Are you a naïve realist?
nautil.us
nautil.us
In my understanding, the classic philosophical use of "naïve realism" refers to the position that there is an objective reality that we can usefully perceive and understand with our senses and reason. It doesn't assert that each person always perceives objective reality correctly on the first attempt or that nobody ever makes a mistake. It might accept many cases in which people make mistakes of perception and/or reasoning, but in most forms of naïve realism we would probably expect that those mistakes could potentially be detected and corrected somehow, whether or not particular people have the willingness, inclination, incentives, or resources to actually complete that process.
As a few other people said, one might also expect disagreements to be tractable in principle but not to assume that one's own view is sure to prevail in every disagreement.
Of course, I could be wrong. :-)
- the believe there is (always?) an objective truth outside of the subjective observer
- the believe that this subjective observer can experience undistorted if they just try hard enough
[...]
If I choose to think this way in a store and on the freeway, fine. Lots of us do. Except thinking this way tends to be so easy and automatic that it doesn’t have to be a choice. It is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of adult life when I’m operating on the automatic, unconscious belief that I am the centre of the world, and that my immediate needs and feelings are what should determine the world’s priorities.
The thing is that, of course, there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations.
DFW, 2005
It’s also been reprinted with the title “This is Water”.
But if we believe and behave that way without understanding the distinction between "my world" and "the world" that is indeed a problem, and we have a word for this old problem that is fairly used as a constant criticism of this increasingly prevalent modern affliction; Solipsism.
While it's hard to argue that solipsism is not a massive problem with the world today and something that is in dire need of being addressed, it's kind of a neat trick if you can convince people that merely optimising their own personal experience of the world by focusing on that experience and acting on their wants with personal autonomy is that exact kind of solipsism, and they should instead constantly defer to everybody else. If one person could do that for the entirety of the rest of humanity, they'd effectively be a permanent ruler by being the only agent in play with actual personal autonomy.
Not that this kind of thing happens, or anything, mind you.
Speaking of naive realism, what evidence? I'm not even asking what evidence was provided, but what could be provided at all.
You can't really prove that elections were fair, especially post factum. Best case, you can show that protections against known frauds were there. And compared to elections I took part in, American elections often look woefully inadequate in that regard.
In fact, at least one American president, Lyndon B. Johnson, remains under serious suspicion.
I'm not going to say that figuring out for sure what happened in 2020 is easy, but you do need to look at things that happened the same year.
It's not one of Carlin's, I think, but there's this old joke
Tech enthusiasts: My entire house is smart.
Tech workers: The only piece of technology in my house is a printer and I keep a gun next to it so I can shoot it if it makes a noise I don't recognize.
Parent poster, as I understood their comment, wasn't asserting that electronic voter machines are impossible to defraud. They were pointing out that you cannot reasonably make a comparison between elections 70 years apart because way too much has changed (one large change being electronic voting machines) for them to be comparable anymore.
> Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future!
> Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise.
> Speaking of naïve realism, what evidence
You can really only prove this type of thing in a single direction, by providing evidence that there was fraud on such a scale as to have swung the results. Otherwise, one could endlessly claim that the election thieves just covered their tracks so well that you don't have any evidence of your assertions regarding their behavior.
The burden of proof was on the ones making accusations of election stealing, and as was reflected in how they lost case after case regarding this, _they did not provide it_.
What evidence? An accurate statement might have read, "Despite the lack of conclusive evidence, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen".
>You can really only prove this type of thing in a single direction, by providing evidence that there was fraud on such a scale as to have swung the results.
This assertion relies on the baseless assumption that the elections are fair unless proven fraudulent. Given the history of elections the opposite could just as easily be argued. This is one of the most important reasons to have total and complete transparency on every level of an election with an auditable paper trail that can be publicly scrutinized leaving no doubt about the integrity of the election among any honest arbiter.
Personally I have doubts about the integrity of every election in my lifetime, and I'm not a young man.
If you’re inclined to doubt every election, did Trump win in 2016 by fraud too? Bush in 2000? Their margins were very tight and they lost the popular vote. Doesn’t that seem like a more likely situation where fraud would carry the day?
It's impossible for me say, unfortunately, because of our black-box elections carried out (mostly) on electronic voting machines that don't allow for real audits and, for the most part, don't have complete paper trails. In my opinion it is absurd to have confidence in any process that is not completely transparent.
More than 90% of votes tallied in the US in 2020 had a paper trail. Up from 80% in 2016.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/05/cybersecu...
This is the consensus opinion among Democrats.
> Bush in 2000?
This is the consensus opinion among Democrats.
> Doesn’t that seem like a more likely situation where fraud would carry the day?
It now seems like this is your opinion. So 100% of elections since 2000 where the opposition won are bitterly contested as illegitimate by party partisans. I'm starting to think these political parties might be the problem.
> This is the consensus opinion among Democrats.
This doesn't jibe with the facts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/197441/accept-trump-legitimate-... (24% believed Trump was illegitimate)
> > Bush in 2000?
> This is the consensus opinion among Democrats.
This also doesn't match the facts: https://news.gallup.com/poll/2188/black-americans-feel-cheat... (31%)
"Nearly one third..."
So, by rough equivalency the same amount of either Republicans OR Democrats belive in stolen elections.
The portrayal of either party by the other is ridiculous. Clearly it is both a common and non-partisan belief. Safely put, one in three United States Statesians don't believe in the legitimacy of elections they don't win.
"one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen."
Which is a lot higher than one third of Democrats believing that about the other things you brought up.
So if all US elections are unreliable, surely the 2000 one is more suspect than the 2020 one.
