= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
marchdown comments on A sense of logic - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (269)
"All men are created equal"
"God's love is unconditional"
I feel the pain in my head. I think its because I genuinely want to understand why they truly believe what they are saying while not seeing the clear contradictions, but try as I might I just cannot. I have found that I feel the same way when a contradiction betweeen a belief and action within myself occurs. For example I believe nothing really matters, but every decision and action I take obviously contradicts this belief.
The pain has a name. Confusion. With awareness that such ideas impact the world and yourself it combines with sadness, pity, anger, frustration or a combination of all of them. Maybe this is the pain you feel in the stomach. Zen uses koans to take confusion to a heighten level in order to show an individual that all thought is equally confused depending on your perspective. The truth is there is nothing solid or certain just a feeling (that is created/invented) that there is. Belief, thought, action, feeling have little to do with reality. People have a limitless ability to rationalize just about anything and make the most absurd ideas true for themselves. The corners you feel are all pinned down are coners you or people collectively have created for yourself. Different corners, different conclusions, different logic. How you react to ideas, whether fast or not, is based upon the corners your logic uses (and so is in a sense kinethetic) and how they are set up over a lifetime is as individual as fingerprints.
What is wrong with your example sentences? They are not arguments, there is no logic to be flawed. Sure, they can be interpreted to refer to factually wrong conjectures, namely that all men at some early point in their live are literally identical and that there is a god with associated bunch of problematic properties.
But this is not necessarily or even often so. For one, these sentences easily lend themselves to non-problematic interpretations: (1) says that all men are similar in significant ways, or that the commonalities are more important than differences, or that they start with the same machinery and may or may not develop it in different ways; while (2) simply means that life and human condition is good and death and non-existence is bad.
Finally, you've got to look at how these are actually used in speech. I'm beginning to see your point here, these sentences are often used as universal rebuttals, or refer to some vague moral maxims which are hard to argue against, they fulfill several patterns, trapping thought and leaving impression of closure where there is none. Is this why you react to them so badly? Do they simply trigger facepalm response without you actually struggling against bad logic?
It is in the use of an idea that the facepalm response occurs. Argueing for the concept of meritocracy for example by using the idea all men are created equal. I believe many feel people fail or succeed based on their efforts without consideration for other factors such as those outlined above and probably the most impotant factor LUCK.