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Author Topic: Censorship  (Read 13290 times)

Jace

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #30 on: 17 Apr 2015, 23:51 »

Congratulations on trying to make this personal and demonstrating why I was trying to bow out of the thread.

Edit: Also, according to Wikipedia, the term 'antitheist' as it is currently used was coined in the 1800s. So it is certainly not a Hitchens term.
« Last Edit: 17 Apr 2015, 23:53 by Sarice »
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Vikarion

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #31 on: 18 Apr 2015, 00:09 »

Congratulations on trying to make this personal and demonstrating why I was trying to bow out of the thread.

Edit: Also, according to Wikipedia, the term 'antitheist' as it is currently used was coined in the 1800s. So it is certainly not a Hitchens term.

You mistake me. Or, perhaps, I'm too comfortable with these terms.

I live within a community of fundamentalists. To me, it doesn't bother me to be called an "idiot", or "damned".

Nonetheless, what I was trying to say is that Hitchen's anti-theism is as moderate, or more moderate, than my own. As such, you've already stated your opinion of me.  :P  I don't care, though. What I want to know is WHY you think I'm wrong. And, if you can't give reason for why I'm wrong, well, given what you've called me and mine, I hardly think I'm out of placed to call you "infected" by a bad idea.

That said, understand, I take none of this personally. This is the internet...you can call me a fool, and it doesn't hurt me. Just don't try to edit your previous posts. I'd rather be insulted than lose what you actually said.
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Jace

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #32 on: 18 Apr 2015, 00:12 »

Well, I am not going to keep on repeating forever that I did not call you an idiot. It is obvious I did not. Rather than ask what it was about Hitchens I thought was idiotic you would rather take the insult in order to try to have some sort of leverage. Sorry, not going to happen because I didn't call you an idiot.

Last post in this thread for me (for real, this time). Cheerio.
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Louella Dougans

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #33 on: 18 Apr 2015, 02:05 »

Read a thing a while back, said that Christians are a lot more accepting of atheism, than Islam, because of a major difference in how the beliefs work.

Jesus said "believe in me". Christians believe. which makes atheists just people who are yet to be convinced.

Muslims don't believe though, they know. And that makes atheists deniers of 'facts'.

Saw a different thing, had quotes from Islamic scholars about questions about Islam, and there was a pair of them that stood out.

"How do we know the Koran is the word of Allah ? Because Muhammed is the messenger of Allah."
when paired with:
"How do we know Muhammed is the messenger of Allah ? Because the Koran says so."

looks a bit circular.


Even for those that are moving away from religion, there is little evidence that they are moving towards an old-fashioned rationalism as per Enlightenment. On the contrary, it seems that many so-called 'postmodernist' approaches are on the rise with the unbelieving.

Jet fuel can't melt steel beams. Majestic 12. Rothschilds. I want to believe. Protocols of the Elders of Zion. JFK shot MLK. Autism causes vaccines.

They don't even teach schoolchildren to check sources, and to realise that all journalism has bias, that they way they report on what happened, or don't report, is to create a particular world view.

"Man arrested for murder", "Man arrested for vicious murder", "Evil killer that shocked nation". All of those headlines are intended to create a particular world view. Even the first one.
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Gwen Ikiryo

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #34 on: 18 Apr 2015, 02:41 »

I've never been so relieved to see a thread derailed into an arguement about atheism in my life.
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Lyn Farel

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #35 on: 18 Apr 2015, 03:42 »

I know, right ?
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Vikarion

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #36 on: 18 Apr 2015, 06:23 »

Well, I am not going to keep on repeating forever that I did not call you an idiot. It is obvious I did not. Rather than ask what it was about Hitchens I thought was idiotic you would rather take the insult in order to try to have some sort of leverage. Sorry, not going to happen because I didn't call you an idiot.

Last post in this thread for me (for real, this time). Cheerio.

Meh. This is probably why I shouldn't post while tired. I don't think I communicate very effectively.

But let me put it this way...from my perspective, it feels like this:

You: "Hitchen's idiotic viewpoints"
Me: "Uh, I hold those same views, in regards to religion, and I don't think they're idiotic"
You: "I'm not calling you an idiot"
Me: "Well, if my views are idiotic, it kinda follows.

