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.
Jump in the discussion.
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Notes -
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 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.
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.
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.
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'.
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.
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)
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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.
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???"
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