I didn't vote for Trump and don't really have a horse in this race, but I also don't feel comfortable with mail in voting as a meaningful percent of all-votes. This is even more true as the entire country becomes more polarized and radicalized. This sort of mentality is going to motivate an increased number of people to try to cheat the system, and encourage "selective vigilance" from those involved in guaranteeing the integrity of the electoral process.
And perhaps the most important point is that in terms of how a democracy functions, whether elections are fair or not is a secondary concern to whether people think they are or not. The main benefit of a democracy for a society is stability. People looking to change their political future were able to set aside their pitchforks and pick up ballots. But when people don't think those ballots matter (even if they do), then we're back to square one.
[1] - https://ballotpedia.org/Election_results,_2020:_Analysis_of_...
But this analysis says that mail in ballots were rejected in an even lower percentage (less than 1%), than previous years.
https://elections-blog.mit.edu/articles/deep-dive-absentee-b...
An even more accurate statement would be, "Despite Donald Trump's blatant attempt to change the outcome of election results[1] [2] his followers still believe he has won the 2020 election"
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/03/us/politics/trump-raffens... [2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2022/06/06/fake-trum...
"Despite the release of another Jurassic Park sequel, nearly one-third of Americans still believe the 2020 presidential election was stolen."
How is this extraneous? Aren't we talking about election fraud?
> in order to antagonize people
How is this antagonizing people? I'm just stating facts. Trump tried to manipulate election and there is evidence to support this.
The people who think the election was fraudulent do so because of Trump's actions, not despite of them. Those people's thinking is horribly flawed, of course, but it's still better to represent it accurately.
The evidence of participants and observers, the evidence of recounts and audits. You know, all the actual evidence that the election was free and fair, that actually holds up under scrutiny.
Unlike all the 'evidence' to the contrary which crumbled when shown the light of day.
> Personally I have doubts
Great, but these are unsubstantiated at this point. It's like you think that there are no mechanisms in place to ensure that elections are run honestly.
The "mechanisms" in place to ensure that elections are run honestly are lacking and/or non-existent in many municipalities and states around the country (something any informed, unbiased election expert will tell you regardless of their political affiliation).
The overwhelming majority of voting in the US takes places on electronic voting machines that run proprietary, black-box software. Further, US electronic voting machines have been proven vulnerable to hacking and manipulation over and over again.
https://www.inverse.com/article/48038-here-s-how-a-voting-ma...
These issues have not been recognized, much less addressed. The fact is that our system of recording and tallying votes on these vulnerable electronic machines that cannot be audited renders our elections insecure. This isn't a partisan issue (for the record I voted 3rd party in the last two elections and voted for neither Republicans or Democrats). You are correct when you say my doubts are "unsubstantiated". Also unsubstantiated is any confidence that votes were accurately cast and recorded. We - all Americans - deserve a reliable, transparent, auditable voting system that everyone can be confident in.
This idea that there is no evidence that the system works is just wrong. There's plenty, and that's in stark contrast to the 'evidence' that the election was stolen.
I agree that an reliable and transparent system is the best, and should be the aim, and I'm sure there is room for massive improvement, I wouldn't seek to deny it.
But likewise you can't just dismiss the evidence that the election was OK as "I don't trust it", when there are a variety of measures taken that are positive evidence of reliability, with no particular evidence it wasn't.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2020/11/05/cybersecu...
Trump even said ahead of time he will contest the election results if he lost.
The onus is on the accuser to come up with evidence. Until then, the countless observers, the sheer number of people involved in coordinating their local election infrastructure, the voting machines audit trails, the numerous recounts, the actual cases of fraud which pointed to republican voters, all are evidence that the election was not 'stolen'.
But it doesn't matter when you're dealing with 'crony beliefs'. Unless Jesus Christ himself appears, walks on water, does the whole water/wine thing again, calls Trump a moron and tells everyone the holy spirit handled the election, it's not going to change anyone's mind. And even then, the mental gymnastics of the rightwing propaganda machine will figure out a way to spin this.
If you want examples of actual stolen election, look no further than https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bush_v._Gore. Actually, I would say that any election in which a president does not win by popular vote is by definition stolen, even if the voting process is 100% ironclad.
It's so funny how people can post something acting as though they are sane and rational, and then finish their thought in a way that reveals they are fully radicalized.
It's no secret and it's a shared belief (shockingly, even among non-'radicalized' people, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Efforts_to_reform_the_United_S...) that the electoral college is undemocratic, obsolete (quite stupid by today's standard), vulnerable to interference (like we saw in 2020 and we'll definitely see in 2024) and it led to the current SCOTUS anomaly. For a nation that prides itself with 'innovation', to never end up reforming its electoral process and amend the constitution is just mind boggling to me. The electoral college was supposed to protect the country against people like Trump. We all know how well that worked out for everyone. And we'll find out again in 2024, as fringe groups inside the republican party are quietly setting up their people in key places.
If your counterargument in favor of the electoral college is that 'the constitution says so', there are a lot of constitutional amendments which prove that it's possible 'it can no longer say so'.
As I understand it, this is incorrect. IIUC, the electoral college still exists in order for the mega-cities not to outvote the countryside every single time. Otherwise, it would be like two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner; the cities would always vote for policies only good for cities, and completely ignore any bad effects on the countryside.
The three fifths compromise would have been difficult to work out if you didn't use an electoral system.
You don't have to agree with the electoral college's system to understand that if someone wins an election based on the rules defined up front, they have won the election, and that those that achieved other measures of electoral support in that election have lost, since those measures were not the goal of the candidate to achieve. To think that not only is this not the case, but that the election was "stolen", goes even beyond being radical, it's entirely irrational, as it would be if you said a baseball game was "stolen" by the team with the most runs but failed to secure the most hits. It's very likely that if that winning team knew that hits was the goal, and not runs, that they'd have won under those rules as well.
