As a philosopher, I don’t think I’d agree that there is no crazy town. Plenty of lines of argument really do lead to absurd conclusions, and if you actually followed through you’d be literally crazy. For example, you might decide that you are probably a boltzmann brain and that the best thing you can do is think happy thoughts as hard as you can because you are about to be dissolved into nothingness. Or you might decide that an action is morally correct iff it maximizes expected utility, but because of funnel-shaped action profiles every action has undefined expected utility and so every action is morally correct.
What I’d say instead of “there is no crazy town” is that the train line is not a single line but a tree or web, and when people find themselves at a crazy town they just backtrack and try a different route. Different people have different standards for what counts as a crazy town; some people think lots of things are crazy and so they stay close to home. Other people have managed to find long paths that seem crazy to some but seem fine to them.
Taking the Boltzmann brain example, isn’t the issue that the premises that would lead to such a conclusion are incorrect, rather than the conclusion being “crazy” per se?
In many cases in philosophy, if we are honest with ourselves, we find that the reason we think the premises are incorrect is that we think the conclusion is crazy. We were perfectly happy to accept those premises until we learned what conclusions could be drawn from them.
what I meant to say with that point is that the tracks never stop, i.e. no matter how crazy an argument seems, there might always be something that seems even crazier. Or from the perspective of the person who is exploring the frontiers, there will always be another interesting question to ask that goes further than the previous one.
As a philosopher, I don’t think I’d agree that there is no crazy town. Plenty of lines of argument really do lead to absurd conclusions, and if you actually followed through you’d be literally crazy. For example, you might decide that you are probably a boltzmann brain and that the best thing you can do is think happy thoughts as hard as you can because you are about to be dissolved into nothingness. Or you might decide that an action is morally correct iff it maximizes expected utility, but because of funnel-shaped action profiles every action has undefined expected utility and so every action is morally correct.
What I’d say instead of “there is no crazy town” is that the train line is not a single line but a tree or web, and when people find themselves at a crazy town they just backtrack and try a different route. Different people have different standards for what counts as a crazy town; some people think lots of things are crazy and so they stay close to home. Other people have managed to find long paths that seem crazy to some but seem fine to them.
Taking the Boltzmann brain example, isn’t the issue that the premises that would lead to such a conclusion are incorrect, rather than the conclusion being “crazy” per se?
In many cases in philosophy, if we are honest with ourselves, we find that the reason we think the premises are incorrect is that we think the conclusion is crazy. We were perfectly happy to accept those premises until we learned what conclusions could be drawn from them.
what I meant to say with that point is that the tracks never stop, i.e. no matter how crazy an argument seems, there might always be something that seems even crazier. Or from the perspective of the person who is exploring the frontiers, there will always be another interesting question to ask that goes further than the previous one.