[nkoren]

I would hope that she would answer "white...?" -- eg., demonstrate the ability and willingness make a useful provisional inference, with the understanding that it is provisional and the curiosity to know more. That, it seems to me, would be the answer that is most useful and correct.

But you're probably right, the answer would be 'white', at least until a black swan comes along and utterly fucks with her worldview. Humans prefer certainties and binaries, and eschew uncertainties, probabilities, and multiplicities. So they employ all sorts of cognitive errors to avoid these things. This s a problem, because the universe rarely comes in binaries or delivers enough information for real certainty. I would hope that machine consciousness would avoid these errors, as I think they are the foundations of some of our nastier tendencies.

[TeMPOraL]

> Humans prefer certainties and binaries, and eschew uncertainties, probabilities, and multiplicities. So they employ all sorts of cognitive errors to avoid these things.

I wonder how general is that. I'd like to believe it's more of a mindset thing - I definitely saw people reasoning this way, but I also know some that handle uncertainty pretty well. I'd like to include myself in the second group - personally, I'm actually suspicious of anything that sounds binary in the real world - it means I'm being fed some artificial boundaries.