Those questions ARE the human condition. We ARE curious about the big questions: What are we? What is this? Where did we come from? Where are we going? What is the purpose of life? What is the origin, purpose, and nature of Life, The Universe, and Everything?
To say that these answers can’t be known is the basis of ignorance. Philosophy may not be able to answer them now or ever, and there may NOT be ANY answer - but it helps us to define the questions and determine those answers for ourselves.
I love how your post derides these big questions as being a bunch of bullshit, then you not only pose some yourself, and answer them with one word conclusions with no supporting reasoning whatsoever.
If humans didn’t have intellectual curiosity, we would still be digging in the mud with sticks for survival and have very short, very shitty lives.
That set of ideas that you’ve expressed is called anti-intellectualism. You usually find this kind of thing in the belief systems of specific social psychologies. I’m not saying that YOU are necessarily have this social psychology - you can’t determine that by one post and who knows what your motivation may be or where you’re coming from.
Epistemology is the study of knowledge, and how it ties to belief and truth. Unless I’ve totally missed the point here. In such a case this definitely applies.
Just because it’s useful for progressing a conversation or understanding of a concept doesn’t mean it’s ‘true’. First before saying P=P or anything = anything, you first have to define parameters outside the construct of your own consciousness.
You are still basing that on the what is observed, and assuming what is observed is real in any sense. Since you can’t say for sure that any observation has any relation to truth, or that observation of any ‘truth’ is possible, than the reliability of what is observed must be based on SOME assumption.
Now you are just confusing the acceptance of limitation, with giving up in the face of them. I kind of hope you can approach this a bit more maturely…
Again you are ignoring fundamental limitations. It’s not an argument from ignorance if there is no claim being made. There is no argument. There is just acknowledgment that ( as you have repeated ) in order to have any sort of progressive conversation assumptions must be made. You keep saying ‘in order to’ and ‘useful’ when that isn’t a requirement.
P=P is neither true or false until P is given some sort of reference or until you accept that P ‘means something’. When I say assumption from here on out, how about you read it as ’ the brain accepting as accurate ’ either conscientiously or on a more base level.
The point is that, yes, we do have to make some assumptions when having a conversation, but just because we have to start from an assumption doesn’t mean that the tools and concepts can’t provide some success, or that results from attempts to understand and observe are pointless.
Several people here have made the assumption that I believe anything one way or the other on this, but I’ve merely posed questions. They weren’t rhetorical. They were designed to incite conversations from multiple views. No one here knows anything about what my actual opinions are yet. I haven’t stated an opinion.
The one thing I will share is that I value verifiable observation, and critical thinking. I don’t sit around questioning the point of it all, but I do like talking about the concepts simply because I find them interesting.
When you say it that way… I may have experienced that each time I sleep, all the furniture gets moved just slightly so that I will have a highly increased chance of hitting my toes at at least one of the closest object to my bed.
Also when we are talking about this being comparable to the Matrix, like superior forces from another dimension… have anyone heard this theory at least once from a conspiracy theorist called “David Icke”?
Why is the burden of proof on the person NOT making a claim?
You can’t START with an assumption and then say all evidence based on the assumption is evidence.
If I said. ‘I’m not a brain in a jar hooked up to electrodes.’
That is MAKING a claim. I am claiming to be more than I can actually prove to myself.
Things I CAN say are ’ I am a conciousness. ’ because in order to say / think this I must first BE a conciousness.
I can say I think you are a real person when I meet someone. I cannot KNOW they are anything more than a perception of my brain though.
You can’t know I exist. I can SAY that I exist to you, but you can only perceive these things with your brain which can be easily fooled. A brain in a jar can be sent a simulation of this message.
As has been pointed out, this makes it all but impossible for any sort of rationality or conversation to occur. So while we base everything on an assumption, unless we do there is no point to anything really.
So we need a basic level of assumption. There is no way around it that I can see. It would seem though, that piling assumptions is bad because it can quickly turn the ground you stand an argument on becomes shaky. Since we are already standing on an assumption for our reasoning and understanding, then we must to our best with both to make the best judgements possible. So, this means we have to be extra diligent, and attentive to our limitations. Avoid assumptions and conclusions without the strong base of evidence.
