Analetheism

I can never tell how much of my experience is reality and how much is just (the reality or psychology of) me. That is of course the classic metaphysical divide: between self and external world, between self and other, between subjective and objective, between desire and fact, between appearance or illusion and reality. (Not to mention that that very divide is itself subject to doubt.) One of the great insights I have derived from amoralism is that the strength of one's conviction  (factual or normative) can be an indication of its very opposite, that is, that what-one-is-convinced-about can turn out to be false, or at least doubtful. (I won't go so far as to say that conviction is a  measure , such that what one is convinced about is doubtful  to the degree  that one is convinced it is true. But it often seems that way!)       Perhaps, then, all of the great insights of philosophy (and the content of wisdom) are instances of discoverin...

Like, I imagine, you, Dear Reader, whenever I form an opinion I assume it manifests Truth. A certain smug aura surrounds this feeling, especially relative to another person or people who may have a different opinion. But in recent months or years I've had a very sobering thought (I resist saying "realization" to avoid forming another smug opinion!), namely, that, far from occupying a position of Truth at these times, I may be (again, I resist saying "am in fact" ... although that is what the strength of this thought feels like) only falling into a slot relative to other slots. I thereby acquire a perspective on myself that much diminishes my presumed authority in all things; surrenders the human-oh-so-human prerogative to situate oneself in the very lap of Truth; a mini-Copernican Revolution to remove myself from the center of my known universe. Concrete (and chilling!) example: In the Trump impeachment proceedings my natural inclination is to side with the inte...

  Guidelines for doctors recommend prescribing cholesterol medication for patients who show a ten percent (or even lower) chance of developing heart disease over the next ten years by the most recent approved measure. When I first heard about this it struck me as odd, even absurd: another case of a hammer seeing everything as a nail. For doctors, all of us are only varying degrees of sick, and hence in need of treatment, since we are never perfectly healthy, right? But how could 10 percent be something to worry about? Isn’t it intuitive that something is probable only if it's >50 percent? And 10 percent is so far below that that it seems downright   im probable.     But then I thought about it in a different way: Suppose someone handed you a revolver with ten chambers in the cylinder and a bullet in one of them. Would you be willing to play Russian roulette?     Or suppose you were one of ten people in a room, one of whom was to be chosen at random to be...