I’m not suggesting this is the same idea as epistemic hell, but it rhymes.
The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is a proponent of what he calls “philosophical crazyism”, which applies to some outstanding philosophical problems, like the hard problem of consciousness, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and free will. His notion is that the solutions to these problems must be crazy, that is, they must have some feature wildly contrary to intuition. For each such problem, he comes up with a set of intuitively obvious properties that any solution must have, and shows that they cannot all be true. By elimination, one of the properties is wrong, and something crazy must be true.
It‘s refreshing because it relieves us of the responsibility to always be plausible.
This is apparently the topic of his new book, “The Weirdness of the World”. I haven’t read the book, but I have read his blog for many years, and watched the theory develop.
Imagine if some of the weirdness that besets us is due to a very subtle but fundamental structural incoherence. It’s not simply that we’re not making sense, but that when it comes to certain metaphysical matters we can’t. Either because that’s how our brains work, or because that’s just how the universe is, or both.
I’m not suggesting this is the same idea as epistemic hell, but it rhymes.
The philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel is a proponent of what he calls “philosophical crazyism”, which applies to some outstanding philosophical problems, like the hard problem of consciousness, the interpretation of quantum mechanics, and free will. His notion is that the solutions to these problems must be crazy, that is, they must have some feature wildly contrary to intuition. For each such problem, he comes up with a set of intuitively obvious properties that any solution must have, and shows that they cannot all be true. By elimination, one of the properties is wrong, and something crazy must be true.
It‘s refreshing because it relieves us of the responsibility to always be plausible.
This is apparently the topic of his new book, “The Weirdness of the World”. I haven’t read the book, but I have read his blog for many years, and watched the theory develop.
Quantum many worlds
Imagine if some of the weirdness that besets us is due to a very subtle but fundamental structural incoherence. It’s not simply that we’re not making sense, but that when it comes to certain metaphysical matters we can’t. Either because that’s how our brains work, or because that’s just how the universe is, or both.
Very interesting, and yes I think I’m getting at something like that here as well.