Theories of Knowledge

He was talking about academic philosophers.

This was a joke referencing academic philosophers rarely being motivated to pick satisfying answers in a time-dependent manner.  

Are you saying that the mechanism of correspondence is an "isomorphism"? Can you please describe what the isomorphism is?

An isomorphism between two systems indicates those two systems implement a common mathematical structure -- a light switch and one's mental model of the light switch are both constrained by having implemented this mathematical structure such that their central behavior ends up the same. Even if your mental model of a light switch has two separate on and off buttons, and the real light switch you're comparing against has a single connected toggle button, they're implementing the same underlying mathematical structure and will behave the same. This allows us to talk about large particle configurations as though they were simple, because correct conclusions about how the system behaves can follow from only using the simplification.

One could communicate to another reasoner what to expect results from a physical system by only telling them what isomorphisms they ought to implement in their mental representation of the system.

Knowledge represents reality.

Yes, but more specifically knowledge is a representation with significant information value due to correspondence with reality, a subset of possible representations. Being a representation at all shouldn't be sufficient to call something knowledge, if the word knowledge is to mean something different than what was already accounted for by having the words belief and representation.

One is justified in believing things on the basis of utility

That is circular. Utility is a value judgment. Value judgments depend on truth judgments. Consequentialism doesn't explain what the basis for truth judgments is, without using circular reasoning.

As I said, consequentialism does not touch the assessment of what is true, it is only about the value judgment placed on beliefs. One can just snip out the part where there was a circular argument that consequentialism was seemingly responsible for invoking, and say consequentialism is just about justification (distinct from truth).

How do you judge "accuracy to reality"?

What a reasoner with all the context would see as reality, such that one can do this imperfectly with less context with that imperfection measured in distance from reality.

People can disagree on what they think is accurate.

This doesn't call into question the ability to make such judgments from the perspective of a reasoner with all the context.

And Representationalism is the best theory for describing how mental models of reality work.

Still a bit foggy on how to distinguish it as a theory. If there is some other content to it besides rejecting direct realism, I could see how this might still be true, but I'm unaware of that content if it exists. I started out rejecting direct realism and (thus adopting what is purported to be representationalism), and don't see how it could go any further in usefully constraining my beliefs.

As I said before, the subject | object dichotomy is necessary for describing what knowledge is and how it works.

I'm not aware of how this is the case; I'd guess this probably follows from using a different definition of knowledge.

Then Consequentialism is not a theory of knowledge.

Correct, unless you're using knowledge to mean justified true belief, which some people do. I think all the abstractions attain maximal usefulness when knowledge just means true belief, such that justification is in the domain of consequentialism, a theory of the value of beliefs which sometimes handles contexts involving knowledge.

Beliefs are knowledge.

Potential abstraction value is lost by assigning 'knowledge' to all beliefs. Either only some beliefs are knowledge, or you're looking for a theory of beliefs, which is better explained by examining the mechanics of Bayes and other abstractions.

How could evolution know an eye has beneficial effects?

That's a metaphorical question. Evolution is not a subject. Evolution doesn't know anything. Evolution is a process.

The answer was that a mind does not need to know why something works in order to implement something that works, and can end up with an implementation providing knowledge. It doesn't depend on a meta-level assessment that the possessed knowledge is actually knowledge.

As the essay explained, knowledge is subjective.

One can have subjective representations of objective reality, but the knowledge is only knowledge insofar as it is about objective reality, which includes information related to the subject. I see no reason to let the abstraction point to anything subjective except insofar as the subjective is also objective.

Your brain is using a model of reality to make a truth judgment and statement. My brain is using a different model of reality that judges your statement to be wrong. I believe that you're implicitly using the representationalism theory of knowledge to make this statement.

This wasn't a truth claim, just me pointing at how I'd use 'knowledge' to mean the most useful thing it can mean. I'm defining knowledge to be only those beliefs which correspond to reality, such that another reasoner with all the context could determine that they actually had knowledge rather than false beliefs not constituting knowledge. We already have the word belief to mean the more general thing. Is knowledge distinct from beliefs in your ontology? What are the constraints that select down from beliefs to knowledge, if some beliefs are not knowledge?

In order to define "ideal reasoning", you need to define what's "ideal". What a person considers to be "ideal" is a value judgment. Value judgments are based on value knowledge. Value knowledge is a type of knowledge. Knowledge is subjective. Thus, ideal reasoning is subjective. It's not possible to give an objective definition of "ideal reasoning". And since you haven't specified how you're defining it, it's not clear what you're talking about.

Ideal is exclusively with respect to preferences, yep. Knowledge is not subjective -- there is a correct answer, and fully incorrect answers are not knowledge. Ideal reasoning, once you have pinned down which ideal reasoning you mean constrained by preference, is objective. There is a correct answer about how one would want to reason given their preferences; any subjectivity is an illusion.

I'm using ideal reasoning to mean that which is available to a reasoner (A), and is the reasoning that would be pointed to by a reasoner (B), if B possessed the whole mapping from contexts to outcomes with respect to A. B knows how to interpret the preferences of A as ways to distinguish outcome quality on the basis of any reasoning they're doing, such that this is a sufficient constraint for B to select the ideal way for A to reason. It would then objectively be the ideal reasoning for A to adopt, but A doesn't have to know anything about that.

If you believe that knowledge can be based on value judgments, then such knowledge would be subjective since value judgments are subjective.

Value judgments are a part of objective reality, and knowledge can be about that objective reality. Whether or not something is knowledge only conditions on truth value about the subjective content, not anything actually subjective that could entail false beliefs. Once you get to condition on preferences as objective qualities of the environment, one can have knowledge 'based on' value judgments that are still only about objective reality.