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PaperclipPerfector  3d ago (text post)   2777 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 12, 2025

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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So this is the opposite of a small-scale question, but similar to what I posted below, I’ve been going through somewhat of an existential crisis about mortality and the purpose of human life.

I want to hear all of your beliefs about the big mysterious questions. For my entire life until now I have been the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists. Surprise surprise that at 32 that doesn’t fill the god-shaped hole in my heart anymore.

I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is. Is the universe an eternal thing? Is it a simulation? How do you actually handle the hard problem of consciousness? The Fermi paradox?

Something that has been tempting me is Michael Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation, very similar to nietzsche’s eternal recurrence. Essentially the bastardized argument is that if the universe is infinite in both temporal directions and you already were plucked from nothingness and given consciousness once, it will happen again even if the probability is infinitesimally small (because if time is infinite it’s bound to happen).

So what do you all think? What gives you comfort when pondering mortality?

As I see it, materialism is just confusing the map for the territory. Technically, everything is connected, so everything is one, and you cannot talk about anything in isolation (the thing-in-itself does not exist, it can't).

The concept "truth" only means reality (and this reality cannot be spoken about) or else it means the value "True" in logic, and all such truth values are just tautologies, and these tautologies follow from assumptions. In other words, you have a closed loop, the only kind of logic which exists is circular logic, it has no connection to reality, it's self-contained, which also means that it adds up to zero.

The only thing which actually exists is experience itself. It's not that our senses deceive while rationality helps us live in reality. What's the actual case is that everything comes from human senses, and that we made up rationality.

I've realize these things, and a bunch of similar things, so all the worries you have are syntax errors to me. There's no problems to solve, and all the questions are wrong. There's only a reality of which we cannot speak, but that's not even a problem. Millions of species have existed even before intelligent beings came to exist, so intelligence is clearly not needed in the first place. I think that wanting answers to questions is a symptom of anxiety, which results in a desire for certainty. It's easier to learn how to accept uncertainty than it is to bother yourself with impossible questions that even the most intelligent people in the world have struggled with. I don't even think you struggle with mortality, but rather with the idea of mortality or a perspective which is so zoomed out that it makes you appear small and meaningless (in which case, I recommend going back to experiencing life from your own body, with yourself as the center)

Edit: Also, aesthetics is enough for me, beauty gives me meaning. And if I'm not happy about life, I consider that a psychological problem and not a philosophical one. Existential questions are the symptoms and not the causes, I think.

For whatever reason, I never struggled with these questions as much as others seemed to, but I eventually settled into a Daoist sort of framework of "the world just is the way it is and what can we know about it?" Whether things are pre-determined by physical laws or whether I have a soul with free will or whether there are infinite copies of me out there someplace has no bearing on how I live my life or get on in my little corner of the universe. Or, as the Bard put it: "All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances." Maybe some find it sad that there's no great cosmic destiny in store for them (but hey, I'm sure someone out there will be be the lucky one), but I never harbored any such delusions of grandeur.

That being said, if you truly want to feel a connection with the Way or God or whatever you want to call it, there are options such as meditation (the hardcore monastic kind where you fast and don't speak to anyone for days) or doing psychedelic drugs, but I can't tell you what sorts of answers you'll get or if they'll do you any good.

In 1921 Wittgenstein wrote a nearly incomprehensible book that, if i understood it correctly, puts forth the idea that trying to find definitive answers to questions like 'what is truth?' and 'what is justice?' is stupid. We might come up with a definition that we find personally amenable, but in creating this definition we have not made a discovery about the world itself. In rat-speak Wittgenstein might have said that trying to find answers to big mysterious questions is trying to map an unseen territory. My personal answer to the big questions is that the questions are stupid.

Despite this Wittgenstein did believe in God, and passionately, but rejected intellectual proofs. Whether that's enough really depends on what it is precisely that you're grappling with. Do you want assurances of immortality? Comfort in mortality? Belief that what you do matters?

In my opinion, it's relatively easy to "debunk" materialism. I'd recommend watching Bernardo Kastrup's playlist, he's the leading proponent of Idealism these days. In his version, which he calls Analytic Idealism, consciousness is essentially all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness instead of the other way around. This is the view I subscribe to now. Some version of this view has popped up throughout human history and across cultures, it's arguably the mainstream view amongst the more philosophical strands of Hinduism (like Advaita Vedanta), Kabbalah has some overlap, the German Idealists mostly believed this (especially Schopenhauer who wrote clearly enough to remove any doubt about the content of his beliefs). Unsure how respected Kastrup is in academia, but he's definitely the person responsible for popularizing it in the last 10 years. Philip Goff is another recommended watch, his interview on Alex O'Connor's channel makes his case for panpsychism, a slightly different view that is essentially physicalism but with the caveat that consciousness is an inherent property of matter and not an emergent property of the interactions between certain sorts of matter. I think this view requires more assumptions than analytic idealism so I don't subscribe to it. That being said, it does address some of the major problems with materialism.

