Posts

Comments

Comment by FiveMuru on Doublethink (Choosing to be Biased) · 2018-09-14T19:04:05.499Z · LW · GW

One can have two pictures in a room: one of a man leaping into a sure-death trap labeled 3/4/11, the other of the same man sitting with his family labeled 3/5/11. The picture is not the thing itself and so unless one attempts to force homogeneity on the depictions there will be no laws of reality wrathfully reaching out and destroying one of the photos.

Have you ever used Prolog? It is easy to tell a program (or a mind) conflicting information. Once something is recorded, it is 'believed,' because no matter what, that data exists on it's own as a subset of whatever it was recorded with and thoughts regarding that information and so on.

I mean to say that I struggle with this article at an even more fundamental level than counter-evidence on this point. I tend towards disbelief that anyone can wholly believe anything. Isn't it just that given the associations in their brains they 'tend' to think of a particular set of data first, or that if they do recall the other set of data first there is a good chance they will also recall the association of that data with determinations about its falsification?

If I am correct, perhaps things which we determine are important to us should be carefully re-iterated to ourselves. Furthermore, there may be a great deal of potential for people described as 'irrational' to act rational when it suits them if a need inspires a different pattern of thought than their norm.

Comment by FiveMuru on Religion's Claim to be Non-Disprovable · 2018-09-07T20:33:45.263Z · LW · GW

I really appreciate your argument about the differences between claims made in the old and new testament.

Unfortunately, I generally expect to read rational and thought provoking facts here and was slightly disappointed. There are some facts which simple google searches seem to refute (such as rather large Jewish populations were ever enslaved in Egypt) and arguments that lean on sentiment against practices supposedly endorsed in the Bible which are either not actually endorsed in the Bible (such as slavery which while being a Hebrew practice, is never endorsed by the 'words of God,' which generally seem to indicate God's disappointment with Hebrew behavior). It seemed as if this article was written due to some perceived opportunity to masquerade an emotional anti-religion argument as an informative article about a specific problematic religious apologetic.

That aside, I was truly interested in views on non-disprovable claims. It is just as easy to claim I am living in an artificial reality with randomly generated laws of nature built as a science experiment. Well developed and non-obvious insight regarding such belief could help me map some more territory.