The philosophy thread general discussion

Sapient-entity-originated Art then?

Organic=Natural. "Deliberate" would include all those other types.

I am not a philosopher although I do comtemplate a lot but what is nature fo reality? What is 'real' and what is the 'illusion'?

Real stuff is whatever can kill you.

Well I sometimes expect things to happen but they don't. So I refer to thing that determines my experimental results reality.

Still, is there more ot this rea;ity thing than just what is seen?

That depends on what you believe. If you are a hard materialist then the answer is "no".

No, if you're a hard materialist, the answer is "yes". There's so much that is material that isn't perceived. I mean, dark matter hasn't actually be perceived by anyone, only inferred, yet most materialists would say it exists. If anyone is arguing that there is nothing to the world beyond our perceptions of it, it's idealists like Berkeley who think the world literally is only our perceptions of it.

I took GAP's use of the term "illusion" vs. "reality" to mean "perceivable" vs. "objectively undetectable".

And, still, a materialist would still say that things can be existent and objectively undetectable. It's only the Berkeleyean idealist who rejects that.

I think you're overthinking it. GAP was pretty clearly refering to a type of dualistic philosophy in which the world we can see is just an illusion, and the reality is in some sense "behind" it. This is not a reference to dark matter, it's to a kind of meta-reality.

That is what I was thinking of. I wonder if there is more to this rather 'reality' and 'illusion' thing that I realized?

And what I should have said was that if true reality cannot affect our illusiory world in any detectable way, then we can never know. All we can know is the world of our senses, a la the British Empiricists; and Hume's response to Berkley. Since that's all we can know, we might as well treat it as the real thing. From this comes the Skeptic's insistence that anything which cannot be directly observed or measured does not exist. Those of us who have faith in more than that must justify our belief on non-empirical grounds.

There might be things that exist that have no effect on us in any way whatsoever, but there's no reason to care because the world you experience would be exactly the same if they did not.

Well there are inferred invisibles. If something crosses our cosmic event horizon it still makes sense to treat it as existing. Outcomes of our actions that happen out there would still count.

The existence of parallel universe is implied by quantum mechanics unless you add another postulate, that's sole role is to avoid this.

But the main ethical consequence of this (if there's no after life) is quantum immortality, which among other things would make suicide pointless, and depending on how you figure it, make death in general much worst.

I'm curious about scientism, which says that science should be the absolute authority on everything. Specifically, why exactly, it would be a bad philosophy to follow, according to Nietzsche.

Just thread hopping, but I remember a joke I used to hear from some of my sparring buddies.

In a fight between a solipsist and a materialist, you can bet the materialist is usually going to win for reasons that need not be explained.

Well, I thought it was funny. Talk amongst yourselves.

Speaking of which, what is the difference between materialism and solipism?

They're pretty much polar opposites. Materialism is the belief that only material things exist — atoms and energy, chemicals and compounds, etc. "Love" does not exist; it's just certain chemical reactions in certain individuals of certain species. If you can't observe it, weigh it, measure it, it doesn't exist — it isn't real, and any perception of it is just a quirk caused by interactions between things that are real (like the complex collection of neurochemicals in your brain).

Solipsism, on the other hand, is the belief that you can't be sure that anything except your internal, subjective experiences really exist. You know that those experiences exist because... well, you're experiencing them. However, you don't know that those experience reflect reality. You could be trapped in the Matrix, your mind thinking that you're living your life while your body is actually being used as a battery for the machine overlords. You could be a computer program, your mind merely part of an enormous digital simulation. You could be a bare soul, tricked by demonic illusions into believing that you have a body. There are any number of ways that your perception of reality could be false. The perception itself certainly exists (given that you're perceiving it right now), but nothing else can be proven.

Personally, I don't find either of them to be particularly useful philosophies. Saying "I certainly exist, but I can't prove that the rest of the universe does" and "the universe certainly exists, but I can't prove that I do" are both forms of extreme skepticism, just pointed in opposite directions. Neither actually illustrates anything useful about ourselves or the world around us.

edited 2nd Jan '15 1:58:24 PM by NativeJovian

I think your thinking of eliminative materialism. My own view is that love exists, it has measurable effect, but it isn't an additional force. It is at any moment made entirely out of atoms.

I have a similar opinion about the "self". The experience of the "self" does exist, but it is essentially an illusion - a process emerging from (as in, caused by) various other processes (mostly) in the brain. If time was to somehow stop the self would cease in the same sense that blood flow would cease: the process would have stopped, and it would not exist again until time continued and allowed the various contingent processes to proceed. (Note that I would still accept that the veins and the blood, or the neurons, would still exist; but any processes they were causing would not exist until time was allowed to proceed.)

Love is similar: it is a subjective sensation, contingent on the cells and processes that cause it. If those processes cease, the love also ceases to exist, even if the particles involved in the process were to continue to exist (but in another assembly - if they remained unchanged there wouldn't be a change in the process.)

edited 2nd Jan '15 3:59:37 PM by BestOf

What about my question about scientism?

One of the often mention exections to what science can answer is what is right.

The only place the answer is even hinted at is in human brains, and it's doubtful that it's written explicitly. But it could help to make up for flaws in our self awareness.

Could you try being more specific? scientifically, there is no right or wrong, but there is game theory and the idea that a set of rules that govern behavior are beneficial overall to everybody, which can be proven

You can a logical notion of morality. If you design a fixed the test, the answer is decided regardless of whether you think it's the right answer. Morality isn't a broad question. It is very complex utility function that has a fixed logical outcome.