Down the rabbit hole of infinity

It is a point that irritates many irrational people that once you accept certain premises, you must either be a hypocrite or paralyzed by total nihilism.

When I used to discuss on IRC, it happened that I encountered people who said that reality was wholly subjective. When I was sure that the person believed this, I then asked them to believe very strongly that I would not ban them. After all, if reality is wholly subjective then their desire would certainly be able to nullify any "objective" action of mine. Then I banned them. Theoretically, if reality was subjective, then reality is determined solely by one's mind, and they should have been able to simply wish my actions away.

But none of them were ever able to wish my actions away. I wonder why. Maybe I just need to believe that they did.

You can call such a premise a "rabbit hole". Once you get into a rabbit hole, you're stuck in it, with no way to get back up. Once you accept the idea that reality is subjective, you have no more way of knowing anything, and the only logical consequence is generalized epistemic anxiety. You can no longer know if your chair will hold you, if the chair might turn into an eggplant, or even that it already has turned into an eggplant and you are hallucinating that you are sitting on a chair. You could also be dreaming, or not-dreaming, or neither, or both at the same time. The laws of logic, being objective, must fly out of the window. The end result is total insanity.

Another type of rabbit hole is the idea that reality is subjective because of an exterior agency. Take the Evil Daemon argument - that there is an evil demon out there, able to change reality as it desires, and which can also make you not realize its existence. If this was true, then how could we really know anything? Anything one brings up could be a pure fabrication of the Daemon. We can't even appeal to the Daemon's motives, since any motive we come up with could also have been fed to us by the Daemon. There is no way to get back up to reality from here, once we accept the premise of a being with what amounts to infinite capacity.

This situation reminds me of one cult which I like to read about, the cult around Indian guru Sai Baba. He claims to be God himself and that everything that happens is his doing. This is a profound rabbit hole indeed, if you can believe that. Then anything bad that happens is really just a test of your faith! Convenient indeed!

The movement around [Sai Baba] interprets everything doubtful so as to make it seem wise, even at the cost of all common sense and reason. The whole teaching is built upon on the assumption of [Sai Baba]'s 'divine infallibility' (supposedly far greater than any Pope's) which may not be questioned and which generates a self-reproducing system of delusions, of preconceptions and subtle discriminations against those who reject it.
http://home.no.net/anir/Sai/enigma/dis6.htm

This kind of claim can even lead a woman to deny that her rape has actually happened. This is powerful delusion! And yet, if everything is the product of Sai Baba's will, doesn't her doubt make perfect sense?

Now I'm sure you see where I'm going with this- I'm going to talk about God. And the most obvious objection, as Descartes brought up in his own examination of the Evil Daemon argument, is that God is good and would never try to deceive us. But that is not acceptable in the rabbit hole. How do you know that God is good? Because the Bible says so? God could have written lies in the Bible. Because you believe it? God could have implanted that belief in you. Any argument that the Christian uses to justify his beliefs, even emotional or faith-based arguments, can be defeated easily.

In essence, we are back in the Cartoon Universe, with us as the hapless cartoons. Even if it was conscious, how could a mere cartoon character assume that he can see through the machinations of his cartoonist? We would call such a character very naive indeed. Yet this is the position that Christians are in. Once moral autonomy is suspended, anything goes.

The fact is, once they accept the notion of an infinite god, Christians cannot even justify their basic premises. The existence of "Jesus"? Could be a fabrication by God to make you believe that he cares about your existence. Original sin? How do you know it exists? Where is it? Heaven and Hell? Could be completely implanted.

How do you know anything? "Duh, I just do." Welcome to the rabbit hole...