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I like your confidence. I also get that you invite criticism because the only way to feel ones own strength is to feel resistance. As you think about things, you "clean up" inconsistencies and create powerful heuristics. This makes you feel sharper and stronger, and things which other people suffer from now feel trivial to you. It's this, and not truth itself, which feels so good. By the way, if you enter formal education, this will go away. You will be made humble, and your own personal model of the world will be replaced with a consensus which feels sterile and foreign. Formal education would make you more adapted to society, but the more you fit the mold, the less you will feel like yourself.
But I'll bite, I guess. What do you think "understanding" means? An internal model which can predict something by simulating it and creating an identical output, perhaps? But if you use a coffee machine, then you press a button and get your coffee. Despite not understanding the machine, you can predict the output. Worse still, you cannot tell different machines apart from the outside, in all cases you press buttons and get your coffee.
If you wish to get to the bottom of things, you cannot use the literal definition of every word that you use to think. We call a process that we can predict deterministic, and one that we cnanot predict propabilistic. But this definition has nothing to do with the object itself, it merely describes how much information we possess about the object.
There may be things which can't be explained by physics which are still physical. Do you know about Gödel's incompleteness theorems? Theories are more limited than reality is, but you make no difference between these two. If I had to guess, it's because you aren't conscious about the difference between the map and the territory which it represents. The saying "All models are wrong, but some are useful" refers to this problem. But if logic, math and any other language is fundamentally limited (and they are), then how do you think in ways which avoid these limitations? If you think about math using math, or about language using language, then there will be gaps that you cannot even see. When you try to get to the bottom of reality, what you actually attempt is getting to the bottom of language. But all languages are self-contained, self-referential systems which can only speak about themselves.
You might notice that I speak about limitations, gaps, and things which are false. You do the same. You impose limitations on things, saying what can't be done or what can't be true. As you see, we can tear down any idea, destroy it, and prove it wrong, but we cannot actually do the opposite. And if you continue going like this, destroying everything which you can destroy, you might assume that there will only be a single, undeniable truth left. But that's not the case. You will actually be left with nothing. You're not destroying anything in real life, of course. You're destroying your map of reality.
You've probably destroyed a lot of things that you're better off without, but if you get too good at destruction, you will end up with a nihilistic worldview (it's already materialistic), and then you'll find that life seems empty and bland. If you then wish to return again, you'll have to learn the opposite of destruction, creation. I think Nietzshe was right when he said "The conditions of life might include error".
Why would I value truth in itself? Truth-seeking can be both beneficial and destructive. Pretending that false things are true will make you less correct, but it might make you more functional. I do not "need" to update my model. I'm not required to be rational. If rationality was optimal, why did darwinism bring about so many irrational beings? Why is is only now, when we're starting to become rational, that it seems like we're on a path to self-destruction?
Destruction is fun, but I find creation to be more so. I can do things that you can't merely because you prune things which are impossible, illogical or irrational, whereas I simply don't. In order to create, you have to appreciate the specific. The general is a space of possibilities, and anything which exists will have to be something specific. The general applies to many contexts, but it doesn't perform well within any one of them. The specific is superior within a context, and only within that context. When you criticize religion, you're attacking a context because you can think of a conflicting context which is more generally correct, but you're also harming that local ecosystem which probably functions perfectly well if nobody disturbs it. As with nuclear weapons, there's an asymmetry which makes destruction easier than creation. A war of values and philosophies would be M.A.D., so it's our good fortune that most people don't go around disillusioning one another. In other words, correct philosophy is "in bad taste".
I don't know how best to respond to this. There's a lot where you seem confused or where you're making a notable attempt to sound more poetic than actually get a real idea across, but to my ear it doesn't lend the wise learned sage image so much as someone who is educated in one domain and drastically undervalues others trying to leverage what they do know in a vague way while nodding at smart concepts from what they don't. Ironic to accuse you of that while dunking on famous philosophical problems, I know. I don't think you've stated any substantive objections to anything I've put down, other than perhaps "why do this", to which I can only respond that if you don't value the truth in itself then I don't know what you're doing here.
I'm not confused about anything, and I meant it all literally.
I did touch on the why, but I also made some strong arguments. I will lower the level this time, let me know if I should lower it further.
There's many classes of equivalence. Simulating somethings output does not require having the same parts. An LLM which acts like a human is not conscious merely because it produces human-like output. Even if you cannot measure any differences, there might still be differences. If I tell you that I have a computer function which takes in "2" and returns "4", you won't be able to tell me the exact code of the function from this information alone.
You assume that, because a word exists, it actually points to something in reality. But a culture which never came up with the concept of randomness in the first place would not have philosophers who struggled with determinism and indeterminism. You assume that either one or the other must be "true", and yet such a culture would not know either concept, and it wouldn't even bother them or hinder their ability to think about other things. Now, this culture might think that reality depends on the nature of "flobx" (a word I just made up which means nothing to us) and that there's no more important concept than this. But because we never came up with that word, we don't think "flobx must be true or false", we don't think about flobx at all. In short, I want you to imagine minds so differently than your own that you realize that all the tokens you use for thinking are arbitrary rather than pieces of an objective reality.
Have you read Nietzsche's Will to Power? He says that our belief in cause and effect is because of quirks of our language. "There is thinking: therefore there is something that thinks": this is the upshot of all Descartes' argumentation. But that means positing as "true a priori" our belief in the concept of substancethat when there is thought there has to be something "that thinks" is simply a formulation of our grammatical custom that adds a doer to every deed. In short, this is not merely the substantiation of a fact but a logical-metaphysical postulate- Along the lines followed by Descartes one does not come upon something absolutely certain but only upon the fact of a very strong belief. If one reduces the proposition to "There is thinking, therefore there are thoughts," one has produced a mere tautology: and precisely that which is in question, the "reality of thought," is not touched upon-that is, in this form the "apparent reality" of thought cannot be denied. But what Descartes desired was that thought should have, not an apparent reality, but a reality in itself."
So the fruits of all Descartes philosophizing ended up being a small sentence which was actually riddled with errors. I believe that you're assuming no such errors exist in your original post because you haven't done much in the way of questioning the language with which you think.
Do you disagree with this quote from "A short history of decay" (1949)? "The compulsion to preach is so rooted in us that it emerges from depths unknown to the instinct for self-preservation. Each of us awaits his moment in order to propose something—anything. (...) From snobs to scavengers, all expend their criminal generosity, all hand out formulas for happiness, all try to give directions: life in common thereby becomes intolerable, and life with oneself still more so; if you fail to meddle in other people’s business you are so uneasy about your own that you convert your “self” into a religion, or, apostle in reverse, you deny it altogether; we are victims of the universal game..." It seems to me like each human being is compelled to make their own values survive memetically, but this is merely a form of self-replication, not an instinct for truth-seeking. An instinct for knowledge-seeking might exist, but that's more of an instinct for increasing ones power and reducing uncertaincy (predictive processing theory).
I do realize that it's ironic to accuse you of being deceived by your own instinct and your own implicit knowledge, while also warning against the dangers of destroying these illusions. But I think this is an argument in my favor - that there exists truths which we're better off not knowing.
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