Now, that might not be fair. And, in retrospect, "cowardly" is not a word I should have used, and I apologize.

Yet - and I hate following an apology with "yet" - it does seem a bit like a conversational hit-and-run.
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Jekaterine

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #37 on: 18 Apr 2015, 06:29 »

I've never been so relieved to see a thread derailed into an arguement about atheism in my life.

The Lord works in mysterious ways.
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Vikarion

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #38 on: 18 Apr 2015, 06:30 »

Saw a different thing, had quotes from Islamic scholars about questions about Islam, and there was a pair of them that stood out.

"How do we know the Koran is the word of Allah ? Because Muhammed is the messenger of Allah."
when paired with:
"How do we know Muhammed is the messenger of Allah ? Because the Koran says so."

looks a bit circular.

I agree, however, there is indeed a small, but possibly growing, movement for Islamic apologetics, much as in the Christian church. On the other hand, they tend to be even less convincing to me than the Christian ones.
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Nicoletta Mithra

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #39 on: 18 Apr 2015, 08:04 »

First, vikarion, we can't know that you're in the line of apostolic succession of Hitchen's anti-theism (which is not only anti-theism but a much broader anti-religionism).

If you feel like you're called out as idiot, because Hitchens' is called idiotic in his anti-theism, then it's because you choose to identify with that starin of anti-theism, not because someone called you, personally, an idiot: There was no intention at all to call you an idiotic.

The anti-theism of Hitchens is, by the way, everything but moderate. It is based on a metaphysical materialism which isn't either based on 'empirical evidence' (and it can't be grounded in that in principle, because 'empirical evidence' (that is scientific evidence) is grounded in a commitment to methodological materialism: and thus trying to base it in such is begging the question, really) nor has it a foundation in common sense (because there are common-sense positions which are either at odds with materialsim or that materialism has at least a very hard time to account for).

Suffice to say, modern metaphysical (reductive/eliminative) materialism is actually a position that needs a lot of very sophisticated argument to make it a proper contender with other positions in metaphysics.

There is nothing obvious about the claim that one would need 'empirical evidence' for any kind of belief. Actually, it's misunderstanding of what religious belief is. It is also a misunderstanding that we need 'empirical evidence' to be justified in treating something as knowledge. The fact that, by definition, 'empirical evidence' is needed to hold a scientific theory (in natural science) to be justified, doesn't really at all, not even a tiny bit, imply that we need 'empirical evidence' to view all kinds of beliefs as justified enough to consider them reliable.

So, that's the first point in which Hitchens' anti-theism can be considered idiotic: It is self-defeating. to justify it you need to take recourse to non-scientific explanations, and reasons that are not 'empirical evidence' - but then the view disqualifies all non-scientific, non-empirical evidence and reasons. That doesn't work out, obviously.

As this is the case, those poeple that hold those positions are fundamentalists. They adhere strictly to that set of ideas and principles and they usually don't allow for any of those fundamental principles to be questioned.

The second point where Hitchens becomes idiotic in his anti-theism is where he mistakes freedom of speech as a license for hate-speech. It is not. Simple as that. Take a look at the laws or the declaration of human rights: Freedom of speech is limited by other right amongst which is the right to not be ridiculed and defamed. Hitchen's call for heaping ridicule and hate on religious people - and he did call out for that - is quite a-moderate and frankly, idiotic.

And the third point, and the last I will raise, while I'm sure there are others as well, where he describes religion and - more broadly - religious thought as a 'virus of the mind'. First, this is based on the 'meme' view of ideas, which is according to modern neuroscience not fitting to how brain-processes occur physically - at all. It is also at odds with psychological accounts of thought and also with epistemology. To make it short: There is so little empirical evidence for it, that one really should go for more fitting theories - especially if one places such emphasis on scientific evidence. It is, frankly again, idiotic to hold on to it under the given circumstances.

It is clear to me, that these three points are objectively idiotic views, in the sense that they are incongruous and inviting ridicule. They are inconsistent, and not in keeping with what is correct (something that is self-defeating can't be correct), proper (a position that depends on human rights, yet cherry-picks them is not proper), or logical (a self-defeating position isn't logical).

Your personal anecdotes are, by the way, no empirical evidence at all in that regard. They are stricly speaking un-scientific, because they are personal and subjective. Accepting the importance of them puts you, basically, in a paradoxical position when holding onto a worldview that denies the importance of personal and subjective experiences, if it is giving reason to religious belief.

