In the new sequence Highly Advanced Epistemology 101 for Beginners EY has made use of exercise questions / statements intended to be pondered prior to continuing. He has labeled these "koans" but is open to suggestions for a better word, as a koan means something a bit more specific than that to Zen people. Any ideas? Here are the "koans" from this sequence in order of appearance:
If the above is true, aren't the postmodernists right? Isn't all this talk of 'truth' just an attempt to assert the privilege of your own beliefs over others, when there's nothing that can actually compare a belief to reality itself, outside of anyone's head?
If we were dealing with an Artificial Intelligence that never had to argue politics with anyone, would it ever need a word or a concept for 'truth'?
What rule could restrict our beliefs to just propositions that can be meaningful, without excluding a priori anything that could in principle be true?
"You say that a universe is a connected fabric of causes and effects. Well, that's a very Western viewpoint - that it's all about mechanistic, deterministic stuff. I agree that anything else is outside the realm of science, but it can still be real, you know. My cousin is psychic - if you draw a card from his deck of cards, he can tell you the name of your card before he looks at it. There's no mechanism for it - it's not a causal thing that scientists could study - he just does it. Same thing when I commune on a deep level with the entire universe in order to realize that my partner truly loves me. I agree that purely spiritual phenomena are outside the realm of causal processes, which can be scientifically understood, but I don't agree that they can't be real."
"Does your rule there forbid epiphenomenalist theories of consciousness - that consciousness is caused by neurons, but doesn't affect those neurons in turn? The classic argument for epiphenomenal consciousness has always been that we can imagine a universe in which all the atoms are in the same place and people behave exactly the same way, but there's nobody home - no awareness, no consciousness, inside the brain. The usual effect of the brain generating consciousness is missing, but consciousness doesn't cause anything else in turn - it's just a passive awareness - and so from the outside the universe looks the same. Now, I'm not so much interested in whether you think epiphenomenal theories of consciousness are true or false - rather, I want to know if you think they're impossible or meaningless a priori based on your rules."
Does the idea that everything is made of causes and effects meaningfully constrain experience? Can you coherently say how reality might look, if our universe did not have the kind of structure that appears in a causal model?
I propose that we continue to call them koans, on the grounds that changing involves a number of small costs, and it really, fundamentally, does not matter in any meaningful sense.
If it's worth saying, but not worth its own post, even in Discussion, it goes here.