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andrewss said:
so rationalist insofar as you self domineer and refine or something?

self dialectic... cool...



and thus atheism and nihilism... well why nihilism? what is nihilism to you?

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johnm214 said:
Well, depends what you mean by "athiest".  Folks seem to have some pretty widely diverging notions of the term.

Nihilism is hard to really comment on.  Do you mean this as a positive belief?  i.e. a belief that no external morality exists or that no moral framework is preferable in the abstract?  Or do you meerly mean you don't have a belief as to these issues?

Nihilism certainly seems emotionally unappealing to me and many, and I always felt it was kind of pointless.  I believe you can form a consistant moral framework from the presumption that people have a moral right to their body and the products and extensions thereof (i.e. property, relationships, et cet).  This not only seems more practical and appealing, but it certainly isn't immoral in the nihilist view, so it always seemed a pretty good beleif system to me.  Both practical, emotionally appealing in ways nihilism isn't, and not justifying the immoral even if we take the presumption of the moral right to the person to be incorrect (i.e. in the case of nihilism, or some forms of it).

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Freedom said:
From a purely rationalist perspective you should have no views whatsoever because you should be dead. There are no reasons to live except for emotional ones. If you were purely rational you would cast aside your irrational desire for water and you would die from dehydration in a couple of days.

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Freedom said:
From a purely rationalist perspective you should have no views whatsoever because you should be dead. There are no reasons to live except for emotional ones. If you were purely rational you would cast aside your irrational desire for water and you would die from dehydration in a couple of days.

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That's your idea of rational?

Imo it's rational to seek pleasure and avoid pain for obvious reasons.  As long as life tips the scales in favor of enjoyment then it's rational to hang in.

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iThink said:

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johnm214 said:
Well, depends what you mean by "athiest".  Folks seem to have some pretty widely diverging notions of the term.

Nihilism is hard to really comment on.  Do you mean this as a positive belief?  i.e. a belief that no external morality exists or that no moral framework is preferable in the abstract?  Or do you meerly mean you don't have a belief as to these issues?

Nihilism certainly seems emotionally unappealing to me and many, and I always felt it was kind of pointless.  I believe you can form a consistant moral framework from the presumption that people have a moral right to their body and the products and extensions thereof (i.e. property, relationships, et cet).  This not only seems more practical and appealing, but it certainly isn't immoral in the nihilist view, so it always seemed a pretty good beleif system to me.  Both practical, emotionally appealing in ways nihilism isn't, and not justifying the immoral even if we take the presumption of the moral right to the person to be incorrect (i.e. in the case of nihilism, or some forms of it).

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Yes, i should have specified I am not a moral nihilist in the way that there is no right and wrong, but even here when considering only the most libertarian of social constrictions i find myself wondering if it is just my emotions playing with me. If i myself am an emotional being and have been my whole life how can i hope to objectively make a decision on something like this. It leads me towards the thought of a very naturalistic worldview with no morals.

Please try to counter this argument for i don't like the implications.

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iThink said:
I consider myself to be an extreme rationalist. I have been going through all of my beliefs over time and if something arises that does not have a purely rational/objective basis then i discard it.

It has lead me to become an Atheist and Nihilist.

I would like to see arguments against my views from the perspective that they are not rational.

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if something arises that does not have a purely rational/objective basis then i discard it.

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johnm214 said:
Nihilism certainly seems emotionally unappealing to me...I always felt it was kind of pointless. 

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SlashOZ said:
interesting thread.

you base your life on rationalism but I don't think you have made explicit yet whether or not you believe that it is making your life better or not.

so I ask you, do you feel that being an 'extreme rationalist' is improving your life?


have a nice day.

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ralphserket said:

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if something arises that does not have a purely rational/objective basis then i discard it.

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Please define "purely objective."

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quinn said:
a nihilism which rejects rationalism:

no belief system is ever preferable to any other.

(note: by 'belief system' i mean the unchallenged assumptions that form the grid for the rest of our beliefs to logically flow from.)

here are some unchallenged assumptions that may make up the base of your own belief system:
-there are physical and mental things
-you are a self
-you have a mind
-you have sensations
-words have meanings
etc etc etc

and yet all these assumptions are entirely optional or not 'given'...


for a belief system to form there must be such unchallenged assumptions.

and given this 'fact' there really is no grounds for rationalism, for to be a rationalist one needs an established belief system to be rational about.

you could never rationally 'discover' or justify the assumptions that allow the system to form in the first place...

and so by rejecting all unchallenged assumptions you inevitably slide toward a kind of nihilism that is skeptical about any belief system and holds no beliefs to begin with.

i think this could be a good place to be because it seems that beliefs more often than not lead ppl to do silly things

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OrgoneConclusion said:
I consider myself extremely moderate.

