In regards to radical skepticism

In My Humble Opinion
161

But how does someone square all this away? I mean I know that things appear a way to us because of our senses, but living a life based on appearances seems shallow and disconnected.

He seems to think that we don’t need beliefs for a lot of things in life, but based on what I have read in his essay the skeptic needs the Socratic to have something to live by and take care of him. Without belief how would one become a doctor or a carpenter? If he is right that we don’t need beliefs to do the job but what about selecting it? Most of what we have now was because of beliefs that carried us through. If we all followed his proposal then we would have nothing. We would not have morality, especially since his last bit kind of torpedos his whole argument.

162

There is no existing alternative. You can’t just go into a sensory-deprivation chamber and stay there for the next twelve years.

People have tried to break through the barrier by using drugs. It has not worked out particularly well for them, and their proffered alternatives are, frankly, banal and uninteresting. Peyote and opium give you interesting sensations, but they lead to harm. Look at Thomas De Quincey (“Confessions of an English Opium-Eater.”) He enjoyed pleasant visions…and ended up with a nasty and very damaging addiction.

You square it all away as best you can, making certain simplifying assumptions, and provisionally accepting the evidence of your senses as a “default” reality.

Believe us all here: if your proposed hyper-skepticism had anything worthwhile to offer, we’d all be encouraging you to follow it. But it doesn’t. It’s a dead-end in all ways – including, for many drug experimenters, literally.

163

What would you be willing to do to finally find the answer to this question?

164

You can become a doctor despite not knowing for sure that becoming a doctor is your best career option. Maybe it will work out, maybe it won’t. But you’ll never be sure, just like you can’t be sure whether the best pastry to order this morning is a cinnamon rolls or an almond croissant.

Maybe the croissant is burnt, and you’ll wish you had picked the other. But you can order the croissant without knowing for sure that you’ve made the correct decision. Or you can skip the pastry and head to the gym. Maybe you’ll slip on the floor at the gym and crack your head open and die. Wow, wrong decision! Oh well.

I can order a pastry with only a provisional acceptance that the pastry will work out. Even after I eat it and it tasted fine I will never know if I made the correct choice. So what’s the problem? I shouldn’t order a pastry unless I know for sure I am making the correct pastry choice? Or do I just order it and eat it and not worry about it?

Becoming a doctor or carpenter is just more of the same. Making a choice based on limited information, fully aware I could be making a mistake and doing it anyway.

165

Without belief in what?

Say you’re a kid, in junior high – well, you appear to be in junior high – and you get told that you’ll be taking courses in English and Math and, also, Wood Shop. And then, to all appearances, you seem to ace Wood Shop: it looks like you slapped together a sturdier birdhouse than everyone else in the class, and in less time; and then it looks like you easily built a big fine table, with the knack that you seem to have and they seem to lack; and then it looks like you’re the best around when it comes to hanging doors and crafting beds; and everywhere you go, it seems like folks are offering you pretty terrific money to do carpentry for them.

And when you tried to swap that money for goods and services, it seemed to work! And the food you seemed to buy seemed to taste delicious!

Can you then think, should I pursue a career in medicine, or carpentry? Well, there’s no way of knowing – but it sure seems like people ooh and aah and press money on me every time I try my hand at this; and I never seem to cut myself, which is kind of a big deal considering I sure seem to recall fainting dead away at the sight of blood. So, again: medicine, or carpentry?

Can you make that choice by guiding off appearances?

166

According to the link, there isn’t anything said about preference or what is better. Even if you are good at carpentry, choosing it because of that would go against pyrrhonism.

The first page or two goes into detail about beliefs.

But what gets me is the “relative” nature of things. How someone can find something to be good while someone else thinks it’s bad. How some people are willing to die and kill because of a clash of ideas. There doesn’t seem much solid ground to go on. Even our senses, though they are all we have, aren’t perfect and only show us things as they pick them up and not the “true nature” as the skeptic gets at. Like in the case of honey, the skeptic won’t say it’s sweet because that would be assenting to something, they would just smile or however they would react.

The more I think about it, the more it sounds like pyrrhonism is a guide to being a robot. Yet I cannot deny that great suffering has happened by a clash of ideas. So they seek to free people of the disturbance brought by the “Socratic” way of an examined life.

I didn’t think too hard about my senses before. Illusions were cool rather than disturbing, and how an object changes based on the angle was also cool. But now I’m plagued by doubt and I can’t shake that there is some truth to the skeptic. But I also know that humans would not have gotten far without beliefs, and that without them I don’t see humanity doing well (in spite of history).