All that, by the way, still doesn't mean that you are an idiot or that you are - in an unqualified sense - idiotic. It just means that you hold positions that are idiotic and engage in some idiotic behaviours.

So, unless you identify with the 'idiotic viewpoints' of Hitchens to the degree that you think that they make up the essence of who you are, you have little reason - if any reason at all - to feel that someone called you an idiot, here. Equally, unless you think that those idiotic points are at the core of your anti-theism, you have no need to think that your anti-theism has been called out as idiotic.

T bring this full circle: It doesn't matter whether Hitchens' attempt to get hate-speech justified by over-extending the right to freedom of speech is more 'convincing' than that of the anti-feminists: He is not the better spokesperson for freedom of speech because of that. And certainly the anti-feminists are not worse spokespersons for it, because of their anti-feminism, as Hitchens was similarly intolerant, even though his intolerance was directed at another group of people.
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Vikarion

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #40 on: 18 Apr 2015, 08:09 »

Oh, and I would make a point about censorship (sorry Lyn  :P ): Freedom of speech is the freedom to offend.

You don't need freedom of speech if you don't want to offend. No one is going to get in trouble for saying that Allah is awesome in Saudi Arabia, or that the Catholic church is wonderful in the Philippines, or that the Communist party in China is terrific. No, you get in trouble when you decide to offend people by disagreeing - most often, the people in charge.

What hate speech laws do is create a class of thoughts that it is illegal to speak. And then hand the power of enforcing such laws over to the very institutions and people who have a great interest in destroying the ability of others to oppose them. Make it illegal to call gays "sinners", and you eventually have a way to toss any Christian you like into jail. Make it illegal to call Islam bullshit, and you've essentially outlawed atheism.

And I think the idea of outlawing thoughts should be troubling. In creating rules for what people may think out loud, you're establishing a precedent for denying everyone in your society access to ideas. Sure, today it may be homophobic remarks, but let the demographics change a bit, and tomorrow it may be the teaching of evolution that is outlawed.
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Nicoletta Mithra

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #41 on: 18 Apr 2015, 08:34 »

If you think that you can't disagree or voice disagreement in a non-offensive, non-hateful way, that you need to go against the right of all humans to live in dignity - on which all human rights are based - and which demands that humans are to be treated with respect and are to be kept safe from attacks upon their honour and reputation, then, well...
you have no basis for the right to freedom of speech either.
The right to freedom of speech needs to be limited, necessarily.

That said, not all 'hate speech laws' are really aiming to outlaw hate speech: Some modern ones do, though. Anyhow, the failure to legislate properly against it doesn't make hate speech any more acceptable.

So, no: Freedom of speech is not the freedom to offend, and certainly not the freedom to speech, gesture or conduct, writing, or display which may incite violence or prejudicial action or which disparages or intimidates a human being or an association of humans, which is formed through and in the excercise of their basic and fundamental human rights.

The freedom to disagree is an entirely different animal than the freedom to offend or to hate speech.
« Last Edit: 18 Apr 2015, 08:39 by Nicoletta Mithra »
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Vikarion

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #42 on: 18 Apr 2015, 08:41 »

Mithra,

One.
Laying aside the fact that I think you are confusing methodological naturalism with metaphysical naturalism...no, actually I won't lay that aside.

Metaphysical naturalism is a claim that nature is all there is. Methodological naturalism is the assumption that we should look for natural causes for effects. I never heard or read Hitchens saying that there couldn't be a God, but rather that the evidence for such was woefully lacking.

Should we want evidence? Well, if you don't think there is any value in evidence and reason, I obviously cannot offer any evidence or reason to convince you otherwise. All I can say is that evidence and reason seem to be really good at giving us models of the world that work. I mean, airplanes that fly, satellites, cell phones...if there are other ways of constructing accurate truths about the world, it seems odd that they can't be demonstrated. And it also seems to be a bit off that all the other methods of understanding the world people use produce contradictory models, sometimes even self-contradictory.

