I sent this as a followup email to those who were at Junto #40 (“If determinism is true, then what’s the point?”), and thought others might find it interesting.
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On Being Okay with the Truth | lesswrong.com | lukeprog
Key ideas:
We humans have a tendency to ‘freak out’ when our model of the world changes drastically. But we get over it.
Showing that love and happiness and moral properties are made of atoms does not mean they are just atoms. They are also love and happiness and moral properties.
Whenever you ‘lose’ something as a result of getting closer to the truth, you’ve only lost a lie.You can face reality, even the truth about morality.
People can stand what is true,
for they are already enduring it.
– Eugene Gendlin
Explaining vs Explaining Away | lesswrong.com | Eliezer Yudkowsky
Key ideas:
If reductionism is correct [note: ‘reductionism’ ~= ‘determinism’ in the way we’ve been using it], then even your belief in reductionism is just the mere result of the motion of molecules – why should I listen to anything you say?
The key word, in the above, is mere; a word which implies that accepting reductionism would explain away all the reasoning processes leading up to my acceptance of reductionism, the way that an optical illusion is explained away.
It takes a strong mind, a deep honesty, and a deliberate effort to say, at this point, “That which can be destroyed by the truth should be,” and “The scientist hasn’t taken the gnomes [or belief in souls/”ultimate choice”/”freedom”] away, only taken my delusion away,”
Think Like Reality | lesswrong.com | Eliezer Yudkowsky
Key ideas:
Reality has been around since long before you showed up. Don’t go calling it nasty names like “bizarre” or “incredible”. […] Quantum physics is not “weird”. You are weird. You have the absolutely bizarre idea that reality ought to consist of little billiard balls bopping around, when in fact reality is a perfectly normal cloud of complex amplitude in configuration space. This is your problem, not reality’s, and you are the one who needs to change.
Surprise exists in the map, not in the territory. There are no surprising facts, only models that are surprised by facts.
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