The link I posted was the author trying to build a case, but the last bit disturbed me.

167

From the wiki link you posted a bit earlier (bolding mine):

These dudes aren’t refusing to take a firm stance on things because the things in question aren’t known. They’re refusing to take a stand on things out of stubborn fact-free logic-free principle. They’re they little kid who just responds to everything by asking “Why?” endlessly without listening to the answers, except they’re endlessly (and mindlessly) repeating “I dunno” instead.

Again, this isn’t driven by logic and it’s damned silly.

The reason they’re doing this silly thing is so they can achieve “mental imperturbability” - because ignoring facts and reality allows them to chill. Again, it’s not that embracing the uncertainty of our senses helps them somehow; it doesn’t. What helps them is that they’re refusing to consider the questions at all. They’re refusing to make any sort of decision on anything, literally on principle alone.

Or putting it another way, which I believe is an accurate description, they’re refusing to think about philosophy/epistemology at all because thinking about philosophy/epistemology stresses them out.

So in your case yes, I think there’s something for you to gain from the example of the Pyrrhonists - just stop thinking about it, chill out, and go about your business.

168

Yep. Just say, “I don’t know that for sure” to everything anyone ever says within your hearing. Over and over and over. Always. Obsessively. Without relent. Every single time…

Yes, there have been bad people who thought they had good ideas. So what? Do you seriously want to throw all thought into the trash, just because some jerks have had harmful thoughts?

Most of us here would suggest that humanity has been richly benefited by ideas, such as public hygiene and sanitation, the arts, baking, negotiated diplomacy, medicine, etc.

(By the way, define “suffering.” Why do you believe in it, when you don’t believe in the reality of sensations? How do you know your “suffering” isn’t actually pleasure? Why do you accept some ideas, when your premise is that no ideas can be accepted?)

169

By finding it to be good, easy as someone else thinks it’s bad.

Take the ‘honey’ example: you find the stuff to be sweet, right? Let’s say I respond “well, I find it sour.” Can you, in light of that, still find it to be sweet?

Well, yeah; you’re not claiming that I’d think it’s sweet, and you’re not claiming there’s some true property of ‘sweetness’ out in a realm of being that’s beyond the realm of mere appearance; you just mention that, to you, it tastes sweet.

You can say “it appears sweet to me.” And, when you later pass up something that appears sour to enjoy more honey you perceive as sweet, I can ask whether you prefer to experience sweet tastes instead of sour ones – and you can respond that, “to all appearances, that sure seems to be the case.”

And if I ask whether you’re a good carpenter, you can reply that, as far as you can tell, you sure appear to be; and if I ask whether people pay you a lot of money to perform carpentry, you can reply that it sure seems that way; and if I ask whether you use the money they hand you to buy sweet honey that tastes delicious, you can reply that, to all appearances, that does seem to be the case.

170

It’s almost–almost I say–as if Machinaforce isn’t listening to anything anybody says.

171

This is sounding like the “Argument Bureau” sketch writ large.

And the next post will be “No it isn’t” so you are ninjaed at the source.

172

I’m convinced by this illusion.

173

I guess I ignore the voices in my head telling me to do things too. It’s just as well, those voices are…not very nice.

174

I know the voices are imaginary but sometimes they have really great ideas.

175

It’s just that by the way you make it sound, it seems like a detachment from life.

176

You should check out the paper I linked, it gives more details.

But my understanding of their point is: our senses are flawed>reason is flawed>we cannot know the true nature of things>suspend all judgment rather then pointlessly theorizing and disturbing the mind by clattering with flawed tools. They further suppliment this by arguing that beliefs and opinions are the source of the problems of the world.

They also criticize therapy as just rearranging of beliefs and the paper claims that the world is in need of the Pyrrhonist’s version of therapy.

Even though I know that without beliefs and opinions man would not get anywhere. I also find the “nonevident” claim to be questionable, for how can one know something is “evident”?

177

You say that about pretty much everything.

178

Here is the arc of every Machinaforce dialectic:

Step 1. Hey everybody! Here’s this new thing that I read which totally explains why there’s no point to life and living, like I’ve been saying all along!
Step 2. You people are all just fooling yourselves into thinking you’re living happy and productive lives.
Step 3. What do you mean this new thing I read on the internet is all wrong? It can’t be wrong! See, there’s a guy, with a blog, and book, and a school paper proving I’m right - you’re all living a lie!
Step 4. I’m not obsessing. Therapy is a crutch! You’re not helping. Why isn’t anyone understanding what I’m saying here?
Step 5. Okay, I admit, there’s this one problem with this not so shiny new thing. But how did any of you figure out life without even exploring this? How do you even know what to do after you wake up in the morning?
Step 6. Wait. I may have been wrong. What seemed a shiny new thing has lost all it’s novelty and is obviously flawed. Never mind all.
Step 7. Find next new thing. Rinse and repeat.