So I don't need to take refuge in anything. I simply look around, and pragmatically determine what happens to actually produce results. And, frankly, this is how most of us live in everyday life. If I see a car coming, I don't think "gee, maybe observational evidence isn't a good path to knowledge". I get out of the way. So what I suggest that people do is apply the very same standards for beliefs such as "there's a car coming" to other beliefs, such as "there was a world-wide flood".


Two.
Sadly, the fact that the U.N. comes up with a declaration of human rights does not mean I have to agree with it. To say that one cannot attack the ideas of others isn't about human rights, anyway. It's about giving ideas rights, about setting up some models of the world as sacred. It's different in severity, but no different in principle, from the motivation behind burning heretics at the stake.

And as I said earlier, giving government - the institution with the greatest motivation to control ideas - the power to do so should be pretty worrisome. It should also be worrying that someone else thinks that they have the right to tell you what you can think out loud.


Three.
Actually, you're beginning to make me wonder if you have more than a passing acquaintance with what Hitchens wrote or spoke. I didn't claim that Hitchens said that religion was a literal mind-virus, I said that I thought it was an apt analogy. Now, I don't think I need to point this out, but I will: an analogy is not a perfect representation of the working of the original subject. And if you'd done reading on the subject, you'd discover that the term "meme" was invented by Richard Dawkins, not by Hitchens.

So, to say that it's unscientific to call religions "mind-viruses", is rather to miss the point. It's not that I think that religious ideas operate like a virus on a mechanical level. What I mean is that bad ideas "infect" people and lead to them doing things harmful to themselves and others - like a cell that has been infected by a virus.

Fourth.
I didn't claim that my personal experience is evidence. I claim that it was my search for evidence that led to my experience. How you create a claim that I didn't make, I don't know. I am certainly not going to say "I experienced atheism, and you should become an atheist because of that". I'm saying "this is how I lost my faith".

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Jekaterine

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #43 on: 18 Apr 2015, 08:46 »

[mod]So this thread is starting to go downhill. My suggestion is that you either salvage it or abandon it. Its fate is in your hands.[/mod]
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Saede Riordan

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Re: Censorship
« Reply #44 on: 18 Apr 2015, 08:47 »

Quote
Yes, you do, and I did when I was a Christian. Please don't be offended, because I only use this as an analogy, but I feel that "mind-virus" is a very apt way to describe what religions do. In a sense, they are like the AIDS virus, because they form a system in which the very methods we use for checking the truth of our beliefs are co-opted. For example, we do not use the same standards for evaluating our own religious beliefs that we do in evaluating other, similar claims.

Just grabbing this bit here Vik, because a really super easy way to prove this point is to demonstrate to the person that they already are an atheist. They already don't believe in every other god save for their own. Its their own specific religion that they are blinded to the faults of.

Nico, I will never fathom how you avoid drifting into endless solipsism with the kind of thinking you're demonstrating here. I'll attempt to respond to it and explain why you don't actually create an infinite deductive recursive loop when trying to explain why reductionism and materialism are useful.

But before I get into that, I just wanted to respond to this specifically:

Quote
The freedom to disagree is an entirely different animal than the freedom to offend or to hate speech.
Offence is taken, not given. A word is only offensive if I think it has an offensive meaning. The word faggot has offensive connotations because of its associations with homophobia, but the word itself is just an arrangement of letters, one that in another language might mean something completely different. There is a Fucking, Austria.

To say it another way, in order to intentionally offend someone, I need to know what they will find offensive. If I were to just shout Pasta! At someone on the street, they would likely give me a bewildered look but not be particularly offended by it at all. In a world where I knew the word pasta had come to be used as a slur for a particular group of which this person I see belongs, I can expect an entirely different outcome.

So when you say 'you should not have the freedom to offend someone' its actually a very dangerous thing to say, because again, offence is taken, not given. The other person decides what is offensive, not you. I know plenty of Christians who feel offended by the existence of gays, I'm sure there's people who would find equal rights for women to be an offensive concept. As soon as you put that power into someone else's hands, you give away your freedom for the benefit of their desire to never be uncomfortable.

Now, on to your proposition that you don't need evidence for beliefs to be reliable.

Quote
Why do I believe that the Sun will rise tomorrow?

Because I've seen the Sun rise on thousands of previous days.

Ah... but why do I believe the future will be like the past?