The basic case for Analytic Idealism goes a bit like this (this is far from a rigorous philosophical proof but it will suffice for now, will try to answer any questions about it):

  1. We should prefer monism to dualism because it requires strictly fewer assumptions. Any dualist ontology has to explain how two fundamentally different substances interact with each other according to a set of laws, which suggests they might actually be the same substance.
  2. That leads us to the question of what the fundamental substance of the universe is, for which matter/energy and consciousness/spirit are the two leading candidates, where one has to be a phenomenon of the other
  3. The mainstream scientific view is materialism, the view that matter is the fundamental substance (FS), and consciousness is a phenomenon of matter. This leads to the Hard Problem of Consciousness as you mentioned. As I'll explain, I don't think the Hard Problem of Consciousness is a real problem that humans need to solve, just a problem for Materialism as a worldview. It's like saying "the Hard Problem of Geocentrism is explaining why Mercury is in retrograde if the Sun revolves around the Earth". The answer is that the assumption is wrong, the sun does not revolve around the Earth.
  4. The main problem with materialism is that epiphenomenalism, one of its corollaries, doesn't have any good explanation for it. Epiphenomenalism is the view that physical events produce consciousness, but because physical events are all that occur (under materialism), consciousness itself has no impact on physical events. But if consciousness doesn't "do" anything, there doesn't seem to be any reason why we should be conscious. If seeing a tiger produces a feeling of fear, and the fear triggers a response (us running away), then it makes perfect evolutionary sense why we're conscious (to experience fear, for example). But if the process of the photons bouncing off a tiger, hitting our eyes, triggering an electrochemical response that leads to our leg muscle fibers twitching is sufficient, the fear we experience is just there for no reason. This is where physicalists tend to disagree with me. They are content to say that the electrochemical response in the brain that eventually leads to us running away simply is the felt sense of fear. Why should this particular physical process also be a qualia whereas, say, a clock ticking isn't? It's not even clear what in principle we could discover that would explain this sudden appearance of 1st-personness from 3rd person phenomena.
  5. If Analytic Idealism, the monist view that consciousness is all there is, and matter is a phenomenon of consciousness, doesn't have an equivalently hard-to-explain problem, we should prefer it to materialism. The Idealist equivalent to the hard problem of consciousness is the Hard Problem of Matter: if reality is fundamentally consciousness, shouldn't there only be a single "self" and not seemingly separate selves? This is nowhere nearly as problematic because we have an example of a single field of consciousness segmenting itself already: dreams. In your dreams, a single field of consciousness (your mind) localizes a "self" within itself that experiences phenomena as being external to it. We can extrapolate that it's possible for a universal field of consciousness to segment itself into selves that perceive themselves as separate from each other.
  6. Therefore, the most likely ontology is Analytic Idealism

Something else worth considering are theories of personal identity. Who are you really? And what makes you you as opposed to anyone else? This link does a great job of summarizing the three primary categories of views: Closed Individualism (CI), Empty Individualism (EI), and Open Individualism (OI). The last of which I subscribe to now. OI takes the position that there is a single self. Every experience in the universe is experienced by this Universal Subject. It should be worth noting that these views are ontology-agnostic. This video by the late Mario Montano makes the case that Open Individualism should be the default perspective under physicalism as well as Idealism. Practically what this means is that "you", that is, your deepest identity and not just the one associated with the human reading this now, will never die. But you should live as if everyone is you, that is, the difference between you and your father and a dog and your worst enemy isn't meaningfully different than the difference between you on your last birthday and you on your next birthday. Torturing your worst enemy is the moral equivalent of torturing your future self.

I'll second @Magusoflight 's suggestion that you look into NDEs. In particular, I can recommend the book Why An Afterlife Obviously Exists by Jens Amberts. It makes the case that NDEs are evidence of an afterlife because:

  1. Hundreds of millions of people have had them
  2. Pretty much everyone who has had one comes to believe in an afterlife
  3. No religious group is more likely to experience them
  4. There is a lot of overlap in their phenomenology and semantic content

One thing that stands out is just how profoundly meaningfully they feel. Just as your friends feel more "real" than the characters you meet in your dreams, the entities people meet in NDEs feel like the closest, most intimate friends, that they've known for an eternity. If the primary purpose of the brain isn't to produce consciousness, but to sustain the ego in attachment to our bodies, then it seem plausible that NDEs, which occur during periods of extremely low brain activity, are peaks at what the afterlife.

As to what I believe, there's things I'm sure of and others that are more speculative. I'm 100% sure consciousness does not end at death. Reincarnation in the traditional Hindu sense, I think, is plausible but unlikely (20%). But what really inspires me is the evolution of humanity. It seems implausible that one species of mammals can so dramatically develop their understanding of the universe that they can bend the world to their will and improve their lives by leaps and bounds without being somehow divinely ordained. So if I had to integrate all of these observations into a single belief system, it might look something like this: We are all God in potential. The purpose of life and history, the telos of the universe, is for God to develop a fuller understanding of itself to reach increasingly more intense, wonderful states of being. To approach what Plato called The Form Of The Good. Everything we do is, in some twisted sense, in service of this goal. Failure in this life can be a temporary setback. But with intelligence and perseverance, and a deeper understanding of our shared being, all will eventually taste the fruits of heaven.

I’m a Catholic. These kinds of metaphysical questions don’t keep me up at night; they’re answered. And I don’t need to explain the answers on my own, either- the saints explained them well enough.

I suggest you do the same. There is a niggling doubt because your heart it restless until it rests in God.

I mean, I work for Odin. Dude hung himself from Yggdrasil for nine days and nights, for $Diety's sake. I totally respect your search for wisdom, and I'm sure the Boss Man would approve in his own right, but me? I've got waaaaaaay too much personal experience to take to the materialist/atheist viewpoint, though I would point you towards Good Omens (the book, don't bother with the show, not because it's necessarily bad but because it doesn't really get into the metaphysical like the book does) or, if you're even more of a Pratchett man, Small Gods for your answers.

Yes, it's turtles all the way down. You knew that before you hovered over this, didn't you?

When ancient humans encountered something like lightning, they probably thought the same thing about mundane phenomena. "We have no explanation for this sudden bolt of energy... so it must be Zeus!" We know they were obviously wrong now. We know what lightning is, after science has advanced sufficiently to explain it.

