Ask “Why are you not a nihilist?”, replacing the word “nihilist” with a phrase that objectively explains it to a person unfamiliar with the concept of nihilism.
Oh right, the idea that nihilism is self-refuting or logically contradictory. Maybe it is, but people still seem to understand what I’m talking about. I find that interesting, don’t you?
See I don’t understand why Christians think the trinity is a contradiction. “God is one person, composed of three other persons.” makes as much sense as “The China brain is one person, composed of a billion people” or “a subset is a set that is part of another set”. In programming, it’s easy to create an object that belongs to class X while also having component parts that belong to class X.
The problem is that the options you just alluded to are probably heresy: I think subordinationism on one side and modalistic monarchianism on the other.
I find the strangely indefinite way humans name things interesting, but I try to have a safe amount of disinterest in the actual denotations of the names themselves, especially the ones which seem to throw off paradoxes in every direction when you put your weight on them. Whatever they are, they weren’t built to be thought about in any depth.
What is it that they understand? Do they anticipate experiences caused by interaction with a person who claims to be a nihilist? That’s plausible. Do they fully understand the belief? That’s a different question.
Take free will as an example. To my knowledge, many compatiblists (free will and determinism are compatible) and people who deny that free will exist do not disagree on anything other than what the correct label for their position is. I imagine the same can often be said about nihilism.
Indeed, Hume, perhaps the most famous compatibilist, denies the existence of free will in his Treatise, only advocating compatibilism later, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It certainly seems to me that he doesn’t actually change his mind; his early position seems to be “this thing people call free will is incoherent, so we should talk about things that matter instead,” and his later position seems to be “people won’t stop talking about free will, so I’ll call the things that matter free will and reject the incoherent stuff under some other label (indifference).”
So his opinions kind of did change over that time period, but only from “I reject these words” to “alright, if you insist, I’ll try to salvage these words”. I’m not sure which policy’s best. The second risks arguments with people who don’t know your definitions. They will pass through two phases, the first is where the two of you legitimately think you’re talking about the same thing but the other is a total idiot who doesn’t know what it’s like. The second phase is perhaps justifiable umbrage on their discovering that you are using a definition you totally just made up, and how were they even supposed to know.
The former position, however, requires us to leave behind what we already sort of kind of suspect about these maybe-not-actual concepts and depart into untilled, unpopulated lands, with a significant risk of wheel-reinvention.
What’s a nihilist, and how would you distinguish it empirically from Eliezer?
If you meant to ask why we don’t benefit your tribe politically by associating ourselves with it: we don’t see any moral or practical reason to do so. It it turns out that nihilists have actually faced discrimination from the general public in the ways atheists have (and therefore declaring ourselves nihilists would help them at our slight expense), I might have to reconsider. Though happily, I don’t belong to a religion that requires this, even if I turn out to meet the dictionary definition.
Can you elaborate? I don’t understand this.
Ask “Why are you not a nihilist?”, replacing the word “nihilist” with a phrase that objectively explains it to a person unfamiliar with the concept of nihilism.
Oh right, the idea that nihilism is self-refuting or logically contradictory. Maybe it is, but people still seem to understand what I’m talking about. I find that interesting, don’t you?
People “understand” contradictions all the time. See: the Trinity.
See I don’t understand why Christians think the trinity is a contradiction. “God is one person, composed of three other persons.” makes as much sense as “The China brain is one person, composed of a billion people” or “a subset is a set that is part of another set”. In programming, it’s easy to create an object that belongs to class X while also having component parts that belong to class X.
The problem is that the options you just alluded to are probably heresy: I think subordinationism on one side and modalistic monarchianism on the other.
I think the idea is that it’s supposed to be both the same being and different beings, and the logical contradiction is a Divine Mystery?
Or something like that.
To me, that just means that God is fractal
I find the strangely indefinite way humans name things interesting, but I try to have a safe amount of disinterest in the actual denotations of the names themselves, especially the ones which seem to throw off paradoxes in every direction when you put your weight on them. Whatever they are, they weren’t built to be thought about in any depth.
What is it that they understand? Do they anticipate experiences caused by interaction with a person who claims to be a nihilist? That’s plausible. Do they fully understand the belief? That’s a different question.
Rationalist taboo is a technique for fighting muddles in discussions. By prohibiting the use of a certain word and all the words synonymous to it, people are forced to elucidate the specific contextual meaning they want to express, thus removing ambiguity otherwise present in a single word.
Take free will as an example. To my knowledge, many compatiblists (free will and determinism are compatible) and people who deny that free will exist do not disagree on anything other than what the correct label for their position is. I imagine the same can often be said about nihilism.
Indeed, Hume, perhaps the most famous compatibilist, denies the existence of free will in his Treatise, only advocating compatibilism later, in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. It certainly seems to me that he doesn’t actually change his mind; his early position seems to be “this thing people call free will is incoherent, so we should talk about things that matter instead,” and his later position seems to be “people won’t stop talking about free will, so I’ll call the things that matter free will and reject the incoherent stuff under some other label (indifference).”
So his opinions kind of did change over that time period, but only from “I reject these words” to “alright, if you insist, I’ll try to salvage these words”. I’m not sure which policy’s best. The second risks arguments with people who don’t know your definitions. They will pass through two phases, the first is where the two of you legitimately think you’re talking about the same thing but the other is a total idiot who doesn’t know what it’s like. The second phase is perhaps justifiable umbrage on their discovering that you are using a definition you totally just made up, and how were they even supposed to know.
The former position, however, requires us to leave behind what we already sort of kind of suspect about these maybe-not-actual concepts and depart into untilled, unpopulated lands, with a significant risk of wheel-reinvention.
What’s a nihilist, and how would you distinguish it empirically from Eliezer?
If you meant to ask why we don’t benefit your tribe politically by associating ourselves with it: we don’t see any moral or practical reason to do so. It it turns out that nihilists have actually faced discrimination from the general public in the ways atheists have (and therefore declaring ourselves nihilists would help them at our slight expense), I might have to reconsider. Though happily, I don’t belong to a religion that requires this, even if I turn out to meet the dictionary definition.