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buybuydandavis comments on How to deal with non-realism? - Less Wrong Discussion

12 Post author: loup-vaillant 22 May 2012 01:58PM

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Comment author: buybuydandavis 25 May 2012 03:03:50AM *  1 point [-]

The Catholic Church? All this nasty material stuff isn't the real you, there's a magical kingdom "beyond" all this where you could live forever in your sparkly immaterial form, Satan has dominion over this world, always seeking ways to deceive you. It's all a big mystery you can't understand. Don't believe your mind, don't believe your senses, just believe and obey us cough cough, I mean God.

For secular antirealism, I recall Hitchens relating that the reaction to Orwell behind the Iron Curtain with respect to DoubleThink was "how does he know?" I don't believe that the communists had an official antirealist stance, however. They were supposed to be scientific socialists. But when it becomes illegal and dangerous to disagree, people are forced into making statements contradicting their own minds, which is antirealism in practice if not in "official ideology".

And of course, saying "I am antirealist" is not the kind of direct factual statement one should expect out of an antirealist. I'd expect mysterion or collectivist piffle.

Comment author: Jayson_Virissimo 26 May 2012 10:17:22AM 1 point [-]

Okay, it has become clear to me that you, the OP, and I are all have different definitions of "realism" in mind. Furthermore, this threads is full of confusions and people talking past each other. I lay the majority of the blame on the OP for using the term in a way completely alien to mainstream philosophy, but I messed up myself by only half-reading it and assuming he was discussing the philosophical position of realism (as it is used, say, in ethics or philosophy of science) rather than a mix of mystical thinking, circular reasoning, appeals to emotion, and selective scepticism.

Comment author: Eugine_Nier 27 May 2012 03:58:28AM 1 point [-]

Mostly agree, except I don't understand why you think the OP's use of "realism" is nonstandard.

Comment author: buybuydandavis 28 May 2012 10:49:42PM 1 point [-]

I think his "something exists" is pretty standard philosophical realism as well.

Wikipedia:

Contemporary philosophical realism is the belief that our reality, or some aspect of it, is ontologically independent of our conceptual schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc.