Maybe I just need to reason harder. That will work, right?
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These sound like depression tweets but they're mostly laughing at myself tweets. It is admittedly a bit gallows humour.
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Me: OK. Postulate that people have intrinsic worth.
My feelings: Yup, with you so far.
Me: And I am a person.
My feelings: I will concede this point.
Me: Therefore by modus ponens I have intrinsic worth.
My feelings: Sorry, I don't follow.
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honestly sometimes when i work with this stuff the catch actually happens at “i am a person”
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I think I'm OK on that front. I have variants of that I get a bit more stuck on ("What sort of person am I?" is a rough one), but I've sufficiently thoroughly internalised the personhood of others that it seems hard not to extend that to myself.
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Which is not to say that there aren't missing bits and lurking demons, but I've built around the missing bits and mostly achieved detente with the demons.
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next it’s time to check whether your feelings believe that modus ponens is true 😅
(have you read EGB? there’s a dialogue about this!)
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EGB = GEB (Godel Escher Bach) or something else?
I think when I ask my feelings whether modus ponens is true the response is something along the lines of vague bafflement at the question.
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oh lol yes GEB
yeah that’s about what i’d expect, i don’t think feelings understand modus ponens
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Yeah, that's kinda where I got to in
Quote Tweet
Hmmm this was a shitpost but actually now that I think about it, my mental model of how feelings work *is* that they're the bit of you that is very clever but can't do propositional reasoning, and this kinda makes a lot of sense in that light.
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yeahhh. although looking back on previous tweet i wonder if it’s more like my feelings don’t *believe in* modus ponens, and specifically in like the whole concept of universal features of universal categories, or something like that
Hmmm.
So I feel like I can have intuitions about mathematics, right? So it seems like in that context I can have a felt belief about modus ponens and that it's true.
Perhaps feelings don't believe modus ponens in the sense that it's literally not true for feelings?
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Like it is true that I can simultaneously feel that all of "A", "If A then B", and "not B" are true, just as a matter of empirical fact, so feelings about statements form a "logic" in which modus ponens is just literally false and thus reasonable not to believe in.
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