# Truly Part Of You

![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article2.74d541386bbf.png)

## Metadata
- Author: [[Eliezer Yudkowsky]]
- Full Title: Truly Part Of You
- Category: #articles
- URL: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/fg9fXrHpeaDD6pEPL/truly-part-of-you

## Highlights
- As Donald Davidson observes, if you believe that “beavers” live in deserts, are pure white in color, and weigh 300 pounds when adult, then you do not have any beliefs about beavers, true or false. Your belief about “beavers” is not right enough to be wrong.2 If you don’t have enough experience to regenerate beliefs when they are deleted, then do you have enough experience to connect that belief to anything at all? Wittgenstein: “A wheel that can be turned though nothing else moves with it, is not part of the mechanism.”
- How much of your knowledge could you regenerate? From how deep a deletion? It’s not just a test to cast out insufficiently connected beliefs. It’s a way of absorbing a fountain of knowledge, not just one fact.
- That which you cannot make yourself, you cannot remake when the situation calls for it.
- When you contain the source of a thought, that thought can change along with you as you acquire new knowledge and new skills. When you contain the source of a thought, it becomes truly a part of you and grows along with you. an answer, imagine that knowledge being deleted as well. And when you find a fountain, see what else it can pour.
- Richard Rorty, “Out of the Matrix: How the Late Philosopher Donald Davidson Showed That Reality Can’t Be an Illusion,” The Boston Globe, 2003, http://archive.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/10/05/out_ of_ the_ matrix/.