doing if the universal subject had a perfect grasp of everything involved." I will discuss the two most helpful analogies and how they address ethical questions.

1. The Time Traveler Analogy:
Imagine that every other person in a given ethical situation is actually yourself, who has time-traveled back, ...

A much simpler (but similar to my previous) answer to Bostrom's probability paradox follows directly from functionalism. Functionalism implies that only the input-output relations of a system (its causal relations) determine its phenomenal experience. We are the function. If this is true, it immediately implies the existence of a universal function, since everything within a given light cone is causally dependent. This means that any system (including us) is ultimately part of the same function.

One possible resolution to Bostrom's probability paradox of unification (which I explained previously) may lie in solving the binding problem of consciousness, since its solution might reveal duplication to be true. The binding problem arises from the observation that our experience is unified, despite being composed of many functional elements.

A desire or will is always a call for change toward a desired future or more accurately against certain undesired futures. In a control system, these would be set points, but we can call them goals. The cause of our desire, whatever its origin, is called a motivation. The root of our motivations lies in our preferences and their root in well-being. Preferences allow us to rank different experiences based on their quality of well-being—that is, how much we desire them relative to one another. An ethical theory must take this into account.

Universalism, as based on the universal of immediacy, since experience is always here, now, and mine, rest on a type theory of identity rather than a token theory.
One contended counterargument to type theory is the slicing problem. Let's see why this is assertion is false. Imagine replacing an entire human brain with a functionally equivalent computer. Arnold Zuboff’s proof of functionalism allows us to infer that this preserves qualia and consciousness.

The most famous counterarguments against universalism—or more specifically, the unification hypothesis, which is a sufficient condition for universalism to be true but not an unavoidably necessary one—were published by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom’s first counterarguments both rely on the assumption of a quasi-infinite universe. While they ultimately fail to refute unification, they might still provide new insights into the nature of the universe and experience.

His first argument can be summarized as follows:

Universalism has far-reaching consequences for population ethics. One specific problem in population ethics is the non-identity problem. This problem says that even a change that would, on the surface, seem to represent a clear improvement for a future person ... ... will often fail to make that person better off. Instead, it often serves only to bring another person, a "better-off person," but still a nonidentical person, into existence in place of the one we intended to help.
Under universalism, this view no longer makes any sense.

It seems impossible to falsify universalism objectively, which would render the claim unscientific. However, it seems to me that universalism could be falsified subjectively. For example, one could anesthetize a brain or invent a switch to toggle the corpus callosum on and off. On the usual view, if we were to anesthetize a brain and then connect it to another brain, similar to how the brains of craniopagus twins can be connected, there would still be two subjective perspectives.

Universalism becomes evident when we consider the concept of identity clearly. It seems to resemble the ideas of the number zero or imaginary numbers in this way. While these concepts are now simple to grasp, they were overlooked or unrecognized for thousands of years. The conventional view of personal identity does not withstand scrutiny.
Let's consider the "Ship of Theseus" thought experiment applied to two human brains A and B. Imagine we gradually exchange one functional brain region at a time, transplanting them from A to B and vice versa.

It can be argued that what has driven the biggest revolutions in science is refining the definition of what observers are.
In relativity, observers can know the order of time-like separated events but cannot know the order of space-like separated events. Similarly, in quantum mechanics, the observer plays a special role in collapsing the wavefunction, becoming entangled with the system. Hence, it seems plausible that new insights into the nature of observers might further deepen our understanding of reality.

Every mental process can be described in two ways: physically, and subjectively as phenomenal experience. Consider merging two brains to form a unified consciousness with no distinct perspectives. Subjectively, the consciousnesses of two individuals merge into one. Using set theory, we can represent the attributes of person A's subjective experience as set A and those of person B as set B. Each set includes a component we call 'subject', which corresponds to the immediacy of experience as here, now, and mine in the first-person style.