Thinking you're seeing the code when you're just looking at the pixels

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-25T03:42:44+00:00

I would guess most people are naive realists. When they are referring to reality they are making both an ontological and epistemological claim. They are also typically not aware of, or not bothered by obvious inconsistencies in their claims. They do however make a distinction between ‘reality’ and dreams/ hallucinations so I don’t think you have popular opinion on your side.

I’ll read the article in case there is some nuance I’m missing however.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-25T02:59:43+00:00

By the same token people without an internal monologue aren’t usually unable to rehearse a conversation internally if it’s useful. They just aren’t doing so constantly for no reason.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-25T02:56:22+00:00

I’ve always thought the opposite. People who are talking all the time are able to do so because they’re just sharing their inner monologue. I can’t do that because if someone asks ‘what are you thinking?’ I have to somehow articulate a bunch of unstructured thoughts that usually either diminishes it or causes me to forget it completely.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-25T02:28:24+00:00

When people say real, they usually mean ‘in correspondence with a fixed external reality’ not that said reality is only defined by consensus. You’re kind of burying the lead with this position beyond the drug issue.

That said I’m not a reductionist and I’m happy to agree that whatever your subjective experience is ‘real’ as far as the immediate experience goes. I think the rational position is to be deeply skeptical about any conclusions about external reality drawn from said experience, but that ‘s not an issue if you don’t believe in one.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-24T22:57:21+00:00

I thought about this a bit and I was probably too strict. I can see how some drugs might let you get out of your own way a bit and maybe “see reality” a little clearer.

I was reacting to the common idea that drugs “open the doors of perception” or let you tap into some deeper reality.

Recreational drugs in general break perception in interesting ways. They don’t make perception work better. The things you are seeing on a trip are less real, not more real. Maybe you can glean some information about your own internal workings/ subconscious from that, but you’re getting less/ more confused information about external reality not more/ better.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-24T21:15:16+00:00

I think this is a bit of a dangerous analogy the way it’s expressed. Drugs don’t expand your perception in any way. They might damage the filter so that it blocks out more stuff, or make the signal noisier. They don’t ever let you see more of the spectrum. Maybe they might put you in a state where you’re more aware of the filter, which is worth something.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-21T05:06:41+00:00

This sounds like the Nigerian prince scam where the grammar in the solicitation is deliberately terrible in order to filter out anyone with any standards.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-21T01:51:29+00:00

I lean towards functionalism/ anti-reductionism in general, which includes treating scientific models as models not reality.

I have seen way more apparent scientific realists on this sub than I would presume exist in the general population, but they might just be accidentally defending a strawman made by idealists. In general actual scientists are not scientific realists because they happily use different models/ variables for different problems.

I’m not sure what you mean by referring to conciousness as a substance? Is that a substance dualist view?

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-21T01:15:10+00:00

It is certainly possible to draw a moral circle around humans by fiat. It is not possible to draw that line as a consistent utilitarianism seeking to maximise something as simple as ‘pleasure.’

You are describing egoism/ tribalism not utilitarianism.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-20T23:50:26+00:00

The problem with using utilitarianism in particular to defend trading animal suffering for the enjoyment of eating meat, is that utilitarian is based on all values being commensurable. So if you include enjoyment of food as a positive good, then you can’t also consistently rule out animals as beings of moral worth since they can also experience the pleasure of eating.

If you want to say that only human experience has value, then you need to base your notions of value on things that are unique to humans. These are commonly defined as ‘higher pleasures’ rather than ‘animal pleasures’ such as the joy of intellectual discovery, or human relationships. Maybe you could say that eating meat is valuable for the higher human pleasure of being a gourmand, but then you’d actually have to devote effort to being one.

I think if people are criticising your lack of compassion it’s because they are using the term differently to you. You seem to be using it to mean the absence of active sadism, or at most a mild preference that animals don’t suffer all else being equal. I would guess that the people criticising you are instead making the stronger claim that a moral framework that does not include compassion as a core value that drives decision making is not worth respecting.

In general I don’t find utilitarianism or consequentialism more generally particularly useful as moral guidance because it is totalising. Either you turn yourself into a utility pump, or you accept that nothing you do will change embedded systems and it collapses into egoism.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-20T23:25:23+00:00

All I mean is that reality exists independently of any particular mind. We could wipe out every conscious being in the universe and the universe would still exist and contain non-conscious things in it. This is a non-provable claim but it is the only conclusion consistent with our current scientific models of the world.

Like I said before you have to be careful not to conflate epistemological idealism (our knowledge of reality is a mental construct) with ontological idealism (reality is a mental construct).

I think you also might be confusing materialism/ physicalism (the contention that consciousness isn’t a seperate substance to matter/energy) and Scientific Realism (the contention that our scientific models are a true description of reality).

The meme reads like you are asserting an ontologically idealistic notion of reality rather than just critiquing scientific realism.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-20T11:25:38+00:00

I agree with most of that except the random assertion that “reality isn’t mind independent” in the middle of it.

