All of Jason_Brennan's Comments + Replies

This reminds me of logical positivism.

Here's a question: "Are there such things as wrong questions, and is there some sort of test to help me identify them?"

Interestingly, I couldn't imagine any concrete, specific state of how-the-world-is that would answer that question.

3pnrjulius
No, we can manage this where the positivists could not. A good heuristic test for a wrong question: We've been trying to resolve it for thousands of years, and there are two (or more) camps that vehemently insist their solution is exactly right, but none of them have any evidence that would persuade an impartial observer. Free will certainly qualifies, as does "Why does anything exist?", as does the Hard Problem of consciousness. One might think that religion qualifies as well---but in this case, the atheist camp actually has some pretty good evidence.

Check out this paper:

Gregory S. Berns, Jonathan Chappelow, Caroline F. Zink, Giuseppe Pagnoni, Megan E. Martin-Skurski, and Jim Richards, “Neurobiological Correlates of Social Conformity and Independence During Mental Rotation,” Biological Psychiatry 58 (2005), pp. 245-253.

It claims that the conformists can, under some conditions, actually come to see the world differently.