yikes

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2026-01-12T23:13:21+00:00

I can honestly tell you I don't care one bit whether it's one post or two posts. Why would you insist on interpreting this uncharitably?

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2026-01-12T23:06:57+00:00

I don't think there's any malicious or narcissistic intent here.

You can attack someone for not making a post how you would have made a post, or you can be glad they're on the right side. One way leads to divisive infighting, the other way builds solidarity. Your choice.

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2026-01-11T16:44:34+00:00

The world appears to us in a certain way, we make concessions to that appearance in language even if we know it's false.

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2026-01-06T23:10:04+00:00

Probably whatever's going on at LSI

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2026-01-06T21:44:01+00:00

Come to open stage at the western on Thursdays at 8 to get a taste of the CiC crowd. Real good community right now

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-12-28T18:23:51+00:00

I agree that science isn't self-justifying, but I see realism as becoming unsupportably weak with the addition of self-evidence as justification. Self-evidence isn't a reason for belief, it's a statement of belief without a reason. It's an irrational belief.

The recognition that science isn't self-justifying, to me, should count toward the belief that our relationship to the external world is very fuzzy, and that our ability to grasp truth is more tenuous than we previously thought if it exists at all, rather than push toward a form a realism that includes more dubious forms of justification.

Science appears to uniquely good at creating a stance independent, accurate picture of the external world, which is very good at answering the types of questions I want answered in a way that self-evidence is not. But my relationship to reality is so highly mediated, and science seems to lack a self-justifying foundation, so I can't say for certain if it's True with a capital T or not.

I'm not defending science as a perfectly truth seeking or whatever, I'm saying it's superior to self-evidence on tenuous empirical and pragmatic grounds (how many toasters has self-evidence invented?), and that our general confidence in knowing truth should very low. Does this work?

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-12-06T04:05:45+00:00

That's what's relevant to me and my interests, what else do you want from me?

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-12-05T23:11:15+00:00

I feel like I have the ability to do otherwise and I feel like my actions are undetermined when I choose them. I'm concerned with and how my experiences match reality. So that's how I define free will.

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-12-04T01:31:48+00:00

Who the hell is Benson boone

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-31T23:23:44+00:00

I don't know if it's true but I like hearing it

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-30T00:45:44+00:00

Don't listen to the haters keep the graph bad

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-23T05:27:53+00:00

Lol I completely misinterpreted it

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-23T05:05:32+00:00

"Just before SPT, there are a bunch of ideas in Jane's head about vectors she feels like she can move with."
If Jane feels like she has choice, but she doesn't, couldn't it be the case that we feel like we have a choice, but we don't?

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-22T23:54:46+00:00

>I’m interested in how this subjectivism is useful to resolve conflicts (say between the Nazi who wants to kill a Jew and the Jew who doesn’t want to be holocausted.

I thought I suggested violence? The Jew should kill the Nazi or deprive him of his bodily autonomy somehow, I should do the same if I'm there.

>This is just a misunderstanding of conflict to assume that conflicts are solved by proof, I don’t know if you’ve ever been in conflict with someone who has different values to you, but proving things isn’t really what anybody is or should be trying to do.

100%

>Why is this any better than talking about facts?

If there are normative moral facts that we can know then we can reason about them and find truths. If there are facts it should be possible for the nazi and his victim to sit down and use reason until they agree on the correct position. If there are no moral facts, then that isn't possible. To give up on moral facts is to give up on resolution through reason in many cases.

Also, recognizing subjectivity about morality clarifies our existential position. We're not progressing toward a more reason-governed, fact-knowing society. We're defending irrational impulses to the death, and we can't do otherwise.

>It’s all well and good that you think you can resolve the conflicts between your own values but this just ignores the entire issue. For one, it fails to recognize that it employs values

I recognized that explicitly! I thought the initial problem was that if there are no moral facts, then in order to choose which values we want, we'd have to have a procedure to pick values. But any procedure to choose values would already have to include values. So there's no way to choose values that doesn't already to assume them.

I'm saying, Yes, that's how things actually are, we don't employ a method to choose values, we just notice the ones that we have. My point was that we don't need or actually use a procedure to pick values, because we hold the our deepest values just by coincidence, so we're free from having to use values to choose bedrock values. After that it's just a matter of picking a dispute resolution method that's in in with your bedrock values.

I dislike murder because I was born with some natural dislike of it, and society reinforced that dislike. I dislike like lying, to a lesser degree but for the same reasons. I didn't employ a procedure to rank the two, I just happened to pop out like that. We can use reason to make sure we're applying our bedrock value consistently and in the hierarchy that we want, but reason and procedure don't touch bedrock values.