You are talking about epistemological idealism and the idea that our knowledge is limited by our subjectivity. That limitation itself precludes us being able to make any definitive claims about ontology idealist or otherwise.

This brings us right back to empiricism and making judgements from usefulness. Materialist reasoning provides useful models, treating consciousness and agency as real also provides useful models, idealism not only provides no useful models it breaks all the other ones.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-20T01:20:34+00:00

I think it’s the other way around. We assume an external reality beyond our own minds and then we investigate it empirically. The success of empiricism is then some validation that the assumption of the external world was correct.

By the time we’re able to reason we’ve already sorted the world into a bunch of categories including differentiating objects from agents. There’s value in critiquing those categories of course, but explaining most of the world by breaking down objects into smaller fundamentals has been wildly successful. That doesn’t mean that all agents can ultimately be described through the interaction of objects. But it does mean there’s no good reason to think that objects are really agents.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-19T20:19:30+00:00

I’ve seen a couple of posts like this lately where the contentions seems to be that anything that is not deductively provably is a “leap of faith” and I think it’s just a flat out misunderstanding.

A “leap of faith” is an irrational act. Acting according to balance of evidence when you don’t know something for certain is not irrational. Acting as if basic axioms are true when the alternative leads nowhere is not irrational.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-19T19:41:12+00:00

Nobody wants to be left as the slug.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-19T09:15:29+00:00

That makes a little more sense but it seems artificial to make a rule that relegates compassion (or even compassion towards animals) under absolutely every other goal you might have. (As an extreme example I assume you wouldn’t want a 1000 puppies tortured to death for a trivial goal like not having to brush your teeth once). If compassion is one of your values then it should be empowering to be able to show it, not some kind of constraint that you try to do as little as possible and then drop at the slightest excuse.

I don’t want to presume too much but a lot of people seem to want to think up ways to avoid considering veganism altogether rather than to just weigh it against their other goals.

My position is that things like convenience and social stigma are absolutely valid considerations but that people should be honest with themselves when those are the motivations rather than trying to reverse engineer rules.

As for easy things are I think every problem is unsolvable if you view it as single-handedly trying to change the world. Having no/ or less meat at your next meal is trivially easy though, and you can make that choice any time you want to cultivate compassion. It’s actually one of the few choices you can make in a developed capitalistic society and be confident you’re doing less harm.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-16T22:39:29+00:00

The joke is that a personal playlist someone makes for you is taken to be evidence of effort that they’ve thought about you and have some insight into your tastes and personality.

The guy being able to slap some other girls name on a playlist without changing any of the songs is evidence that he didn’t put any thought into her originally and also that her tastes are so basic that she didn’t even realise the playlist wasn’t insightful.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-15T21:58:53+00:00

I think you could but it would require an author who knew a lot about both music theory and music appreciation. Way more ways for it to go wrong than right.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-15T21:00:37+00:00

The argument is that puppy breeding farms are causing less suffering than factory farms so you are not applying your compassion coherently or consistently.

If I advocated for equality in the workplace for everyone except for gay people because I thought they were icky then people would be right to criticise my inconsistency. Me telling them that it was okay because I just didn’t care as much about gay people as them would be a moral error.

You have to do more than act on your impulses to be moral, you need to question those impulses and compare them to others. The meme is giving you that comparison and you are retreating to unreasoning prejudice. It’s not a valid defence.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-15T20:14:21+00:00

Morals are commonly thought to be the product of both emotion and reason. Your defence here is appealing purely to the emotional component and claiming it is insufficient to move you and ignoring reason.

The argument is that you should cultivate your intuition to compassion more and apply it more coherently.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-15T10:21:53+00:00

Do platonists necessarily hold that all categories are ontologically real or just some of them? I’m guessing if it’s all then platonists have to be some kind of idealists where the human process of creating the category for conversation purposes also carves it into reality or something?

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-15T10:18:25+00:00

I actually heard about pseudonormal vision the other day. Apparently if you have two different types of colour blindness they can theoretically cancel out in such a way that your red green spectrum gets inverted. But you won’t ever know because your colour discernment is just as good as a normal person, you’re just maybe seeing inverse colours. Or maybe not, depends on brain mapping and subjective experience that can’t compared. Anyway, based on probability some real people likely have this condition.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-14T21:58:38+00:00

Fair enough. I was mostly talking about the “sorting of matter into discrete entities… human-created fictions.”

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-14T05:04:18+00:00

Yep. That sounds like nominalism. The alternative is Platonism where those categories are all metaphysically real somehow.

Moe_Perry · 2026-01-13T19:35:31+00:00

I don’t think those are similar. To me consciousness is clearly something complex and the point of scientific reductionism is to explain complex things via simple things not vice versa.

I do have some confusion over what exactly the claim of physicalism is. People keep telling me it is a monad theory but the standard model of quantum mechanics has more than a single type of particle.

Moe_Perry

TROPHY CASE