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I'm not sure. It's possible that I came to my conclusions purely through philosophical reasoning, and that I am suffering the sort of defect that famously cons

I'm not sure. It's possible that I came to my conclusions purely through philosophical reasoning, and that I am suffering the sort of defect that famously consumed Cantor or Gödel or Pirsig. It's easy to say, "I'm not crazy! You're the one who's crazy!" Or perhaps there is a repressed childhood of abuse somewhere in the memories, but who can tell whether repressed memories are a real thing, or whether memories are trustworthy in general. At the same time, though, people delude themselves all the time. It's a cultural thing; I think that memetics is the right field of study for figuring out how that works. And once one starts to realize how delusional their cultural beliefs are, one cannot help but start examining themselves. Upon learning about p-zombies, for example, I realized that I must be a p-zombie, because I had no evidence to the alternative and no way to refute the argument.

trevyn 8y ago
Yes! IMO, it starts making more sense when you start to see why and how delusional cultural beliefs are actually evolutionarily adaptive for the species, and you can start looking for the neurological structures of belief and consciousness. Never before in history has philosophy of mind been supported by detailed neural imaging technologies and computational neural simulacra. I’ve been digging Ecclesiastes lately, except the “nothing makes sense” refrain transforms to “actually, with understanding of modern neuroscience and AI, everything makes perfect sense.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=CEV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&... (And, of course, “God” translates to “the machine that is the universe” and/or “the character in this fairytale that humans told each other well before the Enlightenment.”)
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AnimalMuppet 8y ago
"I can't refute it" does not imply "therefore it must be true". Neither does "I have no evidence against it".
- DaiHafVaho 8y ago
  Of course. A proof is that which convinces; I was convinced, but that doesn't mean that you have to be convinced. I was presented with evidence which I can't share with anybody: my experiences.

trevyn 8y ago

Yes! IMO, it starts making more sense when you start to see why and how delusional cultural beliefs are actually evolutionarily adaptive for the species, and you can start looking for the neurological structures of belief and consciousness. Never before in history has philosophy of mind been supported by detailed neural imaging technologies and computational neural simulacra. I’ve been digging Ecclesiastes lately, except the “nothing makes sense” refrain transforms to “actually, with understanding of modern neuroscience and AI, everything makes perfect sense.” https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&version=CEV https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes+1&... (And, of course, “God” translates to “the machine that is the universe” and/or “the character in this fairytale that humans told each other well before the Enlightenment.”)

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AnimalMuppet 8y ago

"I can't refute it" does not imply "therefore it must be true". Neither does "I have no evidence against it".

DaiHafVaho 8y ago
Of course. A proof is that which convinces; I was convinced, but that doesn't mean that you have to be convinced. I was presented with evidence which I can't share with anybody: my experiences.