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To: exmarine
You go to great lengths to sell the absurd but it's not working. My senses know a leaf when I see it, and know coffee when I smell it, the color blue, the feel of sandpaper. Are these illusions or are they real? My senses tell me that the particulars in my world are real. My senses (which have great empirical evidential value) say these things are real, so your statement is silly. What do your senses tell you? Are you now going to say that I have no way of knowing if these objects are illusions? Go ahead - the fact will remain that my senses tell me that they are real. That is the preponderance of evidence I was referring to - sensory evidence. Can't argue with that pal. I'll bet you look both ways before crossing the street, don't you? Sure you do - you know that oncoming car is real, eh.

So you do actually believe we'd be more, um, faded looking if we existed because someone (or God) dreamed us up? And where was the proof you were going to offer up? If I were whipping up a good illusion of reality, don't you think I'd take the trouble to condition your mind, when I created it, to convince you everything was really real?

I think you're the one whose been sucking up his ontological philosophy from hollywood movies. Just because pseudo-reality has more glitches than a dog has fleas in a hollywood movie like "Matrix" does not make that a blueprint for the solution to a problem that's stumped the best players in the philosophy game for going on 200 years.

5,453 posted on 01/19/2003 1:49:46 AM PST by donh
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To: donh
I think you're the one whose been sucking up his ontological philosophy from hollywood movies. Just because pseudo-reality has more glitches than a dog has fleas in a hollywood movie like "Matrix" does not make that a blueprint for the solution to a problem that's stumped the best players in the philosophy game for going on 200 years.

Robert Nozick, the recently deceased Harvard philosopher who wrote Anarchy, State, and Utopia which caused a huge stir around 25 or 30 years ago, presented the problem of being unknowingly hooked up to an "experience machine" which would flawlessly reproduce for you all the sensory input of real life. If I recall, the issue wasn't whether one could tell the difference between the machine and reality (it was assumed that one could not) but whether -- for the individual involved -- it really was different enough that he should care one way or the other.

5,458 posted on 01/19/2003 8:18:26 AM PST by PatrickHenry (Creationists secretly admire PH)
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To: donh
As I suspected, there are websites devoted to the issue, for example:
Nozick's Experience Machine.
5,459 posted on 01/19/2003 8:33:30 AM PST by PatrickHenry (Creationists secretly admire PH)
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To: donh
So you do actually believe we'd be more, um, faded looking if we existed because someone (or God) dreamed us up? And where was the proof you were going to offer up? If I were whipping up a good illusion of reality, don't you think I'd take the trouble to condition your mind, when I created it, to convince you everything was really real?

The problem for you is that you live your life AS IF all of the particulars were REAL. You relate to the world as if it were real - if you didn't, you could not function! You breath air as if it were real and if suddenly you could not get oxygen, the pain in your lungs would certainly feel real! You have just created a massive dichotomy for yourself in supporting your silly argument. You can't live as if the universe were an illusion, you must live as if it were real. THERE IS A SUBJECT/OBJECT RELATIONSHIP - in fact there are thousands of such relationships. God created the subjects and the objects so it would only make sense that they would have relationships. The universe if chock full of such relationships, not only with regard to human life, but also in Physics, physiology, chemistry, etc. Therefore, your argument falls on the evidence of your own life experience. Yes, deny it all you want, but the evidence of your own life and how you live it and relate to the things in the world supports a real universe, not an illusory one. That goes for your pal Berkeley too.

The position you are attempting to argue is the ultimate skepticism that results when men start from themselves and have no infinite reference point. Rationalism only ends in skepticism.

5,489 posted on 01/20/2003 6:56:06 AM PST by exmarine
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