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.

We are talking about mind-matter dualism: substance dualism, where matter is one type of thing and mind is another type of thing, and also property dualism, where everything is made of matter, but mental states involve material objects with extra properties outside of those usually discussed in physics. You appear to be talking about some other kind of "dualism".

I think extra properties outside of physics conveys a stronger notion than what this view actually tries to explain. Property dualism, such as emergent materialism or epiphenomenalism, doesn't really think there are any extra properties other than the standard physical ones, it is just that when those physical properties are arranged and interact in a certain way they manifest what we experience as subjective experience and qualia and those phenomena aren't further reducible in an explanatory sense, even though they are reducible in the standard sense of ... (read more)

0ChristianKl14y

Robert Hanson wrote recently: [...] The basic argument structure is that public education either exists for 'creating patriotic citizens for war' or it exist for 'noble purposes'. That's dualism. People who believe in strong reductionism tend to make arguments that are structured that way. What do I mean by strong reductionism? Weak reductionism is the the belief that a world is determined by the way it works on the lowest level. Strong reductionism is the belief that you can basically ignore the halting problem and understand how a system works by understanding how it works on the lowest level. [...] loup-vaillant wants to use dualistic thinking for the way the full human brain works. I sat in a lecture in the Free University of Berlin about how the human brain works the professor told me: "You can't understand how the human brain works if all you are doing is studying neurons, you actually need to study the full system in action." Even when the system might be determined by it's the way neurons work you can't understand it on that level. The stuff that you can then say about the human brain doesn't tend to be either true or false but useful or not useful given a specific purpose. loup-vaillant however wants to convince his mother that it makes dualism works on that level. That it makes sense to distinguish between true and false statements.

16

How to deal with non-realism?

16

16

16

How to deal with non-realism?

16

16