bad questions
29 Aug 2026 - 29 Aug 2026
- There must be a better name and probably a pre-existing page for this idea. I mean eg free will question, things that are obviously insoluble (or it would have been solved) and indicate an ill-posed question, a fake dualism that you should ignore if you want to see the world as it really is.
- I recently realized that the atheism question was also like that, although that seems kind of radical, it opens me to not just to ideas about God, but the actual God or gods or whatever is outside the scope of Newton's vision.
- So then is naturalism vs supernaturalism. This is kind of the WS, Alan Moore, magicky view of the world. Which I am growing to accept more and more, not that you will find be chanting at a Thelemite temple anytime soon.
- OK are there other pages in ammdi that already talk about this Ask Claude
- I can't search ammdi directly since I don't have access to your personal notes system, but I can give you a solid map of the pre-existing philosophical vocabulary for this idea, and flag the closest LessWrong/rationalist-adjacent concepts that overlap with what you're describing.
The pre-existing terms for this idea
- Your concept clusters around a few well-established philosophical categories:
1. Pseudo-problem (Scheinproblem) — the closest match
- Ernst Mach called Du Bois-Reymond's "riddles" meaningless "pseudo-problems" (Scheinprobleme), a notion adopted by the Vienna Circle.
- This is probably the most precise term: questions that appear substantive but dissolve once you examine the assumptions embedded in them. Carnap, the logical positivists, and Wittgenstein all worked with this idea.
2. Dissolving the question — the LessWrong/rationalist framing
- Dissolving a question and answering it are two different things. To dissolve a question is to rid yourself of all confusion regarding it, so that either the question reveals itself to be a wrong question, or the answer becomes ridiculously obvious.
- This is Eliezer Yudkowsky's framing on LessWrong, and it's applied explicitly to free will.
- There does indeed seem to be something weird about the question which deserves scrutiny — answering the question doesn't fully address the confusion that the question represents.
- LessWrong also has a post literally called "Wrong Questions" which is in the same cluster.
3. False dilemma / false dichotomy — the logic framing
- A false dilemma is an informal fallacy based on a premise that erroneously limits what options are available — it oversimplifies the choice by excluding viable alternatives, presenting only two absolute choices when in fact there could be many.
- This covers the naturalism/supernaturalism split you're identifying.
4. Wittgenstein's therapeutic dissolution
- Wittgenstein wasn't trying to "solve" these problems but to "dissolve" them. His philosophical method was described as "therapy," aimed at showing "the fly the way out of the fly-bottle." We get trapped when we apply the rules of one language game to another where they don't belong.
- Our profoundest philosophical confusions often stem not from a lack of answers, but from asking questions that language was never designed to answer in the first place.
On your specific examples
- Free will:
- Genuine problems may be solved, but pseudo-problems don't have genuine solutions — they have no solutions at all — they can only be dissolved.
- Free will is the canonical example for all three frameworks above.
- Atheism / naturalism vs supernaturalism: The LessWrong "Wrong Questions" post explicitly treats these as instances where the framing itself is the problem — once you taboo the loaded terms, the question either becomes answerable empirically or evaporates.
For ammdi
- I can't search your ammdi pages directly, but based on the concepts involved, pages that might already touch this in your notes:
- free will — almost certainly
- reductionism or emergence — the naturalism question lives here
- language or Wittgenstein if you have one — the pseudo-problem framing
- Alan Moore — you've linked this to the magick/naturalism question yourself
- Suggested page name options:
[[pseudo-problems]],[[dissolving questions]],[[wrong questions]], or[[bad questions]](which is fine as a name — it's direct and you clearly know what it means). The LessWrong tag for this is literally "Dissolving the Question" if you want an established label.
- Ah OK, rationalism got there first
- Yudkowsky on free will and reductionism (everybody hates on Y but actually he can be pretty good) Dissolving the Question — LessWrong
- Wonder how far he takes that though (not to [a]theism I bet)