As I see it there is three things to do with the realization that there is very little we actually know. First we can accept that there is a possibility nothing is real and act like a madman. Or we can use what tools we have to do what we can. The third thing is the one I see a lot of people do, that I don’t like, and that’s to take the assumption, and make all sorts of more assumptions on whatever ‘feels’ right, or what ‘seems’ right.
Personally I like the middle option because it seems to follow the most likely possibility, and has ways of seeming correct on the best reasoning tools available. This is based on the assumption that my reasoning tools are useful in any way and that there is a reality they relate to.
This thread make me think of a 5th (or 11th according to the super string theory) dimension where giant bunny aliens are the most intelligent creatures and make computers that looks like this:
This is their version of a quantum computer where the data is stored as triplet codes inside of the nucleus of our cells.
That is my theory if we ever were created by an interdimensional force.
I said the burden of proof is on the person making the claim not the one who hasn’t, if you make a claim you need evidence for it if you don’t have evidence to support your claim then that is evidence itself against your claim. It is a common arguement in the is god real debates. If a person said we are all apart of some simulation program then that person ned to give evidence to support his or her claim if they have no evidence then that counts as evidence that we aren’t apart of some simulation game
And as for the " you can’t know I exist" you are the one making that claim, you need evidence to prove to me that you don’t, but since you have no evidence and i do such as eye witnesses of your posts, your absence of evidence means your statement is false
Are you sure it isn’t tiny “TYL (Terrorize Your Life) gnomes”. I found out it was them that moved all my furniture after I sat up a trap. Try putting another helium balloon in a cage with a piece of cheese for good measure.
If the balloon disappears and a creature is stuck in the cage, it was that creature that stole the balloon.
If the balloon is gone, but the trap is not set off, it was ghosts.
If you hit your toes at the cage, it was TYL-gnomes.
If the cage and the balloon is sucked into another dimension, then this has something with this thread to do.
You are still missing my point. ‘You can’t know I exist or don’t exist’ isn’t a claim made by me, you simply can’t. I can claim to exist, or I can claim to not exist. What I’m saying is that when you form a belief one way or another, it is based on an assumption.
If you walked up to me and said ’ I am real. I exist. ’ Well you are making a claim, in the same way as if you walked up to me and said ’ I am not real. I don’t exist. ’ The thing is, I can’t really know. I can use evidence I assume is reliable to convince myself. I can see you. I can hear you. I can ask others if they think you are real. I can use cameras to take pictures of you, and show the pictures to others. However, I must go on the assumption that the evidence is useful. My experience is my conciousness, and my experiences are restricted to me. Since I can’t experience anything for sure outside my own conciousness then I can’t prove anything about you TO MYSELF.
Say you provide me with mountains of evidence for something. You have every possible form of conveying information to me. I would probably believe you, but it’s on the assumption that both you and by proxy the evidence you deliver to me is real, and not just part of some imagined fantasy of my conciousness.
Again, for all I know I’m just a brain in bowl hooked up to electrodes. I can’t know one way or the other. I would only be able to assume I’m not. I’m talking about justifying your own existence to yourself. Strictly internal.
Now that I’m remembering it better, it was a sort of physics hack. About an hour before it disappeared, I put a certain amount of weight on it to make it float in mid-air and not move up or down, a helium balloon with an ATX expansion slot cover taped to it.
No, the claim is that reality is just a massive computer simulation. Is there any evidence of that?
Saying that I’m real is NOT…let me repeat that… NOT[/SIZE] an assumption. It is based on hard, scientific evidence and can be corroborated by multiple external sources.
What there isn’t evidence for is the assumption that all the evidence that currently exists is somehow flawed and we should be thinking something else, like a computer simulation and that all of our evidence is just inside a program.
It makes for great mental masturbation, but until someone provides even a single solitary shred of evidence that this hypothesis is true, it’ll remain a hypothesis. So, provide evidence that you’re a brain in a bowl. Right now, all evidence points to the fact that you’re a human being sitting behind a computer of some sort.