In LBJ’s 1964 presidential election victory, he won an absolutely overwhelming landslide. I am not really sure what point you think you are proving.
This seems to immediately contradict the prior statement:
> Ross found that people thought their own views were shaped by rational considerations more than biased thinking.
This statement implies that there's such a thing as a non biased source. This is just blatantly false. Here's a fact:
>> Black U.S. residents (465 per 100,000 persons) were incarcerated at 3.5 times the rate of white U.S. residents (133 per 100,000 persons) at midyear 2020.[0]
Now, depending on your outlook of the world, a republican might say this leads to the conclusion that black U.S residents must be likely for 3.5x more crime than white residents. Whereas a Democrat might conclude this is evidence of systemic racism. Then both sides will find the research papers that support their conclusion based on the exact same fact.
Instead of pretending like there's some untapped source of unbiased neutral news that everybody is missing out on, it's much better imo to admit your bias, and then read up on sources that actively oppose your bias with an open mind. That seems like a much better "inoculation against naive realism" than a "healthy dose of fact" (which can just be interpreted however you want to interpret it.)
[0]: https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/jail-inmates-2020-s...
This, 100% this. I do this all the time as well and try to boil down super complex social situations into a binary right or wrong outcome. Is it even possible to comprehensively analyze any social situation? I really don't think it is, and I think the best we can do is analyze each unique situation and come to the best conclusion possible for that specific situation.
But that's just part of living in the world we live in. In the same way we can't physically compute the weather in advance, because doing so would require an accurate simulation of our universe which has way too much data to process with our current hardware, we shouldn't expect to be able to accurately "compute" whether a worldview is right or wrong.
The real world is fuzzy, and it rarely fits into our ideal scenarios. I think the best we can do is to just give life our best shot and give people with opposing ideals the benefit of the doubt and maybe even try to learn from people who think differently than us :)
> Black U.S. residents were incarcerated at 3.5 times the rate of white U.S. residents
To argue with this is to argue with reality itself.
The examples of how Democrats vs Republicans interpret this fact are opinions, not facts. They each have their own views, interpretations, and opinions, but they ought not to have their own facts. E.g.: they can disagree about why blacks are incarcerated more than whites, but not about the numbers.
Notice I use "ought", because many people will cheerfully point at a fact and proclaim that that's "just your opinion" or call it "fake news", as if that makes reality go away.
Worse still in some ways is they will disagree without actually having mutually exclusive opinions, for purely tribal reasons. Your example is actually one of the best ones: BOTH Democratic and Republican opinions are technically valid, at the same time.
Black men do commit crimes at a higher per-capita rate and they are also steered towards a life of crime in no small part due to systematic racism! Not just everyday racism reducing their opportunities to lead a lawful life, but also racism within the legal system that makes it more likely for them to be incarcerated even for petty crimes.
The difference between typical Democrats and typical Republicans is that they'll simply focus on one of the two causes, wilfully ignoring the other. This then leads to pointless, endless debates, because they don't even disagree and can't effectively disprove each others' points -- because neither side is "wrong".
My point is that ordinary people don't debate these things very well, because they don't know how. They confuse their interpretations with their facts, cherry pick, look at their favoured subset to the exclusion of all else, and generally try their best to simply ignore reality.
Especially if reality makes them feel uncomfortable.
Right wing frameworks value hierarchy, wealth, power, dominance, and status based on assumptions of innate superiority/inferiority, and fear of outgroups. Left wing frameworks are based on egalitarianism, universality, and fairness, and tolerance for/interest in outgroups.
The issues that exercise the right - immigration, crime, guns, abortion, vaccination and masking mandates, homosexuality, religion, taxation, government oversight - are all emotional triggers on the dominance/passivity axis.
The issues that exercise the left - wealth and power differentials, racism, sexism, healthcare, education, collective as opposed to individual survival - are all emotional triggers on the fairness/unfairness axis.
You can't overcome these frameworks with facts, because they're fundamentally different.
The problem in the anglo world is that the differences have become so polarised they're no longer in sight of each other.
If you try to explain to someone on the right that Covid and climate change are both serious issues, the framework kicks in and you get a "Why are you trying to tell me what to do? I don't accept your authority over me" response.
Tens, possibly hundreds of thousands of people literally chose to die because they considered vaccination an overwhelming and unacceptable attack on their personal sovereignty.
If you try to explain to someone on the left that you have to use rightwing frameworks to communicate with rightwing people you'll get a "That's stupid and wrong, so I'm going to carry on complaining about unfairness and/or quoting science papers at them, but I'll do it more loudly because that's sure to work."
Neither side is being rational.
With COVID, the facts became disagreeable too. Whenever I'd point to one set of states, the Democrats would tell me that their governors were faking the numbers. If I'd point at a different set of states, the Republicans would tell me that those governors were the ones faking the numbers.
Its hard enough to discuss opinions, but even harder when both groups won't to call the other group liars.
I don't think defender of naive realism take it as "my ideas are always true" or "I am the center of the universe" (as the article seems to imply).
Rather, I'd take it as saying an immediate perception can remain true even when one expands the discussion of reality in a number of ways. I can say: "there's a fence around that house" and that can remain basically true even in you expand the area and categories of reality considerably - if someone points to minute gaps in the fence, I'd note the effective definition of "fence around the house" would intuitively expand to "a configuration dense enough to help keep something out of the house", etc.
The point isn't that there aren't level divisions in reality. The point is there isn't some magical/theological level that trumps every level of reality below it. Not accepting "Plato's Cave" or proving/asserting "we're not all brains in a vat" [Hilary Putnam].
