Contactless Updating

Canonical definition

Contactless Updating is Bayesian Updating on a Belief whose Referent the Individual does not contact, so that every item of Evidence bearing on the Belief is testimony, the coupled Evidence of other Individuals, or the Individual's own recall, and none is a cost the Referent imposes. The rule is the ordinary one and the condition is what distinguishes Contactless Updating: under that condition the posterior follows the flow of Evidence and nothing in the flow is tied to the Referent. Contactless Updating installs a True Belief and a False Belief on the same terms, and the updating that installed a Belief can remove it. Evidence combines additively in log-odds, so a Belief near certainty can be carried below even by many items of endogenous Evidence, none of which moves the probability appreciably and none of which registers with the Individual as a change of mind. Contactless Updating requires M's general case, through which self-coupling returns recalled Beliefs and Confabulated reasons to the Decision Hub as Evidence, and does not require its special case; social input adds to the flow without being necessary to it, and the absence of contact with the Referent is the one condition Contactless Updating does require. Contactless Updating is distinct from drift, which is the non-convergent equilibrium of a domain with no Referent: Contactless Updating converges wherever the flow carries the Belief, in a world-constraining domain whose Referent the Individual does not contact. Where Contactless Updating carries a True Belief about a decohered Referent onto the losing side of a settled question, and the Referent remains available, the Belief's maintenance is reached by the eliminative proof of Referent Abandonment, so Contactless Updating is a route into Referent Abandonment on which no positional calculation is made at a single moment. Where Contactless Updating carries a False Belief onto the Referent's verdict, the correction is real and the corrected Belief stays exposed to the same updating. Contactless Updating and the Mimetic Drive to False Belief are not alternatives: a Belief carried off its Referent can come to carry positional value, and from then on both maintain it. The updating is indifferent to Truth and the protection is not. A True Belief can be held with the trace of the test that settled it, and the Individual's operation of the Provenance Rule on the Evidence arriving against the Belief holds that Evidence below certainty; a False Belief carries no such trace, and the same Rule, applied to the testimony on which the False Belief rests, holds the Belief itself below certainty. The trace makes the operation possible and does not guarantee it, and an Individual whose Belief carries positional value can decline to perform the operation. Whether positional value is present is settled by the Standing Test.