The metaphysics questions you asked are mostly like that, to the extent they're falsifiable at all. The only correct answer is to say "we don't have enough information right now to know". You're not a truth-seeker if you just default to "it must be proof of God" when you encounter any difficult question.

Regardless of the numbers we plug into Fermi's equations, the best evidence that we have no competitor civilizations contesting the observable universe is the fact that most stars still shine, instead of glowing dull in infrared after every available erg of power has been used and reused. Or the fact that we're around to ask that question, instead of Sol being munched on by Von-Neumann replicators. If there's pond scum out there, what of it? It would be even more unlikely that we do have near-peers out there, since the window for a civilization to not have noticeable impact on the wider world is narrow in geological time scales.

As for questions of being in a simulation, or a Boltzmann Brain, our decision theories are simply not up to the task of handling such infinities and infinitesimals. As far as I can tell, in such epistemic uncertainty, the way to act in a manner that minimizes hindsight regret is to act as if our existence is as real as it gets.

If the universe is an illusion, then so am I, hence it is Real enough for me

This is, of course, more applicable at the individual rather than civilizational level. A sufficiently advanced civ should absolutely do everything they can to poke at the universe and see what happens, but that's not your concern today, or mine.

If this approach seems unsatisfactory, I can only apologize sincerely. A god-shaped hole is one of many human design flaws we have yet to fix. Cheer up nonetheless, we're busy making entities that may end up to us as we are the butterfly is to the dreamer, and they might have answers. May said answers be within our ability to grasp. Perhaps making our own Gods can fill that hole instead? I'd rather not worship them myself, but each to their own.

RE: infinite reincarnation, it's just plainly, mathematically untrue that infinite time guarantees the that infinitesimally small probabilities must occur, much less that they must occur infinity times. You can demonstrate this using a simple mathematical model (see "AI slop" below), but it should be a natural conclusion given the increase in entropy over time. Our current configuration has a certain value of entropy and saying that we should see that value of entropy (followed by the same characteristic increase we observe today) violates thermodynamics. And frankly, I don't find "when you're dead you're dead" to be a big hit against pure materialism. If anything, it's a bit motivating.

###Claude chat###

User: Consider two objects that each have a position on the integer number line. At t=0, both objects are at position=0. At each discrete time step, object 1 has a 90% chance to increase its position by 1, and 10% chance to decrease its position by 1. Conversely, object 2 has a 90% chance to decrease its position by 1 and a 10% chance to increase its position by 1. Give a function of discrete time, t>0, that describes the probability that object 1 and object 2 have the same position.

Claude: Let me solve this step by step.

  1. First, let's understand what needs to happen for the objects to be at the same position:

    • Given their movement probabilities, Object 1 tends to move right while Object 2 tends to move left
    • To be at the same position at time t, they must have made the same net movement

  2. For any time t, let's consider:

    • Let X₁ be the net movement of Object 1 (positive = right)
    • Let X₂ be the net movement of Object 2 (positive = right)
    • We want P(X₁ = X₂)

  3. For them to have the same position:

    • The number of right moves minus left moves must be equal for both objects
    • Given that they start at the same position (0)

  4. Key insights:

    • At each step, Object 1 has p₁ = 0.9 for +1 and q₁ = 0.1 for -1
    • Object 2 has p₂ = 0.1 for +1 and q₂ = 0.9 for -1
    • This means Object 2's movement is the negative of Object 1's distribution
    • Therefore, X₂ has the same distribution as -X₁

  5. For time t:

    • X₁ follows a binomial distribution with parameter p₁ = 0.9, scaled to ±1 movements
    • X₂ follows a binomial distribution with parameter p₂ = 0.1, scaled to ±1 movements
    • The probability we want is P(X₁ = X₂)

  6. For the objects to be at the same position:

    • The total number of rightward moves (k) for both objects must be equal
    • Given time t, k must satisfy: 0 ≤ k ≤ t

Therefore, the probability at time t is:

P(same position at t) = Σₖ P(Object 1 makes k right moves) × P(Object 2 makes k right moves)

This can be written as:

P(t) = Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)(0.9)ᵏ(0.1)ᵗ⁻ᵏ × (t choose k)(0.1)ᵏ(0.9)ᵗ⁻ᵏ

Simplifying:

P(t) = Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)² (0.09)ᵏ(0.09)ᵗ⁻ᵏ = (0.09)ᵗ × Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)²

This is the exact formula for the probability that the objects are at the same position at time t.

As t increases, this probability approaches 0, which makes intuitive sense as Object 1 tends to move right while Object 2 tends to move left, making their meeting increasingly unlikely.

User: What is the mean number of times object 1 and object 2 will have the same position integrated from t=1 to infinity?

Claude:Let me solve this step by step.

  1. This is asking us to find E[number of meetings] = Σₜ₌₁^∞ P(meeting at time t)

  2. From our previous derivation: P(meeting at t) = (0.09)ᵗ × Σₖ₌₀ᵗ (t choose k)²

  3. A key insight: this sum is equivalent to counting the expected total number of times the objects will ever meet.

  4. This is related to a classic probability problem. When two random walks with different drift eventually separate (one going mostly right, one going mostly left), the expected number of meetings has a closed form solution.