People ask me what I do and I say I’m a product manager. This is an immediate perception - it says so on my business card - but there is a limit to its truth depending on the definition of product manager in the minds of those hearing my statement. Product management varies wildly across the industry and I am most certainly not a product manager in certain industries.
So no, there isn’t a hierarchy. There are several billion different views of how concepts map to reality that often (depending on the circumstances) pragmatically align.
As others have noted, the article substitutes a sort-of pop psychology idea of naive realist for the philosophical idea.
Of course. How could anyone think otherwise? The only thing missing here is that after both sides present the "real facts", as they see them, it could be either of the parties who change their view as a result of learning new facts.
Assuming such an exchange of facts (and arguments) has taken place, whatever you now think is the correct view (which might be "we can't know, given available information") must be what you think is correct (duh...). If the other person has a different view, then you must think it is incorrect. This isn't "naive realism" (which is a term with a totally different meaning in philosophy, by the way), but simply the definition of a thinking entity with coherent beliefs.
Another point is realizing how aspects of your background - sometimes even just your momentary mood - color your perception of reality, the significance and weight you assign to different pieces of it, to compose the whole.
2. Because of 1 I don't expect any reasonable open-minded person would agree with me. Plus there are some things I think about that most people don't think about. Or I think about them in a way that other people don't think about. Maybe because it's purely theoretical and not useful and I don't expect they'd see it my way.
Most people believe their memory to be an accurate account of their experiences and also believe that they choose how they act and behave. Any serious introspection, however, quickly shows how foolish those two beliefs are.
Its just, many will believe they are rational when they aren't, since their lack of rationality makes them unable to see all the ways they are irrational. But people who notice their own irrationality can just stop doing those things and change their views and therefore becomes much more rational than average.
So we have several layers, we have those who don't see their own irrationality and call themselves rational, we have those who see their own irrationality and call themselves irrational since they are, and then we have the ones who see their own irrationality and takes measures to fix it and therefore call themselves rational. The last group would be the most rational ones, but is still often mistaken for the first group.
Go ask your siblings or parents if you're right.
Memory is a fluid thing.
Could you have a mistaken belief about your memory and it's veracity?
Edit:
> Do you ever sometimes have mistaken beliefs?
I remember the sources of my beliefs. Sometimes I have mistaken beliefs since the sources were wrong or fuzzy, like my parents told me something that I then believed, but then I learned that my parents were wrong. This makes it very easy to correct mistaken beliefs, since you just go back to the sources and verify and re evaluate the information against the new disagreeing information.
Remembering the sources of what you know isn't that much extra information, so it isn't particularly hard to do, but it helps a lot keeping yourself more rational.
Find a so-called DRM word list (acronym originating from the researchers' names Deese, Roediger and McDermott) and have someone test you: They present you with the word list for a predetermined amount of time during which you attempt to memorize it. Then they ask you to recall which words were present. Along with recalling (some of the) actual words, you are in addition likely to recall a so-called critical word which was not actually present in the list.
A collection of such word lists can be found at https://www3.nd.edu/~memory/OLD/Materials/DRM.pdf
Just because many people makes that mistake doesn't mean that such mistakes are common in everyone.
But even if I didn't, that's not really the kind of thing I would ever call upon my memory for. Usually it is something like (real, recent examples from my life): "Who said what, when, how, and to whom", "who was here and who left first", "did this scene happen before or after this other scene in the movie", "who threw the first punch", etc.
> But even if I didn't, that's not really the kind of thing I would ever call upon my memory for.
But it's the same type of thing! If a DRM list produces false memories, why should these other situations not? You don't even have to reach for the DRM paradigm; it's well documented that witness reports in courts (i.e. exactly the kind of thing you mention) are unreliable.
We usually feel like there is a person inside that has control and almost extra-physical ability to override, but surely this must be result of physical inputs and processes?
In a weird twist, meditation is one thing that makes this subjectively apparent. There have also been some (contentious) scientific experiments pointing towards this.
I know of no rigorous evidence against the idea that we're purely matter and physics, nor do I know of any rigorous evidence showing that's all there is to humans (or living beings generally).
It's arguably a "mysticism of the gaps", but the "hard problem" form of consciousness still seems like a pretty weird outcome of evolution to me if that is in fact what it is, and not something that's adequately explained by, say, the anthropic principle. I realize opinions will vary, and I'm okay with that - this one happens to be mine at the moment.
It seems to me to require a decent amount of faith in the idea that only matter exists to conclude that consciousness and free will must be illusory.
It's certainly a defensible, reasonable stance, but I don't think it's the only plausible one.
> There have also been some (contentious) scientific experiments pointing towards this.
If you're referring to Libet's analysis of the Bereitschaftspotential experiments, there has been some acceptance in the past few years that this paper shows he misinterpreted the data:
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1210467109
Popular summary of the debate in The Atlantic:
Why only matter? My default position (of which I'm not entirely convinced of!) is that there are only physical things, not that there is only matter. So if consciousness and free will are physical phenomena of some kind, that makes things logical again.
But if they are physical, then surely they follow physical rules, and need to somehow interact with the rest of physics. This again leaves no gap for there to be a divine kind of free will, one that is extra-physical and capable of overriding cause and effect.
When I say that free will is illusory, I mean it in this sense: I don't see a logically coherent way in which free will could be non-physical and outside of the usual cause-and-effect chain.
**
I did mean Libet, thanks for the references.
And quickly skimming through the linked paper, their suggested mechanism changes the "decision" to simply be a result of stochastic fluctuation in neural activity. So it resolves some of the weirdness introduced by Libet, by not having the moment of decision precede the moment of conscious experience.
But at best, it still leaves free will with a kind of ancillary role, in which it represents the "feeling" of volitional control, with the actual decision still being stochastic at best.
