I understand that this question might be difficult or even unresolved. But within a foundationalist view of knowledge, has anyone proposed a set of basic beliefs that seem to be the most rational for forming an accurate model of reality, or at least the most rational that we know of? If so, what are those beliefs?
To clarify what I mean by a 'rational basic belief', I think it's best to give an example of what I mean by an 'irrational basic belief'. An example of an irrational basic belief might be 'My favourite news channel is always reliable' or 'Whatever I want to be true is true'. Clearly, these two are irrational, but it's hard to pinpoint exactly what makes them different from a basic belief such as 'Deductive reasoning is reliable'. Nonetheless, it would seem this one is a basic belief that is rational or warranted.
So I'm not asking for a set of basic beliefs which by definition is the most rational. For example, I don't want a set of beliefs that includes a complete theory of physics, because right now such a theory is unknown, even though it technically would be the most rational thing to include in your set of basic beliefs.
Also, I'm not asking for a set of basic beliefs that most people seem to adopt, or that seems to explain the behaviour of most people, because most (if not all) people are not rational 100% of the time. I would rather just consider a set of basic beliefs on their own merits.
Another way of thinking about my question is: if I were to build an artificial intelligence/robot whose goal is to create an accurate model of reality, what assumptions should I program into it? Of course, the AI/robot is allowed to update its model of reality as it collects information, but which assumptions should underlie how it models reality?
For example, one assumption that an AI (or any rational agent) might have is "My memory is always reliable". Otherwise, the agent would not want to extrapolate from past experiences.
[EDIT]
I found an article that provides an answer close to what I'm looking for, The Concept of Rational Belief (https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/27902897.pdf), but it's from 1985. So I'm looking for something similar to what's quoted below, but more recent.
From page 13:
So what we want is a policy that will bring our beliefs as nearly as may be into correspondence with the set of facts.
It could be that no policy can do this job. Indeed, it seems that the job can be done only if at least three conditions are met. The first is that there is enough lawful structure (it could be just statistical law)...
The second condition is that there be some input from the world for a person, in the sense that there be some fact, distinct logically from a judgement about it, with which judgement about it can be directly compared, although not necessarily one about which judgement is infallible.
[The third condition] ...there must be some sort of recording device, more or less, reliable, for information about earlier inputs.
Brandt, R. B. (1985). The concept of rational belief. The Monist, 68(1), 3-23.