The crowbar was a metaphor for psilocybin and the like.
I mean, yes, you can have hallucinations that you take for real and are mistaken to believe. But, y’know, there is such a thing as healthy mental functioning, and a real world that we are able to grope towards some fallible understanding of. There’s a baseline of rationality that you have to have reached in order to progress to any higher level, but it isn’t very high: anyone who hasn’t suffered grievous insults to the brain is already there.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see this quote at −2, while the George Carlin quote is at +2 although it says the same thing. Surely on LessWrong people aren’t merely voting up witty words, and nitpicking anything expressed more plainly?
Your quote seems to state, “Believe everything you see”, on a site where people would often agree “Don’t believe everything you think”. Carlin does not seem to be making the same sort of claim.
If you want to then make wild inferences like ‘there is an imperceptible separate “matter” or “object” which “causes” these sights on past and future occasions and which continues to exist between them unobserved, and every sight has a corresponding “matter” or “object”’, well, that’s not Ironcroft’s problem.
The crowbar was a metaphor for psilocybin and the like.
I mean, yes, you can have hallucinations that you take for real and are mistaken to believe. But, y’know, there is such a thing as healthy mental functioning, and a real world that we are able to grope towards some fallible understanding of. There’s a baseline of rationality that you have to have reached in order to progress to any higher level, but it isn’t very high: anyone who hasn’t suffered grievous insults to the brain is already there.
Anyway, it’s interesting to see this quote at −2, while the George Carlin quote is at +2 although it says the same thing. Surely on LessWrong people aren’t merely voting up witty words, and nitpicking anything expressed more plainly?
Your quote seems to state, “Believe everything you see”, on a site where people would often agree “Don’t believe everything you think”. Carlin does not seem to be making the same sort of claim.
Shouldn’t you believe you see everything you see?
If you want to then make wild inferences like ‘there is an imperceptible separate “matter” or “object” which “causes” these sights on past and future occasions and which continues to exist between them unobserved, and every sight has a corresponding “matter” or “object”’, well, that’s not Ironcroft’s problem.