I have evidence, every law of physics we know of is based on math, the processing unit crunching the numbers of the universe must have occurred naturally, due to the passage of time and ability to generate random numbers.
I don’t think the giant, super intelligent alien rabbits from another dimension control the laws of physics, but I believe that they made an attempt on quantum computers by putting variables in triplet codes in DNA molecules in a nucleus in a crap load (as the scientific term would be for it) of cells inside your body.
And that’s how the government works! Before I wanted to make a conspiracy of flying invisible cats from another dimension gets killed by airplanes, but this seems “a little more realistic”. :retard:[/SIZE]
Well the dual slot experiment shows that the behavior of particles depends on observation, which would be what is expected in a simulation run by computing power. That isn’t the point I’m making though. It’s impossible to trust external evidence, because you can’t dislocate yourself from your own consciousness to verify any of it.
Again, this is not an external claim. It is an internal postulation. You are assuming that the evidence is relevant without evidence that any of it is. Because you are limited by your own consciousness there is no way for you to verify external evidence.
How can you know the origin of external sources? Is there any way you can verify that external sources are generated by what you think they are without using external sources as a reference point?
Also, you saying you are ‘real’ is the only thing you CAN say. Because you can question and answer yourself you are indeed SOME form of consciousness. If you weren’t you couldn’t pose the question.
You are falling into the hole of saying that lack of evidence for one thing means evidence for the opposition. You cannot even provide evidence that perception is anything more than impulses in a brain because all evidence is gathered and interpreted by your brain ( seemingly ).
There is no evidence either way. Even the dual slot experiment I mentioned is based on the assumption of the accuracy of observation. You cannot provide evidence that isn’t external to your own consciousness…
I tried to prove internally to myself using excuses like natural thought impulses and instinct, but none of it works. It’s impossible to even verify any of what one would call natural self verifying proofs.
I can provide evidence that is external to my own consciousness. Let’s say that I program a computer to recognize lightwaves entering a sensor between 440–490 nm in wavelength as the color blue.
Now, I shoot a beam of light that I believe to be blue and it detects a wavelength of 475 nm. Now, what color will the computer identify the light as?
Now, have someone else shoot a light beam of their own into the sensor, one that I don’t see, but the computer detects as being 460 nm in length. The computer will, again, identify the color as blue.
Inversely, I shoot a beam of light into a sensor that I didn’t create or program that is between 630–740 nm in length. Now the computer identifies it as red. This is external evidence to my own consciousness.
You can do it today just by opening a Photoshop-like program (or even Microsoft Paint) and using the eyedropper tool on a color you believe to be “red” or “blue” and the color will be confirmed to be red or blue just by the values assigned to it.
Now, you come in and state that invisible fairy pixies are the cause. You don’t provide evidence, but say that, since I can’t prove that isn’t invisible fairy pixies, then all the evidence that I have can be summarily dismissed.
How silly is that?
Until you can provide any evidence of this “other world” or whatever, then we have to go by whatever evidence is available to us. DO YOU HAVE ANY EVIDENCE OF THIS OTHER THING? DO YOU HAVE EVIDENCE OF THE EXISTENCE OF THIS “EXTERNAL” THING OF WHICH YOU SPEAK?
If your answer is anything other than “Yes”, then what good is your claim (and, yes, it’s a claim)?
You STILL aren’t getting it. All of that is external. You are still only perceiving it from your own perspective. You can’t even know for sure there is a computer, a lens, or even the readout. You can’t even verify your own body.
I keep saying there is no evidence, and that there is no possible evidence. I also keep saying that you can’t make any claim without the assumption that anything what your consciousness perceives is at all real or related to any sort of ‘reality’.
I say it again. I make no claim other than the only self verifying truth is the question ’ am I a consciousness? ’ .
Without expanding your consciousness beyond the internal, there is no other self verifying truth that isn’t based on the assumption that the input into your consciousness is representative of external reality. You can’t use the external to prove the accuracy of the external existentially.
Founded in 2004, Leakfree.org became one of the first online communities dedicated to Valve’s Source engine development. It is more famously known for the formation of Black Mesa: Source under the 'Leakfree Modification Team' handle in September 2004.