  5. For simple random walks with transition probabilities p and 1-p, the expected number of meetings is: E[meetings] = p(1-p)/(p² + (1-p)² - 2p(1-p)) = p(1-p)/(2p² - 2p + 1)

  6. In our case:

    • For Object 1: p₁ = 0.9
    • For Object 2: p₂ = 0.1 = 1 - p₁

  7. Plugging into the formula: E[meetings] = 0.9 × 0.1 / (2 × 0.9² - 2 × 0.9 + 1) = 0.09 / (1.62 - 1.8 + 1) = 0.09 / 0.82 = 0.1097... ≈ 1/9

Therefore, the mean number of times the objects will meet after t=0 is approximately 0.1097 or roughly 1/9.

This makes intuitive sense because:

  • The objects start together at t=0 (not counted in our sum)
  • They have strong tendencies to move apart (0.9 vs 0.1 probabilities)
  • Once they separate by a few positions, the probability of meeting again becomes very small
  • The geometric decay of meeting probabilities ensures the infinite sum converges

###End chat###

I find Claude's answer pretty satisfactory. I know there's a lot of criticism here about the use of LLMs for checking your intuition about things, but my feeling is that it does quite well as long as you want reasoning rather than pure factual recall and you know how to prompt it well.

A simple example:

A random walk in 1D and 2D space is recurrent, and the odds of returning to the origin over an infinite amount of time approaches 1.

On the other hand, a random walk in 3D space converges to a finite, <1 value. The space of possible outcomes expands faster than you can explore it.

"A drunk man will find his way home, but a drunk bird may get lost forever."

I don't, however, think this is a rebuttal of a Boltzmann Brain. For any given volume of space-time, there is a finite set of distinct structures it can take, and over an infinite amount of time, the odds of instantiating one approaches 1. The key difference here is that we are concerned with finite volumes with a finite number of potential arrangements over infinite time, as opposed to an infinite volume in the case of random walks in three dimensions.

( @faul_sname , if you're still around, care to comment?)

A random walk in 1D and 2D space is recurrent, and the odds of returning to the origin over an infinite amount of time approaches 1.

An unbiased random walk (where each direction is equally likely) in 1D and 2D space is recurrent.

Take a look into quantum mechanics and accept the many worlds interpretation as probably correct.

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.

Practice "pure" semen retention for 6-12 months and note down all the stuff that happens to you that's atypical. Check out /r/semenretention.

I'm not asking you to believe anything you read there I'm just asking you to self experiment. Use that sub to have an idea on what to look for.

You are kind of trapped in a materialist/physicalist box. So it's hard to break you out of it. I've given you stuff that you can research yourself that doesn't seem too outlandish from a materialist point of view.

There is a lot of discussion about the universe that is not materialist but it's happening in spaces, YouTube channels and websites that you probably don't respect.

All I can say is if you're truly after the truth you must question if you have any biases. You must question every single belief that you have. You must ask yourself "How do I know this to be true?". "Do I believe this because I did the research myself or am I just parroting something I heard from someone with higher status than me?"

GL

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form.

Proactively provide evidence in proportion to how partisan and inflammatory your claim might be.

It doesn’t seem like a particularly partisan and inflammatory claim, though- the partisan and inflammatory claim of that would be ‘the scientific establishment is suppressing biblical truths because they’re godless commies’. It’s certainly an unpopular claim here, but so it ‘anti black racism is a problem in American society’.

Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation? Is there an equivalent mode for non-semen-makers? Are women constantly enjoying the fruits of semen retention?

Everything else aside, on the semen retention: what stops you having nocturnal ejaculation?

Clearly, the only solution here is to epoxy your penis shut. Only then can you reach your true seminal potential.

Not a final solution until you master your cummy innards perhaps.

Semen has potent energy, and there are reliable reports from eg several West African nations of semen autonomously teleporting itself to places it's not supposed to be. Much mischief is created this way. So for this reason alone I wouldn't recommend superglue on one's member.

Can the semen even escape the bonds of JB Weld? I didn't think such a thing was possible!

Electron tunnelling. We’re going quantum, boys!

Practice "pure" semen retention for 6-12 months and note down all the stuff that happens to you that's atypical. Check out /r/semenretention.

How are you supposed to do this with a wife/gf?

Don't have sex with your wife. Don't ejaculate when you have sex.

I'm not in that position sorry.

Ask for it back . "I do not avoid women, Mandrake, but I do deny them my essence."

Do the benefits still apply if you drink flouridated tap water or filtered alcoholic beverages? Ripper only drank spring water and pure grain alcohol.

If you have convincing evidence that humans, despite several millions of years of fossil evidence demonstrating likely intermediate ancestors, couldn't have possibly arisen naturally, pray tell. You could get a Noble or three out of it!

Semen retention? C'mon dawg. If being sexually frustrated is a strict necessity for your third eye to open, it's a rather perverse one.

Why don't you lay out your arguments instead of vaguely waving in their general direction?

Why don't you lay out your arguments instead of vaguely waving in their general direction?

I was a materialist until recently and the transition was not a straightforward path. All the atheist vs theist arguments in the world had no effect on me, my worldview was set.

Until certain things happened in my life and a little bit of randomness/luck I began to start thinking differently.

I don't think its a good use of time and mental energy to get into the weeds of things because I experienced being a materialist and I had an answer for everything. It's going to sound cliché but the search for truth is a personal one and so arguing back and forth is not going to be productive for anyone. We both won't budge. There's literally no point.

However OP mentioned that he feels there is something missing in his model of reality. He mentioned that he was a materialist and so I made some assumptions and gave him some pointers on where he can continue his search for truth.

My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.

You are almost certainly correct that we're not going to change each other's minds. That is not an excuse for not even sharing even the barest shreds of a coherent argument beyond "look at the amazingly counterintuitive outcomes if X was true, which this margin is not large enough to contain."