See a pattern, Machinaforce? Now will you consider therapy?

179

I’ve just took a second look at your most recent link, and having skimmed about a third of the way through the paper, it very much seems that Pyrrhonic skepticism is the state of being stoned out of one’s mind. Literally. You tool around doing things entirely based on the whims of your subconscious mind (which is apparently presumed to be able to handle the complexities and mundanities of modern life) while your consciousness spends the whole time literally failing to contemplate its navel because that would require too much troublesome synaptic activity.

Now, I’m not one to underestimate the capability of the subconsciousness mind; more often than is perhaps wise I let my mind wander while driving a familiar route and trust everything to carry on in the absence of my attention. As best I can tell this is precisely the mechanism the Pyrrhonic skeptic expects to use to make sure that they don’t wander into traffic (give or take that I’m thinking about other things, rather than simply drooling). However I’m skeptical that this would work in practice as a constant mental state - even putting aside the times I’ve ended up at one destination when I wanted to go to another, my brain always gets jerked back to awareness when a sufficiently unexpected situation arises. It’s pretty clear that the subconsciousness doesn’t trust itself to make the kind of decisions that the Pyrrhonic skeptic intends it to.

But let’s pretend for a moment it could - that you could literally tell your subconscious “I’d like to check out now” and your awareness of your senses would turn off and you’d become an uninformed and noncontributing passenger inside your head - forever. That sounds, well, pretty boring. But hey, I’ve got an active fantasy life, within the universe of the fiction books I write; I could probably handle several hours of solitary confinement sensory deprivation before I went batshit insane. And maybe being batshit insane would be somehow comforting for a while, or would eventually die down to a dull mindless white noise, as my mind quietly waited for the rest of my body to get around to dying. Presuming the process isn’t short-circuited by my overworked subconscious accidentally stepping in front of a bus or something.

Putting aside how unappealing that sounds, it raises another, more ethical point. By shoving off the burdens of surviving daily life onto your subconscious, you are perforce forcing the subconscious to develop sufficient awareness to interact with the modern world. It will have to understand money, fitness, social interactions, going to a job and earning money, paying bills, getting to bed on time, dating rituals and safe sex practices. In order to operate in the modern world it will have to demonstrate the behaviors of a conscious individual - and there’s no appreciable difference between “functionally conscious” and “conscious”. So your subconscious mind will have to become another conscious mind.

And if daily life is so horrific that you need to escape it by fleeing into your own head, how could you morally justify creating another conscious mind and forcing it to life life in your stead? That sounds incredibly selfish - and definitively demonstrates that Pyrrhonic skepticism quite literally cannot be a solution for everyone. For every person who adopts Pyrrhonic skepticism literally creates a new person who hasn’t!

Unless you’re assuming you’ll walk in front of a bus and die within the first hour (honestly, a seriously credible outcome). In that case there’s no moral quandary at all - give or take the usual ones about messy suicides, anyway.

If they’re saying that “reason is flawed” flows from “senses are flawed”, then they’re incorrect. Reason, that is to say the actual logic of reasoning, is a self-consistent system that isn’t dependent on anything at all, literally. Trust me on this; I’ve studied formal symbolic logic, and it cares literally not at all about which universe sensed or imagined it’s operating on.

Err, they’re not charging money for their therapy, are they? 'All therapy is false! Except ours! You need our therapy and no other therapy will do! Call now!"

Not sure what you’re talking about with “nonevident”, but the word means “obviously true”. For example there are some truths we hold to be self-evident - that A implies Not Not A.

180

Seriously, how are you getting that from what you just quoted me as saying?

I said that you can – upon experiencing the sweet taste of honey – answer anyone who feels like asking by saying that, to you, “it tastes sweet.” Because, see, it does. And you went on to quote me as adding that, if it “tastes delicious,” then you should of course have no problem replying accordingly upon, y’know, enjoying it.

Because, well, that’s what it is to savor the taste of something you find to be sweet and delicious: you’re not detached from it; you’re experiencing it.

(And, going back to what I said earlier: I sure as hell wouldn’t say you’re detached if you touch fire; I guess you could try to play the it’s-a-mere-appearance game, but I’d also guess that you’d find you’re vividly living it anyway.)