This is certainly possible, but not what people usually mean when discussing free will colloquially (I find).
> They certainly happen on some level
What a strangely useless statement. Why, if they certainly happen, is their appearance in the consciousness and subsequent action when so consciously decided "an illusion"? What illusion is exactly at hand here?
> We usually feel like there is a person inside that has control and almost extra-physical ability to override
I do not see how you can project your qualia on to me, nor how there is a "we" in this statement. I do not feel similarly to this at all. Overall, this is the kind of unenlightened junk I expect to hear from people that claim to understand what our lives are and what they mean. No one understands these things, but it's certainly fun to ponder.
> Why, if they certainly happen, is their appearance in the consciousness and subsequent action when so consciously decided "an illusion"? What illusion is exactly at hand here?
How do you understand the concept of "volition"?
> I do not see how you can project your qualia on to me, nor how there is a "we" in this statement. I do not feel similarly to this at all.
Okay, I apologize for using the word "we". It is certainly my experience that people perceive this in the way I described, from many discussions I've had. The statement above is not meant to be universal in a hard sense, despite my literary use of "we".
I'm not claiming to understand how things ultimately work, but I've certainly had personal experiences pointing towards there not being a homunculus, or an extra-physical volition capable of overriding raw cause-and-effect. In fact, it appears that everything is ultimately cause-and-effect -- and I find people commonly object to this idea when exposed to it.
(Just noticed you're the grandparent poster.) In fact, what do you mean when you say "there is not even conscious level filtering or decisions made prior to action"? What purpose does the conscious level qualifier serve in your sentence, if the filtering and the deciding is ultimately just another effect produced by some cause? How does this differ from any other causal system which is traditionally not considered to possess free will, such as a mechanical contraption?
I understand life and will as follows.
The human experience is built on top of many layers of subconscious awareness. Animals are given the ability to reason about themselves and their physical environment by our shared genes, and so we can conceive of spatial reasoning and execute real-time plans in this way. In addition, all our biological needs - requirements to maintain our existence - are compulsive due to the underlying body driving these requirements. This is why there was a point in this tree where someone invoked the idea that you are compelled sometimes by hunger, sleepiness, or other biological needs to act.
The next level of intellect above most animals is the ability to execute reasoning which is not only focused around cause and effect of one's own actions. All animals, to me, have the ability to understand how they can impact their environment and in doing so hunt, move, climb, or socialize, but they are not well-versed in reasonings of two separate entities beyond themselves. This is what I roughly call abstract reasoning.
In so having abstract reasoning, I am given meaningful will. As I exist, with my needs well-handled by my comfortable first-world existence in a human society, my subconscious freely feeds me ideas. These can be simple; hunger. They can be complex; an echo of a memory. They can be completely abstract; a graph of the program I was working on earlier, a subconscious solution built deep in some internal processing. I agree one certainly does not compel these things, and therefore does not execute will at this stage. But the key is that these things are something which I iterate over, at each moment dabbling in them and their adjacent reason-spaces, deciding if the thought is interesting, or valid, or worth executing, and this is the space where I express my volition. Finding myself in each moment, I ponder what is best for me, what is most desired by me, what I think is morally right in some purely abstract ethical framework developed in my lifetime, and more ideas of this nature. Finally, as Me, I have a decision-space which my conscious explores, the underlying constructs and relationships explained to me by subconscious capabilities granting me some internal knowledge-graph of the world which I get to simply web-walk across, occasionally test new portions of which I do not understand well, and in doing so, I find myself freely able to at each moment to take the great hose of subconscious ponderings and direct them in a way which meshes with my own feelings of interest, progress, pleasure, and other such things. These are the conscious decisions after all, how do I wish to feel? And so the space free will acts in is clearly small, it is not as if I freely wished to exist or to think about some random moment in time which my brain has found itself re-living, but it is very much as if I was the one to decide if the memory is worth pondering deeper, or if the action coming up is one I would like to perform based on these many thoughts executed immediately and without conscious invocation at each moment. In doing so, I decide where to move, why I'd do so, when I should stop, and other such simple decisions which ultimately leave myself able to guide gently into time the vessel I was born into and innately connected with.
So I struggle to understand what illusions I am under, when told this as a simple obvious assertion. Perhaps there is more to say from you at this point.
> In fact, it appears that everything is ultimately cause-and-effect
Maybe it's so, I don't deny this, of course neither you or I know. But the fact is that my consciousness steers and evolves in directions it ordains at one moment and challenges at every other, and in doing so I point my uncontrolled body vaguely, where it passes me back thoughts I did not particularly compel so in the end I can finally compel the entity of myself to do something I so decided.
Even if this is all cause-and-effect, I don't see how it makes consciousness an illusion so much as it just makes it deterministic.
I am not talking about direct control in the sense of “I want to move my hand here and then I make my hand move”, but more in the sense of “there is sometimes a disconnect between the choices I want to make and the choices I actually make”. That difference ebbs and flows, and I am sure some people are better at living exactly how they want to live than others, but I don’t think anyone ALWAYS makes the decisions that are perfectly in line with what they want to choose to do.
Yes, unless those prescribed emotions are causing my body to care more to tend to survival than the normal state of chilling
> Do you ever feel a disconnect about what you wish you would do and what you actually do?
How does the ability to exercise one's will have anything to do with whether or not one has the will?
> Have you ever had trouble kicking a habit, or starting a new one you want to have?
Partial control of my complex meat machine from subconscious levels of my mind do not invalidate the idea that I have complete control over select scenarios. For instance, you have decided to make an argument based on the idea that your meat machine and you share more of a collaborative existence than you would assume a creature with free will would share with its meat-or-otherwise machine, whereas I hold that existence is naturally inextricably tied up with the act of acquiring energy via eating and alleviating whatever burdens sleep is designed to lift and these facts should not be confused as indicating we are slaves to our vessels. Quite a weak argument to me.