The Motte isn't so full of itself that we expect even well-intentioned and earnest people to consistently achieve consensus from reasoned debate. We achieve that more often than most of the Internet does (an admittedly low bar), but that is a surprising outcome, one only maintained through blood, sweat and effort on the part of its posters. (And a strict moderation framework and moderators to enforce it). You're defecting, since you had the time to type up 5 paragraphs of text but not even give a bullet list or TLDR of why you hold the beliefs you do.

I rarely open our volunteer janny page these days, but I did so today, and was happy to mark @coffee_enjoyer 's comment below as being high quality. That's despite it being frankly alien in some important ways to me, and somewhat painful to boot, not in the sense that it's unintelligible or poorly reasoned, but because he and I are both intelligent, earnest humans who can't see eye to eye and disagree on the basic axioms required to do so. At the very least, he articulated his standpoint and doesn't rely on obfuscation or mysticism. Your comment, not that it requires moderation, is awful in comparison and dodges all attempts at explaining itself.

Evidently something turned you from a materialist to.. a semen-retentionalist. You even resort to hinting at materialistic reasons for that conversion, or at least materialist arguments that you must be correct, but I don't think that change could possibly have been for the better, and your inability to defend it does you no favors. I hold this belief for much the same reason that I look at people who fry their brains with psychedelics or were one-shotted by ayahuasca with pity, though I have no idea what could have led to you to where you are now.

I'm not the person you were responding to, but I have to agree with him.

I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true. And whatever the truth is, is simply the truth, so it's silly to demand an explanation, for it assumes that reality needs to justify itself. He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.

If you're building your own worldview, you have no need for something like a consensus, and a consensus is not necessarily true, it's merely a form of coherence. In the first place, I don't even believe that "truth" is very valuable, nor that people are inherently interested in it. And to me, it seems like "truth", in the form where it matters, is context-dependent, and therefore finite, meaning that nothing can be universally true.

You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.

I agree that coffee_enjoyers comment is good, though. It says something similar, but in a more engaging way which is more likely to cause a long-term influence on a person. If you were to argue "If you give the correct answer, don't do so in a way which makes it unappealing", I'd have to agree with you

I don't think anyone knows why they hold the beliefs they do, they just fabricate a reason afterwards which sounds socially acceptable and like it might be true.

I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real because I haven't toppled over and landed on my ass. Or, to gussy that up, concordance between my priors and ongoing sensory input.

You are correct that some beliefs are fundamentally unjustified by further reasoning, but those are far fewer in number than the beliefs that are contingent on more load bearing ones.

Someone might be a Communist not just because they believe in equality, but because they genuinely believed that it was a more economically productive regime. The numbers of those who weren't True Believers in the innate glory of communism fell drastically with the wall.

He changed his belief, and that's more true than any argument could ever be.

I have met, just today, someone who is convinced he's a deep cover MI5 agent and someone who believes their mother is alive and in urgent need of their help (despite being 95 years old themselves). My profession has me running into people who hold all kinds of deeply seated beliefs that can't be dispersed by abundant evidence. They're delusional, and usually legally detained by the time I see them.

Someone holding something to be true is often a terrible argument in favor of those beliefs being true.

While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.

You can try "semen-rentention", I can't think of any reasons for how it could be dangerous. Maybe you will experience something amazing, in which case, that would be interesting. The experiment seems worth doing. And now that I think about it, the search for truth is fun, isn't it? Maybe spoiling the answer would be bad taste.

Maybe doing jumping jacks for an hour while blindfolded would lead to instant enlightenment. Doesn't seem dangerous if you take proper precautions. The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.

As our rules gently suggest, it's good form to affirmatively produce evidence for your claims in proportion to how controversial or inflammatory they are. Semen retention is a kooky idea, and the bare minimum downsides, not getting laid or going on a date with Rosie Palm and her five sisters, requires quite a bit of justification.

I believe the chair I'm sitting on in real

You're sitting on something, but there is no such thing as a "chair". Luckily, this doesn't seem to matter. Communism seems to be positive associations with sharing. Even an animal can recognize somebody who is willing to share with them vs somebody who does not, and to dislike the latter in the same way that a communist would dislike a capitalist. So neither of these concepts exist, nor do they need to exist. There's also no need for logic and reasoning, unless we just assume that even animals are capable of reasoning, and that 'thinking' itself means something like 'to reason'.

While the person we're discussing isn't insane by DSM-5 criteria, that's mostly because his beliefs are benign enough that I presume he's a functioning member of society.

If somebody stops masturbating and feels better as a result - it's true that they feel better, even if that doesn't make any sense. If one were to say "That's nonsense, they should go back to feeling bad", then that would imply that reality has to conform to our theory, which is backwards. If our theories of reality does not explain reality, then our theory needs to update.

The experiment seems worth doing for a few months for the cardiovascular benefits.

If there was 100s of people online who had tried this and had positive effects (by which I mean ones which sound like enlightenment, and not just cardiovascular benefits), I'd actually give it a go.

When I watch less porn, I personally feel better in general. Here, feeling better is reality (something true to me), but any explanation I come up with will be guesswork, and therefore weaker than my experiences. Saying "It's probably because of a spike in testosterone" will make me look sane again, but I think it's weaker evidence than raw experience since it comes after. That said, experiencing that a family member needs your help is not solid evidence that they need your help, but the experience is just as real as if somebody did need your help.

The rules are useful, but the more pragmatic you get, the less true any statement is. If you keep going you will find that the world is absurd, that you can't know anything, that every model is wrong, and so on (you're probably even familiar with these ideas). But how can I say for certain that nothing can be said? I can only arrive at a contradiction and cancel out everything, which brings me to zero/nothingness.

