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David Chapman Profile picture
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7 Aug, 4 tweets, 2 min read
Earliest use of “nihilism” was in attacks on Kant’s Idealism: his denial that knowledge of external reality is possible. I didn’t know this! pdcnet.org/gfpj/content/g… Image
Subjectivism does always collapse toward nihilism. Current cognitivist stories about how we only have access to representations of reality, not reality itself. And Buddhist and Hindu stories about how everything apparent is illusory.

It’s a seemingly bizarre and paranoid error…
“We can’t really know anything because we are trapped in our heads and permanently separated from the world” makes sense if you had believed the eternalist fantasy of perfect certainty, understanding, and control; realized it was wrong; and inverted it.

meaningness.com/eternalism-app…
You aren’t trapped in your head, you have a body with which you can go make breakfast; knowledge is not representations, it’s interactions; perception is inseparable from activity; most of the time it works just fine; etc.

Philosophy. Jeebus.

metarationality.com/reasonableness…

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More from @Meaningness

David Chapman Profile picture
5 Aug
0️⃣ A century ago, relativity was experienced as a catastrophic blow to rationalism. A few decades of work by the best philosophers of the era managed to retcon it as a triumph of rationalism instead.

But this entailed two drastic revisions in the plot…

1️⃣ Science used to discover eternal, absolute, certain truths, like Newtonian mechanics… which turned out not to be—oops!—not true.

To preserve rationalism, science got retconned as discovering increasingly accurate approximations to truth we have no access to & may never know.
2️⃣ Rationality used to prove that everything in the world makes sense and we can figure everything out rationally, because God likes us.

Relativity made no sense, so science got retconned as giving glimpses into the transcendent Science Realm that surpasseth all understanding.
Read 5 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
31 Jul
Catatonia is the accomplishment of nihilism. It’s so dramatic that I assumed it was extremely rare, but (TIL) it’s quite common in severe depression. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/P…
I’ve only encountered one person (a girlfriend, actually) with serious catatonia (“waxy flexibility”). It’s deeply uncanny the first time you see it.
But reading the diagnostic criteria, I realized that at times when I was quite depressed, I exhibited milder versions of many of these symptoms. In fact, I exhibit some of them, to some extent, even when feeling good & normal. (Some are autistic symptoms too… they’re comorbid.)
Read 4 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
29 Jul
Historians will see the administrative bullshitization of every aspect of life as the defining feature of our era. (“How could they have slid into accepting that almost all of almost everyone’s time was wasted on pointless, unpleasant tasks?”)
Another manifestation of “administrative externalities” as a catastrophic loss of human life:
More on the harm of “administrative externalities,” from me: metarationality.com/post-apocalypt…
Read 8 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
25 Jul
@St_Rev Just about to launch a long rant about this! :)
@St_Rev I was going to do a second whole rant about how the natural numbers are bad actually, contrary to “God made,” because you can multiply them, and you get division that way, and if you have division you get primes, and if you get primes you get number theory, and that is AWFUL,
@St_Rev whereas the reals are wonderful, people are scared because they encapsulate actual Lovecraftian infinities with tentacles, but you get continuity with them, so you can do calculus, and calculus is great, calculus is actually the foundation of THE WHOLE MODERN WORLD,
Read 5 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
25 Jul
∑ Fascinating indeed! This is how MOST research works, but I didn’t appreciate quite how true it is in math (or at least current number theory). Lots of tasty morsels in this thread; h/t @DRMacIver

🧪 Science also USED to be like this and isn’t any more: “Mathematicians’ intuition about what's true is mysteriously really good, so publishing false results is quite rare.”

🧪 A few decades ago, most published science was more-or-less true, even though there were often glaring gaps or outright mistakes in experiment. [My informal observation; I don’t have numbers on this.]

Now most published science is more-or-less false, even when done “right.”
Read 14 tweets
David Chapman Profile picture
20 Jul
It’s so weird reading twentieth century philosophers. They were genuinely panicked about the loss of epistemological foundations. Not as an academic intellectual thing, but as “oh my god what am I personally going to do!”

It’s impossible to fully recover that feeling now.
I just barely grew up in modernity, as it was collapsing around me, and I can sort of remember feeling that panic myself in my 20s, but the shape of it is barely discernible through the fog of time.
I mean, seriously. This is from 1988, at least a decade after modernity was over. It’s practically the TVTropes definition of Wangst. Image
Read 4 tweets

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