If philosophy can sometimes sound weird to other philosophers, it can sound really weird to non-philosophers. Imagine (you can do it) you were in a conversation with some non-philosophers and they asked, “what’s your strangest philosophical belief?”
What would your answer be?
(image: detail of “They Have Slept In The Forest Too Long” by Max Ernst)
The the world is an egg and God is a lobster.
I believe in the eternal recurrence of the same.
I believe that one’s response to the notion presents an important philosophical test for overcoming nihilism.
I also believe that it is cosmologically true.
That’s pretty strange I think.
I’m really interested in this idea but I can’t really get my head around it. I mean, if the multiverse exists it could be that the simplest explanation for why WE exist is that “everything exists.” I’m basically thinking of Parfit’s “Why Anything? Why This?” The most ontologically simple explanation for why THIS universe exists is that “every universe exists.” Which would support the notion that reality is indeed truly infinite, which might make N.’s idea of the eternal recurrence possible? I’m still missing something. I’m trying to see how this could be “cosmologically true.”
In terms of the actual philosophical test, I’m also not 100% clear on why affirming any single moment means affirming all the rest that happened – is this because N is taking reality to be wholly deterministic? I could see how, if the universe is deterministic, that it would follow that affirming any moment entails affirming all that led up to it, because if the universe is deterministic then there is only one possible present for each actual past. But this is a question that has yet to be decided, and it requires an ontological commitment that is unwarranted in my opinion.
I go farther than that. The substrate- the basement of existence- is number (Platonism, of course). Number simply IS. This universe is denumerable (Cantor’s term) thanks to the holographic bound conjecture: its entropy is 2^10^122, the number of possible universes at this particular Planck-time (all exist, as much as this one). As I said, denumerable- like the set of integers, aleph-null, the smallest infinity. The set of real numbers is infinitely larger than aleph-null (though R contains I), of order aleph-one. The alephs themselves run to infinity. Somewhere in this is there God (Spinoza’s God)? This is as compact a summation as I can make.
Backwards causation — and, specifically, information transfer via the past — is the best explanation for spooky action at a distance.
I believe in this entity called The Good.
That all truths are necessary.
philosophical zombies
Numbers don’t exist.
[Also: It’s awesome to see a shout-out for backwards causation!]
There is no spoon.
(only matter arranged spoon-wise)
Ideocentrism: human beings are survival machines for ideas.
Chimpanzees are mind-readers.
If it feels good, it is good.
I believe in the very real existence of things that I cannot see or feel or hear (well, I can’t hear anything, so that’s sort of a gimme) or taste or touch that are called “ideas”.
That universities should have fewer deans and more full time faculty. Weird, huh?
Yeah, that’s pretty messed up, Geoff.
There is a puzzle about the arrow of time.
Christianity, as expressed in the Nicene Creed, is true. That is strange sounding to most philosophers today.
1. The very thought that natural laws get an actual grip on reality (rather than approximating the dispositions of nature) is stupid, quasi-religious hang-over that future philosophers will rightly laugh at. It’s 2015 and we are still clawing god out of science.
2. Life (which is everywhere in the universe) is just one of many ways matter organizes itself to better dispel energy.
3. Arguments from statistics claiming that radio-signal-using intelligent life must arise elsewhere in the universe are bullshit anthropocentrism. They claim that we cannot be so special so as to only arise once. But this is precisely to assume that the human scale and frame is special enough to be repeatable. Nature repeats itself, but it’s not going to repeat anything like US! On the cosmic scale, we are nothing.
4. The whole distinction between plants and animals is overwrought.
5. The form of consciousness we have is essentially a social practice.
6. The ability to recognize ourselves and others as persons is also the means for grasping objects as such. All objects are in effect persons stripped of personality (mostly).
1. I’m not so sure about this. I think there are two things here: the way nature actually works, and our description of how nature works. Our description gets closer and closer to the way nature actually works as our knowledge and tools improve. It seems very strange to me to think that our descriptions “just happen” to track reality as well as they do.
2. agree with this, but I’m not sure about life being everywhere in the universe due to the Rare Earth hypothesis. It’s possible that this is a freak accident.
3. agree- I’ve always thought that alien life would be so alien to us that communication might be impossible, even if it is intelligent. I’m also not sure that intelligence is even a good thing. It seems like it is, up to a point, but then it winds up doing more harm than good.
4. not sure about this, that does sound pretty strange – although, I might agree that there is little difference, morally, between a plant and an insect.
5. agree with this – I’ve long thought that “the ego” is a social construct and that in reality we have no “individual self.” There is an individual organism here which is constantly excreting conscious experience. There is nothing other than the organism which survives moment to moment. The self is a persistent illusion that we cling to because it gives order to our experience and it facilitates social interaction.
