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Being "psychic" (pg. 11)
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | When I was a kid and my father was teaching me about skepticism...he used the example of the hypothesis: "There is an object one foot across in the asteroid belt composed entirely of chocolate cake." You would have to search the whole asteroid belt to disprove this hypothesis. But though this hypothesis is very hard to disprove, there aren't good arguments for it.
And the child-Eliezer asked his mind to search for arguments that there was a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. Lo, his mind returned the reply: "Since the asteroid-belt-chocolate-cake is one of the classic examples of a bad hypothesis, if anyone ever invents a time machine, some prankster will toss a chocolate cake back into the 20th-century asteroid belt, making it true all along."
Thus - at a very young age - I discovered that my mind could, if asked, invent arguments for anything.
I know people whose sanity has been destroyed by this discovery. They conclude that Reason can be used to argue for anything. And so there is no point in arguing that God doesn't exist, because you could just as well argue that God does exist. Nothing left but to believe whatever you want.
Having given up, they develop whole philosophies of self-inflation to make their despair seem Deeply Wise. If they catch you trying to use Reason, they will smile and pat you on the head and say, "Oh, someday you'll discover that you can argue for anything."
Perhaps even now, my readers are thinking, "Uh-oh, Eliezer can rationalize anything, that's not a good sign."
But you know... being mentally agile doesn't always doom you to disaster. I mean, you might expect that it would. Yet sometimes practice turns out to be different from theory.
Rationalization came too easily to me. It was visibly just a game.
If I had been less imaginative and more easily stumped - if I had not found myself able to argue for any proposition no matter how bizarre - then perhaps I would have confused the activity with thinking.
But I could argue even for chocolate cake in the asteroid belt. It wasn't even difficult; my mind coughed up the argument immediately. It was very clear that this was fake thinking and not real thinking. I never for a moment confused the game with real life. I didn't start thinking there might really be a chocolate cake in the asteroid belt.
You might expect that any child with enough mental agility to come up with arguments for anything, would surely be doomed. But intelligence doesn't always do so much damage as you might think. In this case, it just set me up, at a very early age, to distinguish "reasoning" from "rationalizing". They felt different. |
http://lesswrong.com/lw/r3/against_devils_advocacy/
I don't agree with everything the guy writes in that entry, but he has some good points. It is neither "thoughtful" nor "wise" to declare that all beliefs are on a level. |
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| d-miurge |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
nefardec, have you been reading Thomas Kuhn or something? |
Aaah, Thomas Kuhn reminds me la prépa (2 years of typically French torture, wiki)...
He was not my favorite contemporary philosopher on Science, but it was a very interesting read though (ok, I skip some chapters).
The debate between "internalists" & "externalists" (the external history of science is the economic, social, etc. background) is endless.
I highly recommend Bachelard (almost everything is incredibly well-written and bright). |
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| nefardec |
| quote: | Originally posted by d-miurge
I highly recommend Bachelard (almost everything is incredibly well-written and bright). |
poetics of space was a huge influence for me in architecture school |
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| Paradox Lost |
| quote: | Originally posted by nefardec
poetics of space was a huge influence for me in architecture school |
On a completely unrelated note, have you checked your PM's lately? |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by d-miurge
I highly recommend Bachelard (almost everything is incredibly well-written and bright). |
Maybe I'll check it out. I find most modern French philosophy impenetrable. Maybe it's the translation, or maybe I'm just a dull-witted Anglophone overly fond of formality in argument.
:p |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
Maybe I'll check it out. I find most modern French philosophy impenetrable. Maybe it's the translation, or maybe I'm just a dull-witted Anglophone overly fond of formality in argument. |
I'd say that's because academic writing in English speaking countries is, more often than not, clearer than in any language spoken in the continent. I see you mentioned Kuhn, for example, and even though I've got a translated copy of "The Structure...", I eventually downloaded the original version and read it instead. The same applies to books originally written in Portuguese.
| quote: | Originally posted by Slylee
so how do scientists explain intuition??? |
As far as I know, they don't. If they do, someone's got to tell generative linguists that, because they still seem to think of intuition as some hard-wired sort of "know how" (opposed to a clearer "know that") hidden in the depths of our mental life. I know Pinker, a great psychologist heavily influenced by generative linguistics mention intuition quite often, but I don't think I've ever read a good explanation of what exactly it is.
(Though it may seem I'm talking about something altogether different, it is somewhat related to what you're thinking). |
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| Lira |
Fashionable Nonsense has been in my wishlist for a while, but I don't know this book you have. Have you read it yet? It seems like it talks about literary theory, mainly. Is it true? Does it talk about proper non-Derridaian philosophy too? |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
| quote: | Originally posted by Lira
Fashionable Nonsense has been in my wishlist for a while, but I don't know this book you have. Have you read it yet? It seems like it talks about literary theory, mainly. Is it true? Does it talk about proper non-Derridaian philosophy too? |
It's mainly literary theory, but some of it talks about philosophy as well, like John Searle's take on Derrida. |
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| Lira |
| quote: | Originally posted by MrJiveBoJingles
It's mainly literary theory, but some of it talks about philosophy as well, like John Searle's take on Derrida. |
Now that should be interesting. The thing I like the most about John Searle is that not only he's a very bright guy, he's also really amusing (which seems to be yet another difference about the anglophone academic discourse - it seems American professors, mostly, want to be both informative AND entertaining... doesn't really seem to happen anywhere else).
Ever seen his stuff on Youtube? I just love watching John Searle talk :D |
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| MrJiveBoJingles |
The only time I saw him talk was in the movie Berkeley in the '60s, about the student uprisings of those years. He was a part of all that. You're right about his sense of humor. Some of the examples in the essay on Derrida were pretty funny, like this one:
| quote: | I believe, furthermore, that it is impossible to put the Background presuppositions into the literal meaning of the sentence. You can see this point if you consider actual examples. Suppose I go into a restaurant for a hamburger. Suppose I say, "Give me a hamburger, medium rare, with ketchup and mustard, no relish." That utterance, we may suppose, is intended almost entirely literally. I have said more or less exactly what I meant. But now suppose they bring me the hamburger encased in a solid block of concrete. The block is a yard thick and requires a jackhammer to open it. Now, did they do what I literally asked them to do? My inclination is to say, "No."
One might object: "Well, you didn't tell them everything, you didn't say 'no concrete.'" But this objection starts one down a road one does not wish to follow. Suppose I go in next time and I say "Give me a hamburger, medium rare (and so on), and this time NO CONCRETE." There are still an indefinite number of ways they can misunderstand me. Suppose they bring me a three-thousand-year-old petrified Egyptian hamburger. They might say, "Oh, well you didn't say it has to be a *new* hamburger." This is a genuine King Tut hamburger. What's wrong with that?" |
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| Silky Johnson |
Umm, isn't that what I already said? Pffft. |
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