Degrees and Kinds of Stupidity



Many stupid ideas take the form "There is nothing outside ____".

One thing that makes ideas stupid is their capacity to capture a brain, to render it incapable of thinking certain thoughts.  We can thus measure the stupidity of ideas in at least two ways: (1) the scope and range of brain function that a stupid idea prevents you from having, and (2) the "grip," so to speak, that this idea has on your brain - that is to say, the degree of difficulty of removing this idea from your brain and liberating yourself from it.  Stupid ideas can be awfully clever.  Wittgenstein is a perfect example of a thinker that was capable of producing ingeniously clever stupid ideas - that is, ideas that, once they have locked themselves onto a person's brain, become fiendishly difficult to dislodge.

On the low stupidity end of the spectrum, we have a statement like "There is nothing outside of my mind."  That is to say, solipsism.

A significantly stupider idea would be something like, "There is nothing outside of mind."  That is, not the individual's own mind, but mind per se.  It takes a lot more work to think one's way out of this idea, once one has fallen into it.  It is a much more sophisticated kind of stupidity, with a much stronger grip, though it is not invincible.

Even stupider than that would be something like, "There is nothing outside of ideas."  This, which one might call "Absolute Idealism," is significantly stupider than the idea that there is nothing outside of mind, because it excludes so much more.  Even within the mind, there is so much more than ideas.  For a brain to cut off all rational access to everything other than its own ideas is far, far narrower constraint.

Perhaps the stupidest idea of all is "There is nothing outside of language."  This is much, much stupider than solipsism, and much stupider than what I'm calling Absolute Idealism, because, again, so much more has been cut off.  After all, not all ideas are linguistic, or capable of being expressed in language.  So you're cutting off not only the outside world, not only much of the interior, mental world, but also you're cutting off even many of the ideas that remain.  Mental activity has been reduced to a bare minimum.

Could there be ideas even stupider than that?  I'm not sure.  I suspect that any attempt to create an idea stupider than that idea will fail, because one kind of stupidity (the scope and range of brain non-function) will only be gained at the cost of the other kind of stupidity (the grip that the stupid idea has on one's brain) or vice versa.  For instance, if one were to say, "There is nothing outside of this sentence," this would cut off even more of the brain's potential to think, but it's pretty easy to think your way out of that one - simply provide a counter-example.

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