simplicio

This website is devoted to the art of rationality, and as such, is a wonderful corrective to wrong facts and, more importantly, wrong procedures for finding out facts. There is, however, another type of cognitive phenomenon that I’ve come to consider particularly troublesome, because it militates against rationality in the irrationalist, and fights against contentment and curiousity in the rationalist. For lack of a better word, I’ll call it perverse-mindedness. The perverse-minded do not necessarily disagree with you about any fact questions. Rather, they feel the wrong emotions about fact questions, usually because they haven’t worked out all the corollaries. Let’s make this less abstract. I think the following quote is preaching to the choir on a site like LW: “The universe that we observe has precisely the properties we should expect if there is, at bottom, no design, no purpose, no evil, no good, nothing but pitiless indifference.” -Richard Dawkins, "God's Utility Function," Scientific American (November, 1995). Am I posting that quote to disagree with it? No. Every jot and tittle of it is correct. But allow me to quote another point of view on this question. “We are not born into this world, but grow out of it; for in the same way an apple tree apples, the Earth peoples.” This quote came from an ingenious and misguided man named Alan Watts. You will not find him the paragon of rationality, to put it mildly. And yet, let’s consider this particular statement on its own. What exactly is wrong with it? Sure, you can pick some trivial holes in it – life would not have arisen without the sun, for example, and Homo sapiens was not inevitable in any way. But the basic idea – that life and consciousness is a natural and possibly inevitable consequence of the way the universe works – is indisputably correct. So why would I be surprised to hear a rationalist say something like this? Note that it is empirically indistinguishable from the more common view of “manki