Even if I go past the mere surface observation of the Sun rising, to the apparently universal and exceptionless laws of gravitation and nuclear physics, then I am still left with the question:  "Why do I believe this will also be true tomorrow?"

I could appeal to Occam's Razor, the principle of using the simplest theory that fits the facts... but why believe in Occam's Razor?  Because it's been successful on past problems?  But who says that this means Occam's Razor will work tomorrow?

And lo, the one said:

Quote
Science also depends on unjustified assumptions.  Thus science is ultimately based on faith, so don't you criticize me for believing in [silly-belief-#238721].


As I've previously observed:

It's a most peculiar psychology—this business of "Science is based on faith too, so there!"  Typically this is said by people who claim that faith is a good thing.  Then why do they say "Science is based on faith too!" in that angry-triumphal tone, rather than as a compliment?

Arguing that you should be immune to criticism is rarely a good sign.

But this doesn't answer the legitimate philosophical dilemma:  If every belief must be justified, and those justifications in turn must be justified, then how is the infinite recursion terminated?

And if you're allowed to end in something assumed-without-justification, then why aren't you allowed to assume anything without justification?

Suppose you're drawing red and white balls from an urn.  You observe that, of the first 9 balls, 3 are red and 6 are white.  What is the probability that the next ball drawn will be red?

That depends on your prior beliefs about the urn.  If you think the urn-maker generated a uniform random number between 0 and 1, and used that number as the fixed probability of each ball being red, then the answer is 4/11 (by Laplace's Law of Succession).  If you think the urn originally contained 10 red balls and 10 white balls, then the answer is 7/11.

Which goes to say that, with the right prior—or rather the wrong prior—the chance of the Sun rising tomorrow, would seem to go down with each succeeding day... if you were absolutely certain, a priori, that there was a great barrel out there from which, on each day, there was drawn a little slip of paper that determined whether the Sun rose or not; and that the barrel contained only a limited number of slips saying "Yes", and the slips were drawn without replacement.

There are possible minds in mind design space who have anti-Occamian and anti-Laplacian priors; they believe that simpler theories are less likely to be correct, and that the more often something happens, the less likely it is to happen again.

And when you ask these strange beings why they keep using priors that never seem to work in real life... they reply, "Because it's never worked for us before!"

Now, one lesson you might derive from this, is "Don't be born with a stupid prior."  This is an amazingly helpful principle on many real-world problems, but I doubt it will satisfy philosophers.

Here's how I treat this problem myself:  I try to approach questions like "Should I trust my brain?" or "Should I trust Occam's Razor?" as though they were nothing special— or at least, nothing special as deep questions go.

Should I trust Occam's Razor?  Well, how well does (any particular version of) Occam's Razor seem to work in practice?  What kind of probability-theoretic justifications can I find for it?  When I look at the universe, does it seem like the kind of universe in which Occam's Razor would work well?

Should I trust my brain?  Obviously not; it doesn't always work.  But nonetheless, the human brain seems much more powerful than the most sophisticated computer programs I could consider trusting otherwise.  How well does my brain work in practice, on which sorts of problems?

When I examine the causal history of my brain—its origins in natural selection—I find, on the one hand, all sorts of specific reasons for doubt; my brain was optimized to run on the ancestral savanna, not to do math.  But on the other hand, it's also clear why, loosely speaking, it's possible that the brain really could work.  Natural selection would have quickly eliminated brains so completely unsuited to reasoning, so anti-helpful, as anti-Occamian or anti-Laplacian priors.

So what I did in practice, does not amount to declaring a sudden halt to questioning and justification.  I'm not halting the chain of examination at the point that I encounter Occam's Razor, or my brain, or some other unquestionable.  The chain of examination continues—but it continues, unavoidably, using my current brain and my current grasp on reasoning techniques.  What else could I possibly use?

Indeed, no matter what I did with this dilemma, it would be me doing it.  Even if I trusted something else, like some computer program, it would be my own decision to trust it.

The technique of rejecting beliefs that have absolutely no justification, is in general an extremely important one.  A fundamental question of rationality is "Why do you believe what you believe?"  I don't even want to say something that sounds like it might allow a single exception to the rule that everything needs justification.

Which is, itself, a dangerous sort of motivation; you can't always avoid everything that might be risky, and when someone annoys you by saying something silly, you can't reverse that stupidity to arrive at intelligence.

