Turning the many in to the one (concepts) is just what humans do, so it’s understandable that people keep falling in to this trap. But, I agree, a bit of honest observation does tell you that we have many “ultimate” values.
Ian_C.
Maybe those cultists were so brainwashed that they no longer judged their ideas by reality, but reality by their ideas? So in their eyes, strictly speaking, the non-arrival of the space fleet did not count as evidence either way. Scary thought, I know.
I don’t believe in heaven, so for me it would take a lot of courage to commit suicide, but I don’t know if it’s the same for a devout religious person, because I can’t get in to their head. Probably there would be some sort of fear response on the biological level, even for them, so at the very least they would have to achieve “mind over matter” and probably bravery also, but I can’t say for sure the last.
As for 9/11, I think the correct response would have been to attack the organization “Al Qaeda,” and to ask all other governments in the world who may have Al Qaeda operating from their territory to help you out. But what do you do when the governments in question refuse (for example the Taliban) is a moral question that’s beyond my current abilities to reason out.
Was this before or after Lord of the Flies I wonder?
Anyway, I think children are different enough from adults that you can’t conclude much about what adults will do from studying the behavior of children.
“Is there any reason in particular that you think that adults are so different from children?”
I believe the main determinant of how people act is their ideas (as against biology or some other factor). So choosing a group of people to represent society who likely have a far narrower set of ideas than actual society is probably a bad experiment. Because it’s not just any old difference, it’s a difference in the main causal factor.
Isn’t the truth of a thing (such as a sentence or artwork) determined by how closely it matches reality? And the match-level is a function of the identity of reality and of the thing. So there is no mention of smart or dumb people anywhere in that.
Was there supposed to be a second book there?
Thanks
If you believe in G-d then you believe in a being that can change reality just by willing it. So therefore you believe it’s possible for consciousness to change/control existence.
So that could explain why Guardians fear too many non-believers: they feel threatened by what they perceive as the power of other people’s consciousness. They fear that if there are too many non-believers that it might change the truth somehow.
But scientists (Seekers) know that reality is what it is regardless of what other people think, so they don’t ascribe so much power to their fellow beings, and therefore don’t feel as threatened by them.
“The moment anyone makes a biased argument because of their attachment to an Idea, they become a Guardian.”
I think it’s more important what happens when the bias is discovered. Does the group in question reward it or try to eliminate it? For example there is corruption in democracies as well as less free forms of government, what makes the difference is what happens when it is discovered.
I think people have a built-in instinct towards self-preservation. What sometimes happens though, is people love something so much, such as a novel, that it becomes an inseparable part of who they are. And that’s when cultish behavior starts, because an attack on that idea becomes an attack on them personally. To find fault with that idea is to find fault with them.
Now one thing (not the only thing) that made Objectivism different from other philosophies was that the founder presented it, not as a dry collection of premises and conclusions in an academic journal, but rather by writing a novel about it, about how some perfect exponents of this philosophy (Howard Roark, etc) would live their lives. So if there is a disproportionate number of cult like behavior in followers of this philosophy, maybe it is something to do with the presentation as a novel and not the ideas themselves or even the founder.
Maybe to be beautiful, art has to have a sense of balance and proper proportion, but a political fanatic has very little of either of these.
“I THINK that’s what you’re saying...”
I think it is saying that if you want to know if an idea is true or not, compare it to reality. Clothes are an irrelevancy. “If it can drive nails, who can doubt it’s worth?”
“If I had a hammer that seemed to me to work really well, but no one was willing to pay me the going rate for hammers of that quality, would it really be ridiculous for me to seriously question the accuracy of my perception of the hammer?”
Yes, in the case of a hammer I think it would be [ridiculous to doubt yourself]. In the case of something more complicated, like Wine, you might start to question whether there is some subtle difference between your wine and theirs that you’re not detecting, but there is no such thing as a hammer connoisseur.
Benquo: “What mistake am I making?”
I think you are artificially restricting your knowledge to direct perception of the objects. Don’t you also know that there are entire shops that sell only wine, that they have many varieties, at many prices, and they have competitions, experts etc?
It is this knowledge that leads you to conclude that wine is probably a complicated business and you may very well have made a mistake.
One advantage of the Two Party Swindle is that swing-voters usually decide an election. That is, the small percent of people who don’t fall for Us vs. Them.
So though it may be designed to distract the populace while their purse is being lightened, the Swindle also results in the more unbiased voter having more influence (even though on paper it’s still one man, one vote).
The emotion of religious faith might just be a feeling of intense admiration originally evolved to be directed at other human beings, but hijacked by religion.
The OPs acquaintance may have been right not to be convinced by the “1 in an incomprehensibly big number” argument. The domain in question (genes, insentient nature) operates by cause and effect, so there is no such thing as the million other paths evolution could have followed to make men and chimps different.
However the simple evidence of the similarity in the genomes should have been very convincing.
I once thought I had a fast, crushing argument against the existence of God. I would point to various objects around me and ask “What does that do?” e.g. point at a beach ball and they would say “bounce,” point at a bird and they would say “sing.” And I would triumphantly say, “See, God can’t exist!” and they would look at me blankly.
In my mind, every object I had ever seen did it’s own peculiar thing—that is, it didn’t do “just anything.” Therefore the idea of omnipotence—the ability to make objects do whatever you please is contradicted by all the evidence, and therefore God (a supposedly omnipotent being) is too.
What I didn’t grasp, was that all the evidence of every object they had seen in their entire life wasn’t convincing to them(!), as long as they could still imagine a counter-example. They gave their own imagination the same weight as real evidence. So it wasn’t a quick argument after all, it would require explaining evidence vs. imagination and that would lead to another thing, and another, and before you know it, it’s an entire website full of articles. So I have to agree with Eliezer, there’s no simple way to convey an entire mental framework in short order.
‘Any other meaning you could assign to the word “certain” makes it useless because everything falls on one side.’
Yes, exactly. The concept of “certainty” as colloquially used has no referents. It is such a strict standard, the only things that could possibly be referents for it are statements made by an omniscient entity. A statement by any lesser entity could be wrong and therefore could not be a referent. We are beating ourselves up over a concept no more valid that “unicorn.”
If fictional evidence is admissible, then doesn’t generalization itself becomes suspect, since people can simply imagine the black swan?
As for science fiction (and art in general), it may skew your concepts if you’re not careful, but it also provides emotional fuel and inspiration to keep going. And since the human need for such fuel is observably true, it’s not really an option to go cold turkey on art. You are either a researcher with some mildly skewed concepts, or not a researcher at all, but some poor fellow who has lost all hope. The researcher with perfectly fact-based concepts may be another case of an impossible fictional character seeping in to our reasoning.