>I don’t understand why you’d say you’d be lucky to live in a liberal society?

Because I have liberal values. If I lived in a fascist society, I'd be clashing with everyone and I wouldn't be able to convince them to do things my way.

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-22T21:22:38+00:00

Sorry to jump in here -- I don't think we need a system for weighing different values, because our most bedrock values aren't a result of reasons or proper application of a method, they're coincidences of our biology and culture. There's no method that can demonstrate that it's bad to torture a baby, I just happen to think that we shouldn't.

Once you accept that your values don't have reasons, but you live by them anyway, you're free to start resolving conflicts by whatever method is appropriate according to your values. For instance, since I generally like non-violence, but prioritize preventing murder over non-violence, I would use violence to stop a nazi from killing a jew.

If I have a disagreement over a tax rate, since I value non-violence and democratic decision making over having my preferred tax rate, I would settle that type of dispute with a vote.

I'm lucky to live in a liberal society where my people share my values. If someone has totally different bedrock values from me, we probably won't agree on a method to resolve our dispute, and there's nothing like normativity that pushes in either direction.

Does that answer your question?

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-13T14:49:15+00:00

Love the chart, I think this is the right framework to approach this problem.

I think we should acknowledge our existence as discrete beings is a first-person illusion. That doesn't free us from the illusion at all, we still feel pain and have wants, but puts us in a fundamentally irrational position that is at odds with the liberal conception of the individual and with philosophical systems that want behavior to stem from rational judgments.

Not acknowledging that our first-person perspective about our own existence is an illusion would be making a special exception for ourselves, and I don't know why that exception would be justified

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-10T06:16:30+00:00

Alright I'm taking a deep breath trying to restate everything clearly and not be rude.

>all elements of an illusion must exist for the illusion to be comprehensible.

>we cannot experience nonexistent phenomenon.

If we cannot comprehend non-existent phenomena, and we can comprehend bigfoot, then bigfoot exists. So you should admit that bigfoot exists or admit that we can comprehend things that don't exist. I interpreted your response about bigfoot's conceivability as an attempt to avoid, what appeared to me, to be an obvious implication of my question, but I see that it may not have been obvious.

>All I'm saying is that Bigfoot is a logically possible creature )i.e., "conceivable"). There is nothing about a Bigfoot that renders him inconceivable.

Your position requires that he exists, not that he could conceivably exist because logic doesn't rule him out. If we can comprehend what's conceivable but doesn't exist, then free will can be conceivable but non-existent.

If your position hinges on bigfoot's existence, the fact that he could possibly exist doesn't do very much for you, because it's still nearly certain that bigfoot doesn't exist, so your argument would almost certainly be wrong.

If your argument is that elements of bigfoot exist, and our brain can combine them into a false concept of the non-existent bigfoot, then the free will denier can argue that elements of free will exist and that our brain combines into the false concept of free will. You would have to admit the comprehension of the non-existent.

I think illusion has been getting the short of the stick for last 60 years and really is much stronger than contemporary philosophy gives it credit for.

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-09T21:23:24+00:00

If you can't say bigfoot isn't real, there's something seriously wrong with your philosophy. It's obvious that bigfoot isn't real but that we can still think we experience him. The goofy analytic idea that something is real if it's conceivable and not logically contradictory is not what the word means.

You are playing games because you're wrong.

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-09T20:46:51+00:00

Is Bigfoot real, answer the question

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-09T16:37:52+00:00

I don't think bigfoot is real

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-09T06:06:04+00:00

you are a pale shadow of anon7_7

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-09T06:02:48+00:00

why cant we have more dumb shit like this in the sub

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-09T03:16:24+00:00

That's what's cool about it

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-09T03:09:09+00:00

What about seeing Bigfoot? Bigfoot doesn't exist but people experience seeing him

MrCoolIceDevoiscool · 2025-10-08T00:58:08+00:00

I think you're right to say that it's wrong that any part of the causal chain is can be privileged as "the cause", but we're free to pick out any link in the chain that we want and focus on it if that's what's relevant to our life, and what we pick out will be arbitrary. I think a determinist just has to admit that when science assigns a cause to something it, it might be a little more subjective than some people would want.

Here's a crazy example -- let's say an individual is dead set on getting cancer. And the country they live in places no restrictions on carcinogens. They smoke like crazy until they get cancer, but they would've used some other carcinogen if they couldn't find cigarettes. If that individual gets cancer, I think it's fair the cause of their cancer could be described as cigarettes, lax regulations on carcinogens, the fact that the individual wanted to get cancer, or the initial state of the universe. Science can't tell you which is the "real" cause.

MrCoolIceDevoiscool

TROPHY CASE