Anyway, I think that, as you become enlightened, you stop caring about things like proof. Just like you might cure anxiety and find that you don't really care what philosophers are saying about the meaning of life, or that you might fall in love and have no time to waste on people trying to explain to you how love is just chemicals and therefore not real. Finally, I don't think coffee enjoyer's comment provided evidence or proof (though I don't remember exactly). It was just a likable comment for human reasons?

Actually, I once almost screwed myself over with my mental models. My mood got really good, and then I remembered that I had no reason to feel good, but before that made me stop, I luckily recognized that I didn't need a reason to feel good. I also realized that if you don't need a reason, the reason can never be taken away from you, meaning you've "won". You won't need validation ever again. And since at least one person can live without needing a reason, it proves that the idea that we need reasons to live is wrong, that it's a fabricated limitation, it only exists in the territory and not in the map. The problem is the idea that there is a problem. If living required meaning, then life must be meaningful already, or else we wouldn't be alive to ponder the meaning of existence. Of course, I still argue and use logic even now, but the sheer amount of troubles which goes away when you think like this is so incredible that I, a former "intellectual", dare to throw it away and to call former self silly for taking concepts like truth seriously. (I do get your point though)

My comment was meant for OP who seems open to alternative ways of seeing reality. Not for you a somewhat unknown entity clearly ready for an argument.

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

I don't think that's what the rule means. When there's nothing you could say to someone that will change their mind, it's better not to engage. It would be as unwise as wasting time trying to prove the Holocaust really happened to certain Motteposters. They believe that it didn't, they know that it didn't, and they have a humongous army of soldier-arguments they're willing to throw at you. They will never believe it happened. Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?

The vast majority of posters here (and everywhere) aren't willing to change their mind about anything they have strong pre-existing convictions on. Discussions are still worth having regardless.

Does this mean we should never have discussions that start with the assumption that the Holocaust happened?

I feel there should be more affordance for orthodox ideas to skip debate on some of the assumptions than for heterodox ideas. Otherwise we could end up with situations like the following:

"I believe elites are all pedophiles who rape children in the basement of a certain pizza parlor. I'm not willing to debate this. This discussion is only for people who agree with me on this point. With that said, how do we stop these evil elites from doing this???"

I suspect it's going to be hard to convince the entire Nobel committee to practice semen retention before they make the call.

Especially the women. It would involve a lot of clenching.

Haha!

Take a hard Look into evolution and realise that natural selection is not enough to explain how we (humans) came to be in our current form. I'm curious. Do you have specific problems, questions in mind?

All of those questions are absolutely and infinitely beyond human comprehension. A human can no more understand the nature of the universe or consciousness than a genetically engineered worm can understand the human mind. This “answers” the difficult question. It’s like if someone with down syndrome asked you about the nature of financial markets — the correct answer is the most beneficial answer. What answer promotes the holistic good in his life? Whatever answer gives him comfort and motivation, and which turns him away from investing time or money into something beyond his understanding. Even if high-powered AI provided we mortals with a definitive answer, some long equation stretching five miles wide when written, this wouldn’t do anything to satisfy our need for an answer, because the answers we are looking for are human-digestible answers just like we look for human-digestible food. The way science is going, material developments on the universe are going to require so much training and intelligence that no one will understand it holistically; it will be specialists working alongside some holistic AI.

Now, once we confess “I am not high-minded”, and declare to ourselves, “I do not exercise myself in great matters which are too high for me”, we can begin our real song of ascent, and “quiet and calm our soul, as a child is weaned from his mother”. You are a designed organism, whether you are a creationist or an evolutionist. This is why you have a need for purpose and clarity. But your need for purpose and clarity is not for things beyond your understanding, because that is not its design. Its design is to obtain the Good, which is evident by results, consequences. This Good can only be obtained in your sphere of concern. Our instinct for broad purpose is to align ourselves with a collective, and our instinct for clarity is to ensure that the path ahead of us will provide a good life.

Surely this is the real answer you are looking for, because imagine if God gave you, and only you, the definitive answer to the universe and consciousness. After a few days that will cease to be interesting, and your instincts will rear their restless head and you will once again be left with an interest for more purpose and more meaning and more clarity. “Okay, I’m happy I have understood the whole purpose in life and science, but now I really have to understand why my boss is mad at me and why my stomach is acting up and why my character’s build isn’t working as I thought…” The answer will not be satisfying. What you want isn’t an answer to this particular question, but to enjoy some designed pattern of life which routinely provides satisfaction and interest, more than other possible life patterns.

Putting it one more way, imagine you sacrifice everything in your life to understand the universe. You understand it, then die. You arrive in some heavenly place but the gate doesn’t open for a few hours, so you sit alongside some Hadzabe hunter from undeveloped Tasmania. You tell about all your suffering and toil and then the answer you found, and he is momentarily interested in the answer (he figured it had to do with the sun god). But then he tells you about his life: the wild hunts of animals, how he met his wife, the feuding tribes and the taste of raw honey, the ways in which he pleased the sun God. Who is really more satisfied? Where did your answers get you? Was it not vanity of vanities?

So IMHO the answer people should be looking for is, “what belief and answer winds up optimizing my life for value”, and this value is in an evolutionary sense, the joys which all of us are evolved to favor: safety, interest, paternal love, friends, helping others, healing the world, and fulfilling our biological role. The optimization of our evolution is something religion-like, because it allows us to perceive the vastness of the cosmos as the expression and handiwork of your loving Father’s glory, and not a dark cold alienating backdrop to a confusing life upon a floating rock. We want an Edenic walled garden. Let the scientists continue working and in 4,000 years perhaps they will find some interesting material answers which can take us to a new earth. But even the scientists when they are off the job should have their walled edenic worldview, as (if what they value most is maximizing scientific knowledge) the stress-reduction and purpose-maxxing and honesty-enhancing benefits of belief will enhance the quality of their output.