> do not invalidate the idea that I have complete control over select scenarios.
I was not trying to say you NEVER have complete control. I am saying we don’t ALWAYS have complete CONSCIOUS control. I am saying we often make decisions for reasons that we are not fully conscious of, or even aware at all. In fact, we will sometimes tell ourselves (and actually believe) we are doing something for one reasons when we are in reality doing it for another reason we aren’t fully aware of. Our subconscious controls a lot more of what we do than we realize, is my point.
I am not saying we can’t choose to, at moments, take more full conscious control for a while. I am also in no way arguing against free will. I am just saying that we are only aware of a part of what goes into our choices of actions.
Okay, perhaps it is useful to be more judicious in your language then. After all, the top-level parent of this comment chain is saying this:
> Most people believe [...] that they choose how they act and behave. Any serious introspection, however, quickly shows how foolish [this belief is].
This comment is not exactly showing the nuance in a statement such as more reasonably arguing "we are only aware of a part of what goes into our choices of actions".
This does not seem like a meaningful definition of free will to me.
This does not seem to me analogous to saying whether a human being would behave the same as itself in the same situation, as the presupposed information differs significantly.
If the reason an oracle can’t exist is fundamental chaos, then that chaos cannot be connected to results of free will without handwavy logic, it would span too many abstraction levels to be useful and/or predictable. The assumption to be made here is that whatever free will is, it must be a similar oracle which predicts chaos instead. Not a direct contradiction but in the same spirit.
One may also view that second oracle as not predicting chaos, but instead acting on top of it, or simply being it. Not sure if you meant this or not.
If an oracle could exist, then yes the chaos is broken (it is no more). The case where an oracle can’t exist for a different reason is still to be explored.
Edit: realized that I’m using “chaos” in place of “uncertainty”, please assume they are the same here.
Really? I can't see how a good faith reading would lead you to think knowing the outcome of a situation having seen that situation and outcome before is in any way congruent with being able to predict an unseen situation given information strictly from before that situation.
I don't really see why I would respond further, that's pretty entry-level logic.
However I'm not sure how they're trying to apply this idea to solve conflict or 'political fractures'. It just sounds like.. marginally less naïve realism? The conclusion shouldn't be that we teach people about naïve realism and then we will solve our problems, I think the correct conclusion is that different people and groups can be entirely rational and also in fundamental opposition.
Rationality is instrumental. If two people start with different assumptions or in different places they can both be entirely reasonable and unbiased and also arrive at two very different points. Teaching them to recognize this rather than thinking the other side is delusional is fine, but it doesn't actually resolve any conflict.
It's naïve to think you're objectively right and everyone else isn't, but it's equally naïve to think being subjectively in disagreement is somehow less substantial. The "Golden rule" the authors provide in the end seems in fact to straight up contradict their diagnosis:
"Proceed from the naïve but charitable assumption that when people respond in ways that are surprising or offensive, it is generally their perceptions, assumptions, and construals, rather than their basic values, that differ from our own"
This is not charitable. If naïve realism is the problem then it is precisely our basic values in which we differ, not our perceptions or capacity to reason.
Wonder why....
A very similar thing can happen with internet conversations that are dominated by a few extremist loudmouths. I think I probably am more reasonable than most of the time, I think probably a lot of the people who don't comment are more reasonable also. Not because the "silent majority" agree with me, of course they don't. But I think the silent majority are a lot more moderate than the vocal minority.
> "We miscalculate the extent to which our opponents’ viewpoints differ from our own."
A more accurate statement is that we tend to misunderstand the ways in which another person's viewpoints differ from our own.
For example, my mom recently told me, in almost these exact words, that she is confidant in her opinions, but doesn't feel any need to rely on facts or evidence to build or maintain those opinions. That's a pretty radical outlook and puts her at direct odds with quite a number of other folks.
I strongly suspect that there are very large differences in humanity's views on topics like epistemology, authority, institutionalization and other very core concepts. When I read articles like this, it's not really clear to me that the authors themselves understand just how divergent these views can be, or how best to get participants to elucidate their core feelings. For my own part, I've seen that under most situations, people will rely on euphemisms and fuzzy language to soften their most radical viewpoints. For example I had to be very direct with my mom to get her to make the admissions that she did, and she only did it because I backed her into a bit of a corner. In other conversations, she would deflect, change the subject, or use language in ambiguous ways in order to appear more reasonable.
This article hints at the very reason why this article is difficult to take to seriously:
>while it remains unclear exactly why this intervention works, Rodríguez and Halperin speculated that it has to do with the desire to maintain a positive self-view.”
This only holds when the table stakes are low and the stakes are never low when it comes to someone's most core beliefs. It looks like the authors succeeded in coaching people on how to appear reasonable, but it's not clear to me that they succeeded in actually teaching people how to be more reasonable. In short, I wonder if this article is naive because I'm not sure if they ever got to the heart of any particular person, including themselves.
It's remarkable to me that when you describe your mother's POV you can do that without judgement though, so I envy you your equanimity here. Struggling myself to relate to/tolerate family like this, because it seems like they've just gone crazy. And sure, we can avoid political discussion, but underneath that it looks like values/life philosophy are kinda corrupted. In general, what usually makes people ignore (some) evidence or (some) authority is a desire for tactical and targeted hypocrisy.. i.e. not justice or truth in general but wins for their team. Regression to pure unapologetic tribalism seems more and more common these days, and it's hard for me to see that as "just" preferences for different epistemology.
