How to deal with non-realism?

loup-vaillant

From Being a Realist (even if you believe in God):

theists and untheists can and should meet half way and at least agree on the logical necessity of being a realist.

My mother, who doesn't call herself a theist (I think she's agnostic), doesn't even accept realism. She doesn't even agree with this:

There is something. All that there is, we generally call "reality". Note that by this definition, reality is unique. The corollary is, we all live in the same reality. We do not percieve it in the same way, but our perceptions and reality itself aren't the same thing.

Every description of reality that matches it is true. Every description of reality that doesn't match it is false. In this sense, truth is unique and universal.

(We can nuance the truth/falsehood dichotomy with probability distributions. Some probability distributions are closer to reality than others, and so on.)

That's little more than tautologies here. Yet it elicited an impression of being forced to believe. I know because she told me about the totalitarian dangers from such narrow thinking.

I'm happy to have finally found the root cause of our ongoing disagreement, but now, how can I deal with that? It looks pretty hopeless, but just in case, does someone have a suggestion, or should I just leave it at that? (My ego doesn't like it, but giving up is an option.)

Now I'm relieved to know that in near mode, she's a complete realist. This craziness only shows up in far mode.

From Being a Realist (even if you believe in God):

theists and untheists can and should meet half way and at least agree on the logical necessity of being a realist.

My mother, who doesn't call herself a theist (I think she's agnostic), doesn't even accept realism. She doesn't even agree with this:

There is something. All that there is, we generally call "reality". Note that by this definition, reality is unique. The corollary is, we all live in the same reality. We do not percieve it in the same way, but our perceptions and reality itself aren't the same thing.

Every description of reality that matches it is true. Every description of reality that doesn't match it is false. In this sense, truth is unique and universal.

(We can nuance the truth/falsehood dichotomy with probability distributions. Some probability distributions are closer to reality than others, and so on.)

That's little more than tautologies here. Yet it elicited an impression of being forced to believe. I know because she told me about the totalitarian dangers from such narrow thinking.

Now I'm relieved to know that in near mode, she's a complete realist. This craziness only shows up in far mode.

"Extreme agnosticism" sounds mostly accurate. She will doubt as a matter of principle, but she won't put a probability on that doubt. As for why I believed what I wrote here…

We talked. A lot. It spanned over multiple conversations, for several months, if not over a year. First, I tried to talk about transhumanist things, like mind uploading. She found it impossible sounding, scary, horrible, and sad. We talked about the potential power of science. She seems to think that science isn't omnipotent (sounds true enough), and some specific things, like the understanding of the human soul, seems definitely out of reach. But I don't recall she ever stuck her neck out and flatly said that there's no way science could ever unravel the mysteries of our minds, even in principle (I personally have some doubt, because of the self-referencing involved. But I don't think these difficulties would prevent us from understanding enough low-level mechanisms to effectively emulate a brain.).

We moved on to more basic things, like reductionism. She often "accuses" me of wanting to control everything with math. So I tried to assert that our world is math all the way down, even if it's way too complicated for us to actually use accurate math. But she doesn't seem to make the bridge between the laws of physics and a full human brain. She seems to assert that there is something there that is by nature incomprehensible. But when I call that "magic", she rejects the term.

At some point, I wrote this (French or English depending on your browser settings). I don't think very highly of it, but I thought it would at least serve my point: stopped being called intolerant just because I take the logical step from believing something to asserting that someone who doesn't believe it is mistaken. (Modulo tiny uncertainties.) It didn't work at all. She just found it juvenile, besides the point, and by the way, the colour of my socks and the existence of God are not the same thing, and should not be reasoned about in the same way. My informal formulation of the Auman's agreement theorem also fell on deaf ears.

We had some more fruitless debates, where I believe she doesn't understand me, and where she believe she perfectly understands me, but I cannot perceive her arguments the same way humans can't perceive ultra-violet, which is why I reject them, the same way some ignorant fool would say "there's no such thing as invisible light". This feels very close to saying that I lack some brain circuitry, though I don't think she would actually say that if I asked. But I do feel like I talk to some mystic who claim to have higher perceptions, and I should not call them hallucinations just because I lack them. (Sounds like Freudian psychoanalysis: If you don't believe it, something is wrong with you.) Of course, her high status (being my mother and older than me) doesn't help. Heck, she even said she used to think like me, but got past that. So I'm clearly immature. I suspect she hopes I will understand her when I get older.