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OrgoneConclusion said:
Because it makes as much sense as extreme rationalism.

There is zero difference between being rational and being extremely rational.

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BlueCoyote said:
To be short, most rationalists miss the predictive values of our imaginary thought system.

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BlueCoyote said:
I did mean imagining thought system. Simply our ability to make predictive imaginations. They are not provable by the facts of the past , they only can be proven in the future, so the scientific proof isn't here at the present moment, so this idea is not recognized as a true fact in reality yet.
After recognition, every idea will be stated as a fact. Same it can be with a well defined g*d-concept.

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BlueCoyote said:
You wanted to know where rationality rationally misses some pieces.
I showed you why this problem (obviously) lies in the evaluation of the imaginatory.

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quinn said:
i think blue coyote made an interesting point... which is that to make progress we need some 'imaginative' or inspired idea that goes beyond or reconstructs the assumptions that we take to be given.

there is a great book that i have never read but everyone seems to refer to which is called "The Structure of Scientific Revolutions" by Kuhn.

and from the little i have gathered it describes something called 'normal science' which is simply the science which works from within a particular belief system and slowly makes progress in describing the world from that system.

and then there is 'revolutionary science' which is something like an imaginative step outside of those beliefs to create an entirely new perspective.


i think this ties in well to your point that surely scientific progress is evidence of a valid belief system. i somewhat agree but i also think that science must be split between the senseless cataloging of data and measurements and the interpretation of the data or the theory which explains it.

i think the data is something separate from a belief system and i feel that many different belief systems could be used to interpret the same data with equal usefulness in the world.

i dont think this is to say that we can 'never truly know' but more that what we know is always relative to the assumptions we hold.


about sensations and language, you could be so many different things. you could be a behaviorist, an essentialist, a phenomenologist, a materialist, an idealist, a pragmatist, a panpsychist etc

and whatever you are will lead you to drawing a different picture of those things than all the others. and your picture may be good and coherent but that is not to say that another isnt. only that it is a different system altogether...

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iThink said:

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BlueCoyote said:
You wanted to know where rationality rationally misses some pieces.
I showed you why this problem (obviously) lies in the evaluation of the imaginatory.

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Sorry, now i understand what you were getting at. I fully accept your point, but can you explain how this would invalidate my beliefs?

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Yes. To discard all 'imaginatory' values isn't rational, because some become true when we rationalize their validity in reality. Some had been true before too, but as long as nobody tested their truth value, they (could have) stayed as an unproven idea in human heads, which will be discarded by your 'believe system', so maybe your rationality leads you to never discover their truth value.
Of course there are many 'unreal' ideas too, which never can be tested, but there also are those who hold an idea which is proven to be wrong. I wonder myself what motivates people to hold untrue ideas, which in fact can be proven as a negative as well (one can prove that there's not wine in some cup, if someone would pretend there is some in it).
So that's where your 'believe system' would hold you back from discovering and learning about some part of reality. So as far I see this part of reality also can be rationally explored, but therefore one first has to accept that this part of reality even exists That would invalidate your beliefs.

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BlueCoyote said:

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iThink said:

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BlueCoyote said:
You wanted to know where rationality rationally misses some pieces.
I showed you why this problem (obviously) lies in the evaluation of the imaginatory.

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Sorry, now i understand what you were getting at. I fully accept your point, but can you explain how this would invalidate my beliefs?

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Yes. To discard all 'imaginatory' values isn't rational, because some become true when we rationalize their validity in reality. Some had been true before too, but as long as nobody tested their truth value, they stayed as an unproven idea in human heads, which will be discarded by your 'believe system', so maybe your rationality leads you to never discover their truth value.
Of course there are many 'unreal' ideas too, which never can be tested, but there also are those who hold an idea which is proven to be wrong. I wonder myself what motivates people to hold untrue ideas, which in fact can be proven as a negative as well (one can prove that there's not wine in some cup, if someone would pretend there is some in it).
So that's where your 'believe system' would hold you back from discovering and learning about some part of reality. So as far I see this part of reality also can be rationally explored, but therefore one first has to accept that this part of reality even exists That would invalidate your beliefs.

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iThink said:

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BlueCoyote said:

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iThink said:

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BlueCoyote said:
You wanted to know where rationality rationally misses some pieces.
I showed you why this problem (obviously) lies in the evaluation of the imaginatory.

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Sorry, now i understand what you were getting at. I fully accept your point, but can you explain how this would invalidate my beliefs?

