Somehow, I get this nagging feeling that you use ‘wrong question’ as a, in your own words, ‘stop word’. This series is leading upto ‘can’t say’ and ‘no answer’ for any and all questions that you have explicitly started out to answer.
Sam B:
One, it’s completely unanswerable, there being no imaginable evidence that would shift your belief one way or the other. And two, whether your belief is right or wrong has no direct consequences, positive or negative.
A rationalist might see this as a bad thing—a “wrong question”—and so ignore it.
Consider rereading Dissolving the Question. You do not ignore “wrong questions”. You take a step back and ask the question of cognitive science, “Why is my brain generating the appearance of a question here?” And then you don’t come up with some evolutionary argument for why it would be advantageous, because that’s not the ‘why’ you want; you want a detailed walkthrough of the malfunctioning cognitive algorithm.
Here, for example, I have endeavored to show an intuitive, non-explicit internal causal network that will generate wrong questions about conflicts between self and physics.
I liked Sam’s biscuit tin analogy, though.
Shane:
In the classical sense “freewill” means that there is something outside of the system that is free to make decisions (at least this is my understanding of it).
But then why not just create a Grand System that includes the free thingy plus the system? Oh noes! Now the Grand System is determined!
Mous:
Sam B:
Consider rereading Dissolving the Question. You do not ignore “wrong questions”. You take a step back and ask the question of cognitive science, “Why is my brain generating the appearance of a question here?” And then you don’t come up with some evolutionary argument for why it would be advantageous, because that’s not the ‘why’ you want; you want a detailed walkthrough of the malfunctioning cognitive algorithm.
Here, for example, I have endeavored to show an intuitive, non-explicit internal causal network that will generate wrong questions about conflicts between self and physics.
I liked Sam’s biscuit tin analogy, though.
Shane:
But then why not just create a Grand System that includes the free thingy plus the system? Oh noes! Now the Grand System is determined!