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.

On another note I've started blogging here, in order to practice my writing and lay down my thoughts in semi-coherent form 'cuz I'm trying to write a treatise on God and other such things. Five to fifteen or so LessWrong folk have messaged me asking for more info about my thoughts on theism, religion, &c., and I suspect more than that are quietly interested, so the readership might not be tiny once I publicize the blog. And I suspect the readership will be pretty elite. I've also invited various cool people to write guest posts. If you want to write guest posts that are more or less on the theme then let me know. Especially, I have a huge gap in my knowledge of the history of computation during roughly the Islamic Golden Age period, and I'd appreciate a post roughly on that subject. ("Computation" is pretty loose here: it's more like theory of processes in general. And I'm also interested in the history of computers. Basically, anything in the historical run-up to Leibniz' calculator and proto-algorithmic-information-theory.)

(The history of computation is especially relevant to "computational theology", but in the past I mostly studied it because computation is a similar concept to justification, and I wanted to get an estimate of how close we are to formalizing justification. My intuition is that we're either right before or right at the Leibniz stage, with the modern decision theorists adding up to about half a Leibniz all told. Hopefully with modern technologies like the internet it won't be a long time 'til we reach the Turing stage.)

Is this a proper descendent of Computational Axiology, or more of a sibling?

4Jayson_Virissimo14y

Yes, I would like to write such a post, but I'm not so sure I want to like to write such a post. I'm this close to going on a Less Wrong-fast due to it being a source of akrasia with respect to my higher-order, more time-sensitive goals. I'm working full-time, launching a start-up with my wife, and training to be a sysadmin in my off-time. Anyway, I'll have to think about it. On the other hand, I am one of those that has "gone insane" (supposedly) from x-rationality. For instance, I currently maintain a Weltanschauung I refer to as simulation-theism. This pretty much excludes me from easily identifying with the more traditional camps of atheism, theism, agnosticism, etc... I don't fit in with the atheists because well...I believe in God (the software engineer or engineers of our simulation). I don't really fit in with theists because I'm a non-realist with respect to actual infinites (which seems to rule out the possibility, even in principle, of omnipotence, omniscience, etc...), but not necessarily potential infinites (to borrow from Aristotle). I'm not an agnostic either, since I think there is a decent amount of rational evidence pushing one way rather than the other (although my subjective probability has swung back-and-forth a few times in the last couple years) and I'm not really sure what range of epistemic probabilities are supposed to constitute "not knowing" rather than just having a given degree of belief. So, I think I am particularly well suited to be part of your readership, at the very least. [...] I'm far from being an expert on science during the Islamic Golden Age (I can't even read Arabic!), but your suspicions that the computationalist view didn't spring fully formed from the brow of Leibniz is definitely on the right track. While I may be able to talk a little bit about the alchemists' view of natural processes, I'm not really all that sure how much of that work survived in the Western tradition in a form that Leibniz would have assimilated

16

How to deal with non-realism?

16

16

16

How to deal with non-realism?

16

16