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ZankerH comments on Yet more "stupid" questions - Less Wrong Discussion

7 Post author: NancyLebovitz 28 August 2013 03:58PM

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Comment author: ZankerH 28 August 2013 09:10:14PM * 6 points [-]

Ask "Why are you not a nihilist?", replacing the word "nihilist" with a phrase that objectively explains it to a person unfamiliar with the concept of nihilism.

Comment author: BrotherNihil comment score below threshold [+] (7 children)

Comment author: linkhyrule5 29 August 2013 12:31:02AM 2 points [-]

People "understand" contradictions all the time. See: the Trinity.

Comment author: Omid 29 August 2013 02:39:11AM 1 point [-]

See I don't understand why Christians think the trinity is a contradiction. "God is one person, composed of three other persons." makes as much sense as "The China brain is one person, composed of a billion people" or "a subset is a set that is part of another set". In programming, it's easy to create an object that belongs to class X while also having component parts that belong to class X.

Comment author: hairyfigment 29 August 2013 06:51:03PM 4 points [-]

The problem is that the options you just alluded to are probably heresy: I think subordinationism on one side and modalistic monarchianism on the other.

Comment author: linkhyrule5 29 August 2013 04:05:17AM * 0 points [-]

I think the idea is that it's supposed to be both the same being and different beings, and the logical contradiction is a Divine Mystery?

Or something like that.

Comment author: erratio 29 August 2013 12:36:00PM -2 points [-]

To me, that just means that God is fractal

Comment author: PrometheanFaun 05 September 2013 10:54:58AM 0 points [-]

I find the strangely indefinite way humans name things interesting, but I try to have a safe amount of disinterest in the actual denotations of the names themselves, especially the ones which seem to throw off paradoxes in every direction when you put your weight on them. Whatever they are, they weren't built to be thought about in any depth.

Comment author: blacktrance 28 August 2013 09:32:49PM -1 points [-]

What is it that they understand? Do they anticipate experiences caused by interaction with a person who claims to be a nihilist? That's plausible. Do they fully understand the belief? That's a different question.

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