Generalizing more.. some story like "objective meets subjective and they disagree about who is who" seems naive, almost nostalgic. It reminds me of earnest science/religion debates I had with smart friends when I was a kid. Those debates now seem quite civilized and mature compared to most political/philosophical/even vaguely value-oriented discussions I see (or foolishly participate in) now. I would characterize recent modern discourse more directly as "open mind meets closed mind" or even more directly as "spiteful meets curious".
As families, friends or whole society's I wish we were lucky enough to still argue in terms of things like objectivity/subjectivity, because hey, at least things like science/art cross-pollinate! But this is an increasingly irrelevant regime for discussion, post-truth and all that. This sucks, because I don't see the alternative curiosity-vs-spite regime bearing much fruit for anyone.
They should realize that it was actually the 2016 election that was stolen, and that the Russians and the Chinese are trying to kill us all through mind control.
If someone is driving faster than me, I usually respect them for having a greater risk tolerance of getting a speeding ticket.
I consider myself decently read but what weirds me out are the people who are way more confident than myself. Maybe I'm just dumb about most things and these people are confident and right? I have a relative who is very well read but largely believes all of the talking points conservative media advertises. I find his confidence interesting but I'm skeptical of anyone's perspectives are aligned too closely with a particular ideology. What I find interesting is that he'll say "I'm a conservative, therefor I believe X" Rather than "I believe X, Y, and Z, therefor I most closely identify as a conservative." I guess I would say that I am biased towards moderate beliefs and self-doubt. The more nuanced your beliefs the more likely I am to believe them.
I like to think that my stance that most things are two complex too be truly knowable means I'm fairly accurate about what I know and don't know, but I'm curious where the glaring holes are.
Maybe ironically, in my professional life, perhaps because I know so much more about the nuances of it, I am much more confident that I am wrong about many things. Much more confident about that wrongness than I am about the world. There just really is so much to know.
And I fully acknowledge that when I move on, I will be one of those people to the next set of developers!
You have that going on for couple generations and pretty soon everyone will think they're better than they are.
> What I fear is that loss of certainty is something that keeps some people into the naïve realist position or so I've noticed in my own social circles.
> It's like talking to a brick wall. And honestly, I've given up. It's just one tiny example in a sea of ignorance
Are you certain about these claims? You seem to be fairly confident. While your interlocutors may not have the sophistication to have reasons for their positions (I don't know), that doesn't mean there aren't valid arguments against your convictions, and yet you seem quite certain that there aren't, whereas I claim that there are.
I think what needs to be underscored is that, in the typical course of affairs, we make best judgements based on our prior beliefs and revise them when we have sufficient reason to revise them. You may not have come across such reasons (again, I don't know), but if you did, would you consider revising your position? Do you have good arguments for your position?
Nope since it's about me how I see myself with respect to my gender identity.
>Putting aside how gender theory conflicts with common sense, there are plenty of philosophers and scientists who, as philosophers and scientists, find gender theory incoherent.
I don't care what theories are out there, my identity is what I subjectively experience, if your assertion is that I should take what others think what I'm actually experiencing as the single source of truth and be subordinate to their thoughts and feelings then I'm just gonna say no. My brain, my body, my experiences, my way or the highway. People who disagree lose nothing by leaving me and others like me alone.
>Have you tried to examine the best arguments against gender theory?
Again, I don't need affirmation for what I subjectively experience. I don't experience gender the way you and others do. Therefore, I act on my own will to express and identify as I wish. If this offends you and your own ask yourself why. Why is it so important that you have the power over my person and my property when, as I stated before, you lose nothing by letting me be.
>Are you certain about these claims?
Again when it comes to my subjective experience regarding my gender identity, yes. I can confirm my feelings because I am my feelings. There's no argument you can produce to say I am not myself or the body of my experiences that isn't some strange brew of Cartesian nonsense that's been long discarded.
>I think what needs to be underscored is that, in the typical course of affairs, we make best judgements based on our prior beliefs and revise them when we have sufficient reason to revise them. You may not have come across such reasons (again, I don't know), but if you did, would you consider revising your position? Do you have good arguments for your position?
No because when we're discussing my subjective experience (this seems to be a theme here) it's not a question of external verification because you can't externally verify what's subjective or internal to your mental states. Therefore, I have supreme confidence that my gender dysphoria is not some random fluke that'll go away if I listen to the right argument from someone, just as my subjective experience with clinical depression (life long) will magically evaporate if people repeatedly tell me it's just a phase despite historical trends.
Ultimately, your argument boils down to this: you subjectively experience A, you should listen to others with respect to that experience and disregard it despite it not being something you're attempting to objectify nor assume to be an excuse to act against their own wishes and subjective experiences of their own person. You might want to recheck your assumptions. First, acknowledge that the mental states of others is wholly subjective and therefore not up for debate as to their existence. Second, if those subjective experiences do not result in actions that impede the actions of others then it's automatically permissible no matter how much you might feel it's disgusting/vulgar/tasteless/etc as personal sentiments should not be the basis for interpersonal interactions inasmuch as asserting some kind of morality or ethics. Third, asking someone to disregard to their own subjective experience as if it's up for debate is something that shouldn't be the default position as for the reasons stated prior.
Basically, you're coming off as an arrogant jerk trying to say, "well you need to consider other people's feelings about your feelings" which doesn't make any sense on its face or even in-depth and it's the reason why I don't believe in capital T truth.
I try to notice my own ignorance and thereby avoid "instant expert" syndrome. If I just read a news story or two about some hot-button issue, I try not to assume that I know much about it.
There are overconfident reactions everywhere, though. It's hard to resist poking at them.