As a last note, really, look at how our atheistic age spends their time without religion, and you see that it’s just as fantastical and delusional if not more — playing fantastical video games where they are the hero who must heal a fallen world, reading fantastical mangas and erotica, listening to rappers extol a life of abject hedonism, over-concerning themselves with political drama — but it lacks all of the invisible benefits of religion. This tells us something about what we crave as humans. There’s no use in being “scientifically accurate” if we wind up wasting even more time on stranger fantasies without reaping any benefits. I lied, I have one last note: do you really want a world where every human has long periods of existential dread and confusion? How inefficient, yet this is any world without irrational dogma. Irrational dogma is good! Which dogma most efficiently promotes scientifically-evident good behaviors and feelings?

Exceptional comment.

I'm not worried about death. That's inevitable.

Post-pandemic worried me. I heard a lot of stories about how people were profoundly affected by COVID & the lockdown. I...wasn't especially. I worked, I shopped with a mask on, I went home.

If my lifestyle was such that a national state of emergency barely affected my weekly routine...what parts of society have I missing out on all this time?

Dying? It sucks, but it's not a problem. Living on a pandemic-proof autopilot? Problem.

This may not answer your question about the Big Stuff. But hopefully this will help answer why I'm not especially interested in Big Stuff questions.

I don't remember whether I've seen the infinite reincarnation somewhere or arrived to it myself, but I have also been thinking about it for a few years.

Have you looked much into NDEs? That’s probably the best proof of an afterlife, science really has a hard time explaining whatever this phenomenon is (there are explanations but in my opinion they are pretty weak)

As you might have found out I ended up converting to Christianity. I’m more of a mystical Christian though so I do still contemplate these questions.

I believe God didn’t give us answers because He wants us to wonder.

He wants us to wonder.

If you would, during the next prayer, do use your psychic link to relay to God that Exotic_cetacean from the motte dot org is having a rather bad time with the wondering!

Doesn’t work that way. But I can pray for you if you want to DM me your name.

Huemer’s argument about infinite reincarnation

I didn’t know that Huemer had written about this, but this same exact thought occurred to me independently. It seems somewhat obvious and I’m surprised that more atheists/materialists don’t bring this up when discussing the possibility of life after death.

If it happened once, it can happen again. Very simple argument.

I’m currently just thinking about how weird all of this is.

This here, this is a great place to be. When the world feels weird, that's a palpable sign that something is the matter with my internal model of the world. And that's as it should be! If my internal model of the world is so snug and secure that I feel not a twinge of discomfort, of puzzle, of wonder, that's when I am most in danger in getting blindsided when that internal model falls short of reality. And the plain fact is that my internal model of the world will always fall short of reality. So the best I can do is to hold my model lightly, play with it, and always be willing to adjust it as new information arises.

As to a story that places my consciousness into the grand scheme of things, I am quite partial to the one from "The Elephant in the Brain". The "I" -- that feeling of consciousness -- is not the captain of this mind/body, is not even the team leader, but is rather the spokesman--the spokesman of a generally disorganized cabal pretending to be a well-organized administration. The cabal does something, and "I" stand in front of the members of the press and spin it as best as "I" can.

I like this story because, paradoxically, it gives me agency.

"I" can't compel the cabal against the cabal's wishes. "I" am not even directly privy to the inner politics of the cabal: "I" don't really know why the cabal did what it did. But "I" do have influence on the cabal, because the cabal cares about self-image and public-image, and "I" am the one who goes in front of the members of the press and spins those stories. So if, as part of a story about "myself" (especially to actual other people), "I" commit myself to some action in the future (an action not immediately salient so as to not step on any of the cabal's current sore points, and one that's not too difficult), then the cabal is incentivized in following through that commitment to avoid negative publicity.

I got into the habit of daily jogging this way.

It's not easy to start jogging. The inertia of habit is against you, and the activity isn't rewarding. If you aren't already used to it, sustained cardiovascular exercise feels bad. You are out of breath, you feel nauseous, and (at least for me jogging) you feel distracted by the jagged vision produced by the bouncing eyeballs. That's quite a barrier to overcome.

So "I" spun it, and "I" spun it hard. "I" told stories of heroic effort, of commitment, of taking on the unpleasant hard tasks for the greater good. "I" advertised my intentions to my spouse and my friends, and "I" updated them on my progress and setbacks. Two months it took me to stop hating the actual act of jogging (though even then I felt great afterwards). After another two months, jogging got kind of enjoyable. Now, it's a habit, and I get the jogging itch if I skip a day.

I felt the same way at about 25. After thinking about things a bit, and reading some of the history of materialist thought and argument through the last couple of centuries, it became clearer to me that physicalism is limited. It doesn't explain where the universe came from, and it assumes away the possibility of non-material, super-natural entities or phenomena as an axiom rather than proving that such things don't exist. Likewise the behaviourists 'solved' the hard problem of consciousness fifty years ago by decreeing that consciousness didn't exist - since it was not scientifically measurable, it would be presumed not to exist by fiat.

The materialism that we grew up with is a set of assumptions, axioms. Occam's razor, Betrand Russel's teapot. As a belief system it's perfectly acceptable, it holds together, but it's one among many and cannot be proved to be true, nor disprove its rivals. Believing in physicalism, in materialism, is a choice not an inevitability. And once I realised that I had the ability to make that choice, I decided to use it. I cannot prove that Christianity is true, but I decided to hope that it was, and to act as if it was.