But I would nonetheless emphasize the difference between saying:

"Here is this assumption I cannot justify, which must be simply taken, and not further examined."

Versus saying:

"Here the inquiry continues to examine this assumption, with the full force of my present intelligence—as opposed to the full force of something else, like a random number generator or a magic 8-ball—even though my present intelligence happens to be founded on this assumption."

Still... wouldn't it be nice if we could examine the problem of how much to trust our brains without using our current intelligence?  Wouldn't it be nice if we could examine the problem of how to think, without using our current grasp of rationality?

When you phrase it that way, it starts looking like the answer might be "No".

E. T. Jaynes used to say that you must always use all the information available to you—he was a Bayesian probability theorist, and had to clean up the paradoxes other people generated when they used different information at different points in their calculations.  The principle of "Always put forth your true best effort" has at least as much appeal as "Never do anything that might look circular."  After all, the alternative to putting forth your best effort is presumably doing less than your best.

But still... wouldn't it be nice if there were some way to justify using Occam's Razor, or justify predicting that the future will resemble the past, without assuming that those methods of reasoning which have worked on previous occasions are better than those which have continually failed?

Wouldn't it be nice if there were some chain of justifications that neither ended in an unexaminable assumption, nor was forced to examine itself under its own rules, but, instead, could be explained starting from absolute scratch to an ideal philosophy student of perfect emptiness?

Well, I'd certainly be interested, but I don't expect to see it done any time soon.

Even if someone cracks the First Cause problem and comes up with the actual reason the universe is simple, which does not itself presume a simple universe... then I would still expect that the explanation could only be understood by a mindful listener, and not by, say, a rock.  A listener that didn't start out already implementing modus ponens might be out of luck.

So, at the end of the day, what happens when someone keeps asking me "Why do you believe what you believe?"

At present, I start going around in a loop at the point where I explain, "I predict the future as though it will resemble the past on the simplest and most stable level of organization I can identify, because previously, this rule has usually worked to generate good results; and using the simple assumption of a simple universe, I can see why it generates good results; and I can even see how my brain might have evolved to be able to observe the universe with some degree of accuracy, if my observations are correct."

But then... haven't I just licensed circular logic?

Actually, I've just licensed reflecting on your mind's degree of trustworthiness, using your current mind as opposed to something else.

Reflection of this sort is, indeed, the reason we reject most circular logic in the first place.  We want to have a coherent causal story about how our mind comes to know something, a story that explains how the process we used to arrive at our beliefs, is itself trustworthy.  This is the essential demand behind the rationalist's fundamental question, "Why do you believe what you believe?"

Now suppose you write on a sheet of paper:  "(1) Everything on this sheet of paper is true, (2) The mass of a helium atom is 20 grams."  If that trick actually worked in real life, you would be able to know the true mass of a helium atom just by believing some circular logic which asserted it.  Which would enable you to arrive at a true map of the universe sitting in your living room with the blinds drawn.  Which would violate the second law of thermodynamics by generating information from nowhere.  Which would not be a plausible story about how your mind could end up believing something true.

Even if you started out believing the sheet of paper, it would not seem that you had any reason for why the paper corresponded to reality.  It would just be a miraculous coincidence that (a) the mass of a helium atom was 20 grams, and (b) the paper happened to say so.

Believing, in general, self-validating statement sets, does not seem like it should work to map external reality—when we reflect on it as a causal story about minds—using, of course, our current minds to do so.

But what about evolving to give more credence to simpler beliefs, and to believe that algorithms which have worked in the past are more likely to work in the future?  Even when we reflect on this as a causal story of the origin of minds, it still seems like this could plausibly work to map reality.

And what about trusting reflective coherence in general?  Wouldn't most possible minds, randomly generated and allowed to settle into a state of reflective coherence, be incorrect?  Ah, but we evolved by natural selection; we were not generated randomly.

If trusting this argument seems worrisome to you, then forget about the problem of philosophical justifications, and ask yourself whether it's really truly true.

(You will, of course, use your own mind to do so.)

Is this the same as the one who says, "I believe that the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so"?

Couldn't they argue that their blind faith must also have been placed in them by God, and is therefore trustworthy?