Well, apart from the choice in naming, you can count me in as a "naive realist" then. I'd prefer "rationalism" or "ideologue" or "fundamentalism" (the quest to seek the least amount of assumptions to explain our observations).
The beautiful thing about logic and mathematics is that derivations / proofs can be verified mechanically: if even a dumb computer can follow and verify the reasoning, so can indeed a reasonable person.
So next there's disputes on observation, say in science, measurements for example. In theory standard measurement equipment and even cables could be produced in controlled conditions such that each cable end cryptographically signs its connection to some device port only after verifying a timely signed timestamped response to a challenge, a response by some external entity (centralized or decentralized). The device say an oscilloscope could similarly sign the measurements it made, when the circuit was in what topology etc... and all of these could have custom security envelopes with PUF's ... All the tools and assembly lines where those cables, oscilloscopes, etc are produced would have similar security controls in a way that the group can audit (at least statistically) that the expected intrusion rate is marginally low...
A popular saying or adage goes like "In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice; but in practice, there is."
I disagree not with the figurative meaning but with the literal one:
There really is no difference between theory and practice.
But there is a big difference between theory and malpractice.
These psychologists and philosophers really seem to think they harbor very rare insights. But even a toddler knows different people have different opinions, views, ... nihil nove sub sole...
It's a very sad world when people are stigmatized into nihilism in order to maintain the status quo.
Oh how I yearn to live in a publically verifiable society, with verifiable desiderata.
Even in mathematics and logic you have axioms which cannot be formally proven by mathematics and logic. You do try to minimize the axioms, but they will always be there.
So even in the most pure of disciplines, you cannot be 100% "objective".
Most real life issues are much messier than logic and mathematics.
If politics was like that instead of the current "try to make the other side seem as different as possible to sway voters" then the world would be a much nicer place. People are too stupid to do that though, when they try they still fall for the fallacies mentioned in the article. Instead of just looking at how the different sides starts with different moral axioms they instead focus on how the derivative results differ and call the other side morally corrupt based on their derivative results being so far from what this side sees as optimal.
If the latter you are one of the very few people I have communicated with who can also see the myriad advantages of formal verification in democracy, daily life, or perhaps even courts.
Consider things like due process, it may seem like a pedantic thing and overly paranoid to demand we have formally verifiable due process, so that anyone verify due process at home. But its much more than that. Institutional buildings are heavily protected assets, which cost a lot of money to protect. When a fraction of the populace storms such an asset, it costs lives and limbs, it costs a lot of money to permanently guard it, it will cost a lot of money and attention in processing the consequences etc... If the capitol was entirely virtual there would be nothing to storm and all these costs in life, limb, taxpayer dollars and time and attention of both the legal system and the population as audience would have avoided.
I state nothing less myself when I describe "fundamentalism" as a better moniker: the quest for locally minimal sets of axioms that allow maximal sets of theorems to follow from them without generating mathematical inconsistency.
Actually I don’t think the laws of inference are formally provable.
And strictly speaking, mechanical deduction is a simulation of deduction that exploits the formal properties of propositions. You cannot analyze the conceptual terms (e.g., predicates) in this fashion because, by definition, the content of those terms are exactly what formalism excludes. Formalism provides us with essentially this: that we can deduce the shape of the (or a) conclusion regardless or for any such terms from the shapes of the premises alone with no concern for the concepts involved.
Is that really what you got out of the article? "People have different opinions"? I'm not sure you're particularly more rational than anyone else, I'm afraid.
>But there is a big difference between theory and malpractice.
If there was only one theory and it had been verified absolutely, sure, but unfortunately that’s not the case. Not only are there many theories about many things, most of which are all mutually exclusive, but hardly any of them match with all the practical results anyway. That’s life.
You seem to envision formal verification only operating on some pre-agreed set of axioms, as if one can not use formal verification until the whole of humanity has agreed on them.
Unless one makes the overarching single theory a taboo there is in fact a single theory if you don't omit logical entailment operators as in modal accounts. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logical_consequence#Modal_acco...
Suppose Alice believes all humans are mortal:
Alice ⊢ X ∈ Human => Mortal(X)
And suppose Alice believes she is human herself:
Alice ⊢ Alice ∈ Human
Then she could conclude using a rule of inference (modus ponens) she believes in that she is mortal:
Alice ⊢ Mortal(Alice)
The same formal system can contain your beliefs, my beliefs, those of Newton and those of Einstein etc...
The turnstiles may be nested suppose Bob has expressed his beliefs, and Alice has found a statement resulting from Bob's beliefs, then she can express that he should then also believe that statement:
Alice ⊢ Bob ⊢ SomeStatementPerhapsEvenALogicalContradiction
All these turnstiles may be subscripted with a version or time indicator to model beliefs changing over time, such that when someone derives a contradiction from your believes you either drown in your own rules (principle of explosion) or reject at least one of your axioms that was used in the proof resulting in the contradiction (at the cost of losing the theorems that depended on that belief)...
Consider for example 2 encompassed theories, for simplicity chosen to be a plattitude of Newtonian physics and Special Relativistic physics:
Newton ⊢ SomeInstantaneousActionStatements
Einstein ⊢ ConstantSpeedOfLightInVacuumStatement
One and the same overarching theory can contain express all these theories, and we can exert pressures on one another to drop axioms, convince one another to promote a result to the status of an axiom (like Einstein proposed to bombard the deductions of Lorenz and others on the length contraction, field distortion and mass change in the back then seemingly very specific context of fast electrons in the theory of electromagnetism into fundamental mechanical postulates).
EDIT: the main reason people seem to believe in the strictly monotheistic applicability of formal verification is because they tend to only or mostly be exposed to mathematical statements where the boring repetitive turnstiles on the left are omitted for brevity