So I ended up writing this (French only for now). She hasn't read it so far, but I told her about the first paragraphs (which I roughly translated in my post here). Then she told me there's something wrong with this. (But again, she won't outright contradict me, and say there isn't a world out there.)

By the way, she thinks I believe all that stuff for some "deep reason", which I take to mean "something unrelated to the actual accuracy of such beliefs". She thinks I have some deep fear inside that makes me cling to that. (No kidding: I see small hopes of making a paradise out of our world, and I would give up on them? OK, if it's impossible after all, let us enjoy our short lives. But if there is a possibility, then missing it is unforgivable.) Strangest of all, she sees a contradiction between my humanistic, left-wing, environmentalist ideas, and my consequentialist, positivist, transhumanist ideas.

Now to her credit, I must note that she probably changed her mind about longevity: without taking into account some problems like world population, she wouldn't be against doubling our life expectancy, or more. Living forever seems too much yet, but a couple centuries seems like a good idea. (She is closer to death lately: her aunt, which she loves dearly, starts to have health problems that may prove serious in the coming years, if not months.)

Reading your article, I see a possible problem:

Some opinions about facts aren't open to criticism. They are deemed personal, and as such no worse than opposite opinions. Attacking them is often considered rude, if not outright intolerant. This essay is about why this should stop.

There is something like "Agree Denotationally But Object Connotationally" here. Sometimes it is better to be wrong than to be right in a wrong context.

Imagine that a powerful majority of a people share the same opinion. What kind of society would you prefer? One where... (read more)

1Desrtopa14y

If she's arguing from a position of separate magisteria which have to be reasoned about differently, I would probably try this tactic. Point out that we do not automatically gravitate to reasoning correctly about mundane things; you can use examples from Greek philosophers and alchemists and so on. Correct processes of mundane reasoning are something we've had to develop over time by refining our methods in situations where would could tell if our conclusions were wrong. That being the case, how does she know that her different procedure for reasoning about non-mundane things is one that works? If it were simply wrong, how would she be able to tell? If her procedure for reasoning about non-mundane things can be used to draw contradictory conclusions (it almost certainly can,) point out that you have on the one hand a set of confusing apparent contradictions that must somehow all be true, and on the other hand the possibility that the reasoning procedure simply doesn't work.

11Mitchell_Porter14y

One way to test your mother's attitude to science, explanation, and so on, would be to see what she thinks of theories of the mind which sound like nonreductionistic quantum mysticism to you. What would she think of the theory that qualia are in the quantum-gravity transitions of the microtubule, and the soul is a bose-einstein condensate in the brain? I predict that she would find that sort of theory much more agreeable and plausible. I think she's not hostile to reality or to understanding, she's hostile to reductionism that falsifies subjective reality. People here and elsewhere believe in ordinary reductionist materialism because they think they have to - because they think it is a necessary implication of the scientifically examined world - not because that outlook actually makes sense. For someone who truly believes in an atomistic physical universe, the natural belief is dualism: matter is made of atoms, mind is some other sort of thing. It's only the belief in the causal closure and causal self-sufficiency of atomistic physics that leads people to come up with all the variations of mental materialism: eliminativism, epiphenomenalism, various "identity theories" such as functionalism. A lot of these so-called materialisms are actually dualisms, but they are property dualism rather than substance dualism: the mind is the brain, but it has properties like "being in a certain state of consciousness", which are distinct from, yet somehow correlated with, properties like "being made of atoms arranged in a certain way". I regard this situation as temporary and contingent. It's the consequence of the limitations of our current science and currently available concepts. I fully expect that new data from biology, new perspectives in physics, and a revival of rigorous studies of subjectivity like transcendental phenomenology, is eventually going to give us a physically monistic account of what the self is, in which consciousness as it is subjectively experienced is re

16

How to deal with non-realism?

16

16

16

How to deal with non-realism?

16

16