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by FeepingCreature 361 days ago
Okay, you know what?

I'll let my argument stand as written, and you can let yours stand as written, and we'll see which one is more convincing. I don't feel like I have any need to add anything.

edit: Other than, I guess, that this mode of argument not being there is what made LessWrong attractive. "But what's the actual answer?!"
1 comments
margalabargala 361 days ago
The attraction of LessWrong is that they take unanswerable questions with unknowable answers and assign an "actual answer" to them?

That my friend is a religion.

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FeepingCreature 361 days ago
The attraction is that they say "actually, this has an answer, and I can show you why" and then they actually do so.

Philosophy is over-attached to the questions to the point of rejecting a commitment to an answer when it stares them in the face. The point of the whole entire shebang was to find out what the right answer was. All else is distraction, and philosophy has a lot of distraction.

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margalabargala 361 days ago
> and I can show you why

But you haven't, you've just said "I have decided that proposition X is more likely than proposition Y, and if we accept X as truth then Z is the answer".

You've not shown that X is more likely than Y, and you have certainly not shown that it must be X and not Y.

Your statements don't logically follow. You said:

> it's simply much more plausible that the human feeling of freedom measures something about human cognition rather than reality

You said your opinion about some probabilities, and somehow drew the conclusion that it was "obvious that 40% of a field's practitioners are wrong".

Someone saying "actually, this has an answer, and I can show you why" to a currently fundamentally unanswerable question is simply going off faith and is literally a religion. It's choosing to believe in the downstream implication despite no actual foundation existing.

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