6. Yes!! this is a nice summary of many thoughts I’ve been having lately. There is no “person” just a crude ability/tendency to group certain properties together. In reality, there is only one thing – Parmenides, Einstein and Spinoza are right about this – a sea of fluctuating matter-energy that manifests different properties at different times, which, due to our evolved capacities, we label as individual “things.”
Psychology and the brain sciences are sustained by question begging and the ol’ bait-and-switch
The weirdest and most non-intuitive belief I have is probably that “(metaphysical) freedom” in the/a positive sense denotes a kind of ignorance, and a sort of restriction in the/a negative sense.
That collective groups can have perceptions– though that one’s too weird for most philosophers, too.
Free will nihilism.
Freedom isn’t being able to do whatever you want.
Negative acts are acts…
Put more absurdly: not doing things is doing things.
There exist mathematical structures of which you only speak truly by contradicting yourself. Far too weird for most philosophers, let alone most mathematicians.
There is only one substance (and it’s not matter or mind).
I don’t believe in beliefs.
The good man cannot be harmed.
Strangest philosophical exchange of beliefs:
Kantian 1: It is hard to point to space.
Kantian 2: It is hard not to point to space.
plenty of philosophers subscribe to at least one of these odd beliefs:
• There are no composite material objects (objects with parts); all there are are lots of particles arranged into relatively stable patterns (e.g., there are no dogs; there just are particles arranged “dog-wise”).
• Although there are composites, there are no artifacts that are composites: no human-made objects that have parts.
• No ordinary physical objects are colored; color is just in our experiences.
• No one has any beliefs; although we have many cognitive operations and states of various kinds, the notion of belief is a relatively primitive one that will be replaced upon future research.
• There is no substantive knowledge of the external world.
• There are no mathematical truths; mathematical theorems are practically useful but false.
• Pain is located only in the head, not in the rest of the body.
• There are no substantive moral truths, only moral opinions and feelings.
• The entire universe is just one particle plus a physical “pilot wave”; everything else is illusion (this is an ontological version of Bohmian quantum mechanics).
• No claims made with vague words are true even though many are useful in virtually all contexts.
• There are no truths; truth is an inconsistent concept, as shown by the semantic paradoxes.
Well, I ponder which came first, the egg or the lobster.
Plants ought to have legal rights.
To some, it feels good to murder, or torture. Do you stick with that belief?
I honestly have no idea whether or not I’m dreaming, or if I’m a brain in a vat, or what.
1) All that exists is minds and the thoughts in minds.
2) We are actually thoughts within a supremely powerful and rational mind (God).
3) The existence of God and our existence is explained by their being good.
4) Modal realism is true.
5) Everettian relative state theory (about QM) is true.
privation theory (i think)
That basically no now living person has benefitted from historically distant activities such as the industrial revolution due to Parfit’s non-identity problem.
1) That there is no such thing as ‘communication’ and that noone can ‘change their mind’ on the basis of dialogue (we are only going to have the ideas we are necessarily going to have by virtue of our intellectual disposition).
2) That you have to force the philosopher to teach (although it seems to be to the contrary!)
Hegel’s theoretical philosophy is, by and large, correct.
Theories of truth should not be able to explain the rational faultlessness of affirming hysteretical (“flip-floppy”) mental representations in terms of changing opinions about the truth of propositions.
That sounds totally strange and pompous, but the motivation is noble. It really just feeds off of the introspectively obvious fact that we don’t have a series of miniature mental breakdowns when we see the duck rabbit illusion and say “It is a duck” one minute and “it’s not a duck” the next.
There are objective, mind-indepedent facts about what is morally right, but I can’t tell you with confidence what any of them are.
The world is God’s love affair with herself.
We have moral duties to self. In fact, we probably wouldn’t have duties to others if we didn’t antecedently have duties to self.
We are how being thinks itself.
My telephone call to New York does, in fact, strengthen my conviction that the external world exists.
The Hegelian Dialectic is the best thing that ever happened to me.
Yesterday, someone lost a penny, and on the basis of that alone, went from being rich to being not rich.
If “I” has been adopted by a different family than the one who (as a matter of fact) adopted me, I would not exist.
And closely related: If I had not been put up for adoption by my biological mother, I would not exist.
Most non-human animals can’t feel pain, but do have aversive experiences.
The conjunction of theses I defended in two different books: (1) It’s morally impermissible for the state to punish people for breaking the law and (2) abortion is morally permissible even if the fetus is a person with the same right to life that you and I have.