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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   2982 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for October 29, 2023

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Interesting. The serious religious intellectuals tend to argue that you can't have any sort of epistemic hygiene without a 'first mover' - or in other words that the modern scientific worldview is based on a contradiction given that the a priori assumption is that no belief is ultimately true, which is in itself an ultimate belief.

Anyway I get a bit confused by these super high order epistemological arguments, but that's the steelmanned version of the other side's argument as far as I can tell.

ETA: I guess this is what rehashing the internet atheist wars from the other side feels like... good lord.

There is a pragmatic version of the argument about epistemic hygiene that is summed up in this cartoon.

Pragmatic arguments make me uncomfortable, nearly as uncomfortable as the replication crisis does.

Why do pragmatic arguments make you uncomfortable?

I think I muddle together various issues

  • the inaccessibility of truth. I never get to the real truth, but there is wide variation in how hard I try and how close I get.

  • fear of the future. Will it be A or B? I make my choice. It turns out to be C.

Should I pursue "Epistemic Rationality" and seek the truth just because it is true. That is a reckless path that probably leads to nihilism, despair, and suicide. Not a good idea.

Should I tackle the problem above by being more pragmatic? I could compromise the concept of truth by asking "is this true for me" where I'm sneaking in the idea that things can be true because they make me happy or help me cope.

But the two paragraphs above get greatly modified when I contemplate that I'm not actually getting close to the truth, sometimes because it is hard to find, sometimes because I slack off and don't really try. Since I'm not actually getting close to the truth, the stuff that I believe to be true doesn't stand the test of time. My pragmatic approach fails because times change and the things I believed would make me happy and help me cope, turn out to make me sad and become new problems to be coped with.

My attempts at "Epistemic Rationality" fail twice. No God, no joy, no hope. I buy my rope and my bucket. But this first failure is followed by a second failure. I don't believe that I have gotten to the bottom of things. What if I'm wrong? What new horror will 2024 bring? Disabled by doubt, I fail to kick the bucket. I wait with anxious curiosity to find how how I was wrong this time.

I lean more towards "Epistemic Rationality" because I hope that the things that I accept as true will be closer to the truth and hence last longer. I guess that it is easier to come up with coping strategies for unpleasant truths that last, than it is to cope with the endless churn of pragmatic truths that don't last.

tldr: my version of pragmatism is a shoddily constructed thing that wobbles, breaks, and falls over.

Oh man, I can’t even read all this because it’s so close to my own previous issues. I found a way out by listening to my heart or body or soul or whatever you want to call it instead of my head. Over rationalizing will get you nowhere.

Even if you wish to hold it as axiomatic that there's an Uncaused Cause or something responsible for the existence of the universe, there is no way near sufficient evidence to imbue it with the usual crap like Omnipotence, Omniscience or Omnibenevolence, or assume it cares at all what we do or is even capable of doing so.

If God as it's claimed to exist created the universe via a Big Bang, it's a more parsimonious claim to state that the Big Bang itself is capable of arising ex nihilo, pending a Grand Unified Theory of Everything that explains if multiverses and the like exist.

And looking at the state of the world, it's indistinguishable from a scenario where a Creator simply set the wheels in motion and fucked off forever. Hence I'm more than content to swing Newton's Flaming Laser Sword about till it hits something it can't cut.

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