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Yes. To discard all 'imaginatory' values isn't rational, because some become true when we rationalize their validity in reality. Some had been true before too, but as long as nobody tested their truth value, they stayed as an unproven idea in human heads, which will be discarded by your 'believe system', so maybe your rationality leads you to never discover their truth value.
Of course there are many 'unreal' ideas too, which never can be tested, but there also are those who hold an idea which is proven to be wrong. I wonder myself what motivates people to hold untrue ideas, which in fact can be proven as a negative as well (one can prove that there's not wine in some cup, if someone would pretend there is some in it).
So that's where your 'believe system' would hold you back from discovering and learning about some part of reality. So as far I see this part of reality also can be rationally explored, but therefore one first has to accept that this part of reality even exists That would invalidate your beliefs.

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From what I understand I accept what you are saying, but i feel it kind of rests on the point that i won't know everything which is obvious.

Also, could you explain what you mean by "this part of reality"?

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iThink said:
I consider myself to be an extreme rationalist. I have been going through all of my beliefs over time and if something arises that does not have a purely rational/objective basis then i discard it.

It has lead me to become an Atheist and Nihilist.

I would like to see arguments against my views from the perspective that they are not rational.

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iThink said:
I consider myself to be an extreme rationalist. I have been going through all of my beliefs over time and if something arises that does not have a purely rational/objective basis then i discard it.

It has lead me to become an Atheist and Nihilist.

I would like to see arguments against my views from the perspective that they are not rational.

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iThink said:


First of all I don't believe their to be physical and mental things, unless you mean mental in a figurative sense. I believe all things "mental" to be physical and quantifiable phenomenon.

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Noteworthy said:

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iThink said:


First of all I don't believe their to be physical and mental things, unless you mean mental in a figurative sense. I believe all things "mental" to be physical and quantifiable phenomenon.

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how do you measure the mental?

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quinn said:
yes noteworthy, it depends what exactly you are calling 'the mental'...

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quinn said:
and you dont believe we have such a thing?

why is that?

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quinn said:
and you dont believe we have such a thing?

why is that?

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hey laser...

have you ever heard of Godels incompleteness theorems?

i know next to nothing about it because i have been for the most part afraid of mathematics since junior school... but it says something like we can never prove that arithmetic is free of any internal contradictions (or something)

this does seem to challenge the idea that:

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Because any idea which rests on rational foundations is unassailable.

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crumblebum said:
Because it makes for a boring lifestyle. As a trolling method, it's A numbah One, but a purely rational existence is a slow road to becoming a seriously dull person who's only joy is being right.

Spock was never wrong, but he didn't get any ass till Sylar played him.

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laserpig said:
Rationality is not something that has to be enforced. You don't need to guard it. In fact, guarding it is missing the point. Because any idea which rests on rational foundations is unassailable. What most people mean when they say they're "rational" is that they're so phobic of ideas which challenge their established conceptions, that they need to find some trick of rhetoric to play against any person or idea which challenges them. Anyone who calls themself an "extreme rationalist," I have to suspect of belonging to that majority.

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iThink said:
I consider myself to be an extreme rationalist. I have been going through all of my beliefs over time and if something arises that does not have a purely rational/objective basis then i discard it.

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iThink said:
Go ahead and dismantle my original claims instead of making vague personal attacks.

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laserpig said:

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iThink said:
Go ahead and dismantle my original claims instead of making vague personal attacks.

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This was not an attack on you, just a posting of what was on my mind at the time. If you want to be an atheist and nihilist, go for it.

I guess all I was sayin' is: clear thinking is clear thinking. No need to make a thang out of it.

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deCypher said:

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iThink said:
I consider myself to be an extreme rationalist. I have been going through all of my beliefs over time and if something arises that does not have a purely rational/objective basis then i discard it.

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What axioms do you accept as self-evident in this belief system?

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iThink said:
What do you mean "no need to make a thang out of it"?

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laserpig said:

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iThink said:
What do you mean "no need to make a thang out of it"?

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I mean there's no need to put it on a pedestal and keep telling oneself "I am rational I am rational I am rational." I'm not saying you do this. I don't know you. But I know many people who do in fact do this. They hang their personal identity on some association they've built up about "rational people," and they wear that garment like a sports fan wears a T-shirt. This is unnecessary, and, ironically, it is irrational. Real rationality requires nothing more than looking upon the thoughts of oneself and of others with a critical eye, and applying some logical razors (parsimony, rules of evidence, etc).

BTW, I completely disagree that morality is subjective and man-made. The guidelines of morality that any given person chooses to adhere to are of course subjective and man-made, but morality itself is not. Morality is the study of the effects of human behavior on human (or animal, or ecological) well-being. It can be studied objectively. For example, consider two societies, comparable in their behavior, except that one society punishes rapists, and the other allows them to go unprosecuted. Is there any doubt that the first society will have a higher level of average human well-being than the second? There is simply no case to be made that allowing rape will lead to a stable society of psychologically healthy human beings. This is an objective fact. (Admittedly, the experiment has not been run under controlled conditions, so the fact has not been experimentally confirmed, but need it be? Is there really any doubt about this?) A stable society with psychologically and physically healthy human beings is obviously "good," or, shall we say, "better than the alternative." To doubt this is equivalent to doubting that health is better than illness. Therefore, there are right and wrong ways to construct human moral guidelines, and the differences between various systems of guidelines can be investigated objectively.

