Emotivism: The argument from self-consistency

I like thought which preserves a whiff of flesh and blood, and I prefer a thousand times an idea rising from sexual tension or nervous depression to an empty abstraction. Haven't people learned yet that the time of superficial intellectual games is over, that agony is infinitely more important than syllogism, that a cry of despair is more revealing than the most subtle thought, and that tears always have deeper roots than smiles?

The problem with some nihilisms, especially epistemological nihilism, is a kind of inconsistency. This kind of inconsistency is not logical inconsistency, but a kind of "personal inconsistency".

Let's see one example: epistemological nihilism.

Epistemological nihilism states that there is no way to know truths. There are various kinds of epistemological nihilism:

• Ontological: truths don't exist;
• Skeptical: there are no methods for us to know the truth;
• Meta skeptical: there are, but we can't know which methods actually work;

The common rejection is this: If you believe in epistemological nihilism, then you believe in something, but that's not justifiable, by epistemological nihilism.

Accelerate without humanity: Summary of Nick Land's philosophy

I took note of the philosopher Nick Land from reading about posthumanism on Wikipedia.

A more pessimistic alternative to transhumanism in which humans will not be enhanced, but rather eventually replaced by artificial intelligences. Some philosophers, including Nick Land, promote the view that humans should embrace and accept their eventual demise. This is related to the view of "cosmism", which supports the building of strong artificial intelligence even if it may entail the end of humanity, as in their view it "would be a cosmic tragedy if humanity freezes evolution at the puny human level".

I was intrigued by such boldness, so I read more. And turns out Nick Land's writing is sometimes easy to read but most of the times extremely hard to read, and probably garbage. I wrote this post so that you don't have to waste time wading through the garbage, looking for fragments of good poetry.

Nothing human makes it out of the near-future.

Survey of moral realism and irrealism

Note: philosophers use "ethics" and "morality" as the same word.

The moral realism vs irrealism contrast is the most important contrast in metaethics, the study about what ethics is, such as whether morality is objective, subjective, emotion-based, rationality-based, changeable over time, etc.

Realism says morality is real in some sense, while irrealism says it isn't.

Infinity

For an example of such a contrast, we can consider the positions on infinity in mathematics. Realism would simply say that infinity exists, is an actual mathematical object, and there's a symbol of it, ω. Irrealism would claim that ω is just a convenient fiction, and merely stands for the endlessness of natural numbers.

There are very fine-grained notions of realism vs irrealism in the study of infinity, too, used by expert set theorists. Most set theorists consider the first few infinities unproblematic, but as they climb up the ladder of infinities, they encounter more and more abstract infinities. They often draw a line somewhere and proclaim infinities beneath some line real and above unreal.