From Scientismism to Subjectivism to Good Hair to Marriage Bigotry to Fictionalism

[essentialsaltes]

I really am working, but my current task is eerily similar to a pigeon pecking at a food bar at occasional intervals. So you are all hostage to the blathering that emerges from my brain, mediated through fingers and the intertubes. So I was reading Pharyngula, and a couple items caught my attention.

Comments

[jimkeller]

True or false: "Sherlock Holmes lived at 221B Baker Street."

I like this example a lot. Thank you for it.

[essentialsaltes]

It's hardly original with me, but I'll take any credit that comes my way!

[gina]

The fictional truth stuff is so interesting!

[ajax]

Your developing philosophy is in pretty near 100% concordance with mine own. (Therefore you are objectively correct.) It bothers me that so many people are so terribly insecure about taking a moral position on their own, without the comfort of believing that Something Bigger said so first.

Many people blanch when I explain to them that if the God of Abraham really did exist as described in some versions of Christianity, our moral imperative as humans might very well be to kill Him. But consider: do we really want a jealous, narcissistic manipulator running the universe like some sort of supernatural pimp? Can those qualities exist in something we would call "good", and should we suffer ourselves to be ruled by something we wouldn't call "good"?

--- Ajax.

[essentialsaltes]

(Therefore you are objectively correct.)

Woohoo! I win!

[arcane_nitehawk]

I disagree with the assertion that mathematics should be considered fictionally true. However it is currently 3:16 am and I am not able to coherently defend my position. I shall try again when I've had sleep.

[gotham_bound]

I am the subject who experiences these judgments. The universe doesn't give a rat's fart about Botticelli or rape. People care about these things. This does not mean they are unimportant; it means they are important in the only way that it makes sense for them to be important -- to people.

There is nothing good or bad, but thinking makes it so. --Hamlet

Easily my favorite Shakespeare quote. Focused a little differently this entry also reminds me of sentence or two from Herman Hesse's Siddhartha (I don't have a copy so I can only paraphrase) that went something to the gist of "I don't worry about my interaction with other things despite my inherent subject knowledge of their existence, because they exist in the same way that I do

[essentialsaltes]

I appreciate the tangent. I considered going there, but got tired of listening to myself. Like you, I think neuroscience seems to be showing that memory is hardly an accurate recording of experience as it happens, but more like a story that I tell myself. And I think this extends to consciousness -- different subsystems in the brain all percolate away, and some sort of narrative arises to try to incorporate and harmonize it all as a character. Yet another fiction in my grand unified theory of fiction. I see what you mean about the potential danger of solipsism, but I don't see myself falling prey to it. All of you may just be figments -- and all I personally know about you is a figment of a figment -- but I'm just a figment, too. I'm not the one solitary 'real' person in my own universe.

I don't know that I've actually read any Hume, but I'm familiar with some of his ideas, and obviously the whole is/ought thing that gives me the fits from time to time comes directly from him.

[gotham_bound]

Cool! I wasn't sure that wasn't just late night babbling. I really can't grasp the science of neuroscience but I've really enjoyed studying its investigations and conclusions.

Solipsism - I tend to think any honest person won't fall to it, probably, because as you said if we're figments then you yourself (or me myself) are likewise figments.... Echoing Hesse. }:>

Hume is good stuff. And from there Immanuel Kant, who really set the tone for 20th century investigations of human behavior. }:>