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laserpig said:
Or we could actually study the matter, and examine the consequences, both physical and psychological, of adopting that social attitude towards the less-fortunate. I think it requires very little investigation before one realizes that a discriminatory and death-dealing attitude towards the unfortunate yields an unhappy psychological climate overall. Socially speaking, compassion really is "right," because it creates a setting in which people can interact without fear of being punished for weaknesses beyond their control. Less fear, less tension, more sanity, more good feelings all around. IMO, that's a QED right there. Sure, we could argue if the cost in physical resources might outweigh the psychological cost, but I think that's a no-brainer. A society where everyone has plentiful material resources, but in which everyone fears to show weakness and persecutes those who do ... that is not a "good" society. That does not make people happy.

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laserpig said:
To be clear: I'm not claiming to be some great moral theoretician. I don't have all the moral answers. To be honest, I've never even thought about most of the questions. But I still think it's quite obvious that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, if one can merely keep sight of the fact that what morality is really attempting to maximize is long-term and large-scale human well-being. There are behaviors which reinforce well-being, and behaviors which undermine it. Logic and experiment can figure out which is which.

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laserpig said:
Let's get one thing clear: there is no such thing as wrong or right.
There is only such a thing as better or worse.

A society in which thieves are murdered on sight would be better than one in which they go free, but worse than one in which they are taken to trial and made to pay off their debts in a socially responsible manner. I hope the reasons for this are apparent.

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laserpig said:
To be clear: I'm not claiming to be some great moral theoretician. I don't have all the moral answers. To be honest, I've never even thought about most of the questions. But I still think it's quite obvious that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, if one can merely keep sight of the fact that what morality is really attempting to maximize is long-term and large-scale human well-being. There are behaviors which reinforce well-being, and behaviors which undermine it. Logic and experiment can figure out which is which.

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laserpig said:
To be clear: I'm not claiming to be some great moral theoretician. I don't have all the moral answers. To be honest, I've never even thought about most of the questions. But I still think it's quite obvious that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions, if one can merely keep sight of the fact that what morality is really attempting to maximize is long-term and large-scale human well-being. There are behaviors which reinforce well-being, and behaviors which undermine it. Logic and experiment can figure out which is which.

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laserpig said:
Quite. Has anyone thought out why condom use is supposed to be "immoral?"
Apparently not.

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Religious people have an aversion to thinking.

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Icelander said:
Great example. It's easy to see how so many of our morals are built upon our fears and insecurities. In effect that really challenges the idea of them being "moral".

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crumblebum said:
It seems like this has gone from "What's wrong with Extreme Rationalism?" to "I meant Regular Rationalism, not Extreme Rationalism!"

The point I made earlier was directed towards a concept of extreme or radical rationalism, not the normal kind OP is actually espousing.

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laserpig said:
What separates "extremely rational" from "rational?"
IMO wanting to be happy is just plain rational.

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crumblebum said:
Rationality, reason, has no input there. Rationality can tell you how do get the things that you irrationally want so you can be happy, but a strictly rational viewpoint shows that a quick, painless suicide would immediately satiate all desires more quickly and efficiently than any protracted process of acquisition and enjoyment.

Rationality is a sweet tool for both getting the things you want, or for tempering your want, but it's still a mechanism, a process, a tool. It doesn't suggest or imply anything itself until it's provided with some input, some irrational desire to do the bidding of.

In which case my criticism would be that picking just one mode of reasoning is limiting.

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crumblebum said:
Well then, in this instance, why does the rationalism you practice require the "Extreme" modifier?

Are you snowboarding and doing the Dew while you reason things out?

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iThink said:

I wasn't thinking that in depth when i added "extreme" to the title. I was just thinking extreme in the sense that my beliefs seem extreme to most.

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crumblebum said:

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iThink said:

I wasn't thinking that in depth when i added "extreme" to the title. I was just thinking extreme in the sense that my beliefs seem extreme to most.

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Ah. Well, seems like regular old Colombian oven roast rationality to me.

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iThink said:

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crumblebum said:

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iThink said:

I wasn't thinking that in depth when i added "extreme" to the title. I was just thinking extreme in the sense that my beliefs seem extreme to most.

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Ah. Well, seems like regular old Colombian oven roast rationality to me.

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Should i take this statement to be negative?

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