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Lumifer comments on Ultimate List of Irrational Nonsense - Less Wrong
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Because if you disbelieve empiricism and jump off a tall building, you will die. If you disbelieve ethics of suffering and become evil, you get to build a lair with slave girls and a white cat.
If you disbelieve in empiricism and jump of a building you may die. If all of reality actually is a simulation, there is no telling what will happen.
I don't recommend testing this X-/
Neither do I :) But the possibility exists, we just assume it doesn't.
The possibility of anything you can think of (and everything you can't think of, too) exists. So what?
The point is we have to make certain assumptions to get anything done. Without them we can't have science, we can't have ethics. We'd be all alone with our own thoughts. This is the same problem Descartes struggled with as well. He had so effectively doubted everything that he concluded that he could only know one thing with 100% certainty, that is, that he existed. All other possibilities are merely probable and require certain assumptions. I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism (and by extension most of rationality).
The point is we have to make certain assumptions to get anything done. Without them we can't have science, we can't have ethics. We'd be all alone with our own thoughts. This is the same problem Descartes struggled with as well. He had so effectively doubted everything that he concluded that he could only know one thing with 100% certainty, that is, that he existed. All other possibilities are merely probable and require certain assumptions. I therefore hold that it is inconsistent to be relativistic about morality but not about empiricism (and by extension most of rationality).
I apparently still do not entirely get the commenting system here. Apologies.
Well, then it's also inconsistent to be relativistic about gastronomy. And wine. And fashion. And books. And prettiness.
If you say A, you've got to go through the whole alphabet :-)
On the other side, of course, is what is basically Samuel Johnson's refutation. You want to deny empirical reality and science, maybe I'll even come to your funeral. You want to deny some particular ethics, well, what will happen?
Short answer, people will kill you. The long answer is about 2.5 sheets by now. Maybe I'll post it :). Hopefully that won't go as disastrously, with people getting pissed off, as this one.
8-0 Your universal ethics are "whatever is acceptable in this society at this particular time"??