In point of fact, when religious people finally come to reject the Bible, they do not do so by magically jumping to a non-religious state of pure emptiness, and then evaluating their religious beliefs in that non-religious state of mind, and then jumping back to a new state with their religious beliefs removed.

People go from being religious, to being non-religious, because even in a religious state of mind, doubt seeps in.  They notice their prayers (and worse, the prayers of seemingly much worthier people) are not being answered.  They notice that God, who speaks to them in their heart in order to provide seemingly consoling answers about the universe, is not able to tell them the hundredth digit of pi (which would be a lot more reassuring, if God's purpose were reassurance).  They examine the story of God's creation of the world and damnation of unbelievers, and it doesn't seem to make sense even under their own religious premises.

Being religious doesn't make you less than human.  Your brain still has the abilities of a human brain.  The dangerous part is that being religious might stop you from applying those native abilities to your religion—stop you from reflecting fully on yourself.  People don't heal their errors by resetting themselves to an ideal philosopher of pure emptiness and reconsidering all their sensory experiences from scratch.  They heal themselves by becoming more willing to question their current beliefs, using more of the power of their current mind.

This is why it's important to distinguish between reflecting on your mind using your mind (it's not like you can use anything else) and having an unquestionable assumption that you can't reflect on.

"I believe that the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so."  Well, if the Bible were an astoundingly reliable source of information about all other matters, if it had not said that grasshoppers had four legs or that the universe was created in six days, but had instead contained the Periodic Table of Elements centuries before chemistry—if the Bible had served us only well and told us only truth—then we might, in fact, be inclined to take seriously the additional statement in the Bible, that the Bible had been generated by God.  We might not trust it entirely, because it could also be aliens or the Dark Lords of the Matrix, but it would at least be worth taking seriously.

Likewise, if everything else that priests had told us, turned out to be true, we might take more seriously their statement that faith had been placed in us by God and was a systematically trustworthy source—especially if people could divine the hundredth digit of pi by faith as well.

So the important part of appreciating the circularity of "I believe that the Bible is the word of God, because the Bible says so," is not so much that you are going to reject the idea of reflecting on your mind using your current mind.  But, rather, that you realize that anything which calls into question the Bible's trustworthiness, also calls into question the Bible's assurance of its trustworthiness.

This applies to rationality too: if the future should cease to resemble the past—even on its lowest and simplest and most stable observed levels of organization—well, mostly, I'd be dead, because my brain's processes require a lawful universe where chemistry goes on working.  But if somehow I survived, then I would have to start questioning the principle that the future should be predicted to be like the past.

But for now... what's the alternative to saying, "I'm going to believe that the future will be like the past on the most stable level of organization I can identify, because that's previously worked better for me than any other algorithm I've tried"?

Is it saying, "I'm going to believe that the future will not be like the past, because that algorithm has always failed before"?

At this point I feel obliged to drag up the point that rationalists are not out to win arguments with ideal philosophers of perfect emptiness; we are simply out to win.  For which purpose we want to get as close to the truth as we can possibly manage.  So at the end of the day, I embrace the principle:  "Question your brain, question your intuitions, question your principles of rationality, using the full current force of your mind, and doing the best you can do at every point."

If one of your current principles does come up wanting—according to your own mind's examination, since you can't step outside yourself—then change it!  And then go back and look at things again, using your new improved principles.

The point is not to be reflectively consistent.  The point is to win.  But if you look at yourself and play to win, you are making yourself more reflectively consistent—that's what it means to "play to win" while "looking at yourself".

Everything, without exception, needs justification.  Sometimes—unavoidably, as far as I can tell—those justifications will go around in reflective loops.  I do think that reflective loops have a meta-character which should enable one to distinguish them, by common sense, from circular logics.  But anyone seriously considering a circular logic in the first place, is probably out to lunch in matters of rationality; and will simply insist that their circular logic is a "reflective loop" even if it consists of a single scrap of paper saying "Trust me".  Well, you can't always optimize your rationality techniques according to the sole consideration of preventing those bent on self-destruction from abusing them.

The important thing is to hold nothing back in your criticisms of how to criticize; nor should you regard the unavoidability of loopy justifications as a warrant of immunity from questioning.

Always apply full force, whether it loops or not—do the best you can possibly do, whether it loops or not—and play, ultimately, to win.
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A ship in harbour is safe, but that's not what ships are built for.
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