Now, I don't know if that gives me the comfort that you're looking for. It is very difficult, maybe impossible, to grow up a materialist, and live in a materialist society, and not have the tenets of materialism burned into you at a fundamental level. I know perfectly well that I can't prove my current beliefs any more than I can prove materialism, and they may well be wrong. But I choose to try and believe, and I find it helps a bit.

Why would you waste time pondering the imponderables? You know you are never going to think your way to an answer to these questions.

Anatta gives me comfort re: mortality. It's never personal.

As a neurotic, the best thing is to figure out some way of not thinking about this kind of stuff. I really think this is the key to TMI style Buddhism, the deep metaphysics are irrelevant, the real benefit is in anatta, in detachment, in meditation, in letting go. The happiest people don’t care about this stuff. (You could say the same about political debate forums, but I’d (a) disagree and (b) think some kind of intellectual stimulation is important).

This is a depressing answer, but as the hardest of hard materialist/physicalist atheists, I don't have anything to soften the blow. I can't convince myself of there being any observable meaning or purpose to human life, some metaphysical telos behind everything that would impart order onto it all. I think life is pure, unadulterated chaos, a blur of noise and fury that mindlessly hammers away at you until it all finally stops. My death will have meant nothing at all when it happens, and the world will go on without me.

How I find comfort in my inevitable death is the fact that I already feel tired, even at the age of 23. Somehow I have become ridiculously jaded, and I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. I've become deeply cynical of the idea of effecting any meaningful change on the world, which is part of the reason for my slow withdrawal from political discussion on TheMotte and elsewhere. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. Celebrations, for example. Birthdays feel... annoying, frankly. Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, you're anchored down by a million life obligations that keep you in some mildly uncomfortable local minima that requires a lot of activation energy to escape, and regardless of how much you try to take comfort in the small things you can't avoid the fact that your life is running on an endless loop.

It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days already seem impossibly distant and out of reach, and I wonder what would happen if I added 1000 years on to that. Every finite physical system has information-storage limits (see: Bekenstein bounds), and the limits of memory exist far below that. How long would it take for me to forget my childhood completely? How tired and jaded would I get seeing empires rise and fall, people slipping into the same failure-modes over and over again; what happens when I experience everything there is to experience?

This isn't to say that death is a desirable condition - for most people, it's unwanted and it comes far too soon. But at the same time endless life would be an interminable, inescapable hell, and I can't think of any condition where that wouldn't be the case unless I, myself, changed via genetic modification or augmentation sometime far in the hypothetical future - at which point, I would have been thoroughly ship-of-theuseused, and I wouldn't be me anymore. Somehow, that makes me feel better about eventually not existing someday.

Others have commented advice and armchair diagnoses. I would agree, and suggest you stay talking here even if you're not slinging it out in the political threads.

Your ennui is familiar to me and appears in cycles. The difference (perhaps) is I have spent another decade investigating what can pop me out of it. I have a suite of activities and people that are reliable sources of semi-religious joy, and have mentally exercised enough to silence or survive the yawn of the god-shaped hole when it appears.

Put another way, it could get better. Even if it involves some lame bullshit like medication or therapy! I'll echo self_made_human and say it's worth a shot.

I agree with @Corvos that this is a clear ringer for clinical depression. I'd know, I'm clinically depressed and a psychiatry resident.

The facts are facts, but the implications can vary widely. Do you want to spend your life feeling like a clock slowly coming unwound, as the world blurs into a grey smear around you? I don't.

The world lacking "objective" meaning is all the excuse I need to make my subjective one all that matters to me. Even if the universe cools and congeals till each hydrogen atom is alone in the observable universe alongside dying photons redshifted till eternity, I want my time in the sun to have mattered. To me.

It doesn't have to be this way. I can't force you to seek help, but I can recommend it. What have you really got to lose?

[...] I already feel deeply tired, even at the age of 23. [...] I don't particularly find a lot of value in things that make other people happy. [...]. So much is out of your control, and things that once were cause for joy begin to lose meaning as you go on. [...] Christmas and New Year and every other holiday custom are chores to participate in. Days repeat, over and over and over again, [...]

It's not that there's absolutely nothing to feel grateful about. But the longer you live, the more fed up you get with the entire thing. Sometimes I look at photos of myself as a kid, running down a hill or feeding koi in a pond, and that doesn’t even feel like me anymore. It almost feels like a memory from another life, one where the days were longer and the sun was brighter. These days seem impossibly distant and out of reach

I'm going to be presumptuous and intrusive, but this sounds a lot like depression to me. Especially coming from someone who's 23. I get where you're coming from, of course: I feel that way sometimes and I think that everyone does, but if you're feeling that way the majority of the time I think this is a problem which can and should be fixed.

What gives you comfort when pondering mortality?

That I will not be there to regret that I died.

There's also the fact that the universe might be infinite in size.

Let's take take the size of the observable universe. According to holographic theory (not 100% accepted) the maximum amount of information in an area of space is proportional to its surface area, with 1 bit per plank area.

Assuming randomly distributed universes, the median expected distance to the nearest exact copy of our observable universe is 10^10^122 meters away. (Source: Brian Greene). There are infinite yous, not just temporally but spatially as well. Furthermore, if this is true, any version of you that can exist does exist.

Honestly, I find most atheists pretty basic and incurious (just like most religious people). Science is amazing but it hasn't answered a lot of the big questions. It might never be able to. For example, do mathematics exist independently of human thought? Or, more obviously, how can we explain the existence of the universe without causality? Why is there something and not nothing?

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


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A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

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