/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.22696966]

holy fuark

[Anonymous No.22696973]

>>22696966
/thread

[Anonymous No.22697032]

>>22696973
>if
refuted by Mickey already
/thread

[Anonymous No.22697044]

>>22697032
Mickey’s whole argument is “if your brain is chemicals then you can’t trust them.” But if you assume that the brain is chemicals, then it’s literally a fact that the brain is chemicals. So it makes no sense to say “you can’t trust your brain made of chemicals to tell you that your brain is made of chemicals.”

[Anonymous No.22697061]

>>22697044
you can't though

[Anonymous No.22697187]

>>22697044
Mickey is pointing out an internal contradiction in donald's worldview. His entire justification for believing that all we know is reducible to "absurd acts of chemicals" itself rests on the assumption that those chemicals provide reliable knowledge about the world.

Imagine if the world was a book and Donald were saying: "everything in this book is arbitrary and cannot be trusted", and mickey asks: "How do you know", upon which Donald anbswers "It says right here on page 23"

[Anonymous No.22697192]

>>22696973
mass literacy was a mistake

[Anonymous No.22697228]

>>22697187
There is no contradiction. Donald recognizes that his values come from his brain, an assortment of chemicals that evolved in such a way that tended to survival and reproduction. Therefore, he says, there is no intrinsic value in the universe. His brain is what creates the values.
>but how can you trust the brain *in general* if it’s just chemicals?
If the brain is just chemicals, then at the very least, we can trust that it’s just chemicals.

[Anonymous No.22697230]

Material reality isn't what we're actually experiencing, it's just one of our theories that tries (poorly) to explain qualia

[Anonymous No.22697258]

>>22697228
The contradiction is presupposing truth from where truth can not be derived by the nature of his worldview.

[Anonymous No.22697264]

>>22697228
But don't you see how that undercuts the justification for believing the brain to be just chemicals?
You presumably believe your brain to be merely chemicals because you've seen some evidence and/or reasoned your way to it. But once you accept that, and follow it to the conclusion that all our beliefs and reasoning are absurd and arbitrary, that justification goes out the window. It's not formally a contradiction, but the belief is rendered as a mere assumption, on the same epistemic level as any other belief we might hold, including our beliefs about morals and purpose.

[Anonymous No.22697271]

>Everything that we know and love is reducible to the absurd acts of chemicals,
>and there is therefore no intrinsic value in this material universe
why would being composed of chemicals alone make "everything we know and love" worth any less? to say that love is mere chemicals does nothing to change love. the atomic composition is merely a fact, it does nothing to change the value. if anything, the chemicals are what make love at all possible.

Donald is wrong for valuing everything less simply due to their physical nature.
Mickey is a non-sequitur because Donald is concerned about the value of things, while Mickey is concerned about the truth of things, which is its own topic.

[Anonymous No.22697279]

>>22697258
>>22697264
If we accept evolution, then the purpose of the brain and the beliefs formed by the brain is to aid in survival. There is no such thing as knowledge, we simply assume something, experiment, and see if our assumption was true. So you can assume that the brain is just chemicals and that it evolved, and this can lead to many beneficial discoveries which will only help you and your society survive. There is no problem in believing any of this until it suddenly makes it harder for you to survive.

Anyway, the main point is that if you assume the brain to be just chemicals, then there is no contradiction in coming to the conclusion that you literally assumed.

[Anonymous No.22697288]

>>22697279
btw, I shouldn’t say “purpose,” but rather that we exist with this brain and these beliefs because they have traditionally helped us survive.

[Anonymous No.22697306]

>>22697279
reread this sentence:
>It's not formally a contradiction, but the belief is rendered as a mere assumption, on the same epistemic level as any other belief we might hold, including our beliefs about morals and purpose
If I say "everything in this book is arbitrary and cannot be trusted" and my justification is, that it says so in the book, that belief will be unjustified. It's not contradictory, but I have no reason to believe it over "some things in this book is trustworthy".

[Anonymous No.22697324]

>>22697279
upon reading your post again, I think the main disagreement here is how to interpret donald's sentence "everything we know and love is reducable the absurd acts of chemicals". I interpret it as saying (partly) something about epistemology, that we cannot trust our knowledge, since it merely the meaningless interactions of chemicals in our brain.

[Anonymous No.22697332]

>>22697306
A belief is justified by how well it benefits the believer. Or, more simply, a belief is justified by how long it survives in the believer. You can’t “trust” any of your beliefs, you must test them and modify them accordingly, in the same way that organisms mutate and evolve over time. So my justification for believing that the brain is just chemicals is that such a belief will likely give an advantage over believing that the brain is rational because of some magical soul dust which we cannot interact with in any way.

[Anonymous No.22697337]

>>22696966
Counterpoint

[Anonymous No.22697348]

i think you good people forget that "logic" itself is merely a language of signs we invented that works in an isolated system. the logical contradiction is merely that, a contradiction within that bubble of thinking and its rules. no different from a programming error. it does not touch the truth, which certainly makes exceptions out of contradictions and cares little about how much of her we can capture in our signs.

>everything is a lie because it is reducible to chemicals which lie
>but the chemicals would have to be true in this case for this assertion to be true
this is a "logical contradiction" but where does one make the leap from that to really say that it is untrue?
a simple exception would resolve this, where at least some assertions can still be true.

the burden ought to be in proving the complete falseness of every conclusion brought about by the senses. can't it be true at least a few times? my eyes can at least tell me that i am holding a mug right now. why can't that be true simply because my eyes do not see the whole spectrum of light? or that i fall for a few optical illusions here and there?

[Anonymous No.22697352]

>>22696966
>perish like a dog
Yes, please.

[Anonymous No.22697393]

>>22697187
Nailed it

[Anonymous No.22697410]

>>22697324
our brains evolved over millions of years. We trust them because we have no other choice, because trusting them is what allowed us to survive, and if we continue to trust them, we will continue to survive. Pure skeptics perish like dogs. My brain is made of chemicals, but I trust it because it gives good results

[Anonymous No.22697442]

>>22697332
But everything you just wrote, I could ask "how do you know" to. How do you know evolution is true, how do you know you can test beliefs, how do you know certain beliefs give advantages etc. etc. At some point down the chain you have to throw up your arms and say "I just belief that my senses are reliable and my reasoning faculties are sound, just because". But that means the belief, that everything is meaningless and without inherent value is at its core just as arbitrary as any value judgement (for example). But if you are willing to accept the reliability of your senses and your reasoning (or whatever is at the bottom of the how-do-you-know chain), why not accept your value judgements? Donald is being a hypocrite by picking and choosing arbitrarily which unprovable assumptions to accept.

[Anonymous No.22697462]

>>22697442
I don’t “know” anything. But I’m compelled to act on certain beliefs, because if I didn’t, then I would be dead. It is simply my nature to believe things even if I can’t use pure logic to prove it beyond a doubt. Of course those beliefs must be tested so I can trust them, but in general that’s how it works. Again, all of this follows from the theory of evolution. This might bother some people like Donald because if their values and even their beliefs are subjective, then they no longer feel the same conviction when trying to impose their beliefs on others. The illusion of objectivity is useful when fighting for our beliefs. But the strong do not need such illusions

[Anonymous No.22697707]

>ITT: retards arguing about fragments of memes and missing the point
may I recommend reading the bible next?