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.

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 it is considered OK to believe differently, because personal thoughts are exceptions from public rules? Or one, where the opinion of the majority is considered so important that it is considered OK to attack people who disagree, and there is no good excuse for disagreement?

I have simply replaced "truth" with "opinion of a powerful majority". Why is this legitimate? Simply, because if someone has an opinion, they consider it truth. And if the agree with each other, the more sure they are. And if they are powerful enough, who dares to openly disagree? Especially if there is a rule that it is OK to attack people do disagree.

Therefore we have a rule that it is OK to have your own opinions about private matters. We have often seen that people who try to break this rule, do it to increase their power, even if their professed goals are noble.

But this situations is different, because unlike those people, you are actually right. Therefore those social rules obviously don't apply to you. Is there a good reason to follow those rules anyway?

Maybe I didn't convey the meaning I wanted to. The reason I wrote this article was because I was called intolerant for merely pointing out that, given that I strongly believe X, I also strongly believe those who believe non-X to be mistaken. Merely noticing the link is enough to be called intolerant. This is nuts. Human, I know, but nuts nevertheless. Consistency is not intolerance.

I perfectly understand that I can be mistaken about X (infinite certainty, biases, and all that). I just can't stand when people disagree and see no problem whatsoever. Then whe... (read more)

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How to deal with non-realism?

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How to deal with non-realism?

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