I'm familiar with Berkeley's main arguments and what people have said about his using God, which is similar to what Descartes did. I guess you could c...
No God, no tree in the quad! You can dispense with God, but subjective idealism loses the world when we're not looking, which Berkeley was concerned a...
No, that's not the point. Direct realists disagree about the nature of experience itself. That's crucially important for making the direct realist cas...
But they do disagree fundamentally about what an experience is. For direct realists, perception is awareness of external objects, and not anything mor...
I think the argument is that in order for the simulation to make a circle non-squarable when we try to square it, it would have to compute the transce...
What sort of arguments does he provide for God's existence? That God is necessary for the tree to remain in the quad unperceived by us? How is that fu...
If you ran a planet-sized holodeck, would we be able to know it wasn't actually the size of the universe? We could think we were sending a probe off i...
Have you watched any of The Next Generation or Voyager? It's not uncommon for some of the crew to spin up a holodeck program that's as sensory rich as...
That might be so for BIVs, but it won't be so for holodecks, since holodecks feed our sensory organs instead of our brains. Imagine the ST universe wh...
The computer needs to be able to compute the result of any experiment we might think to devise in a convincing fashion. That goes way beyond simply fo...
The fact that we can compute PI to huge numbers of places means the simulation has to be able to do that. And that we can devise physics experiments t...
Well, the brain isn't very fast compared to computers. It takes a quarter of a second or so to think a thought or recognize an object. Responding to a...
No, it needs to be high enough to fool human technology and math. That's why some people have speculated that physics might be able to show we're in a...
Right, but it the hypothesis also needs to make sense. So you could argue that realists cannot coherently say our world is a simulation if building su...
Oh well, why ask why? What reason do we have to suppose things have a reason for existing? We can explain the mechanics for how they came to exist (to...
Like maybe in the real world P=NP, but not our simulation? But it seems like if you could show that it's impossible to construct a simulation in our w...
Maybe so, but t's hard to see how metaphysical realism doesn't entail the possibility of some form of radical skepticism, even though I am a realist. ...
Not sure how you can accept chemistry as scientifically valid without conceding the existence of the atomic world which makes the periodic table what ...
But this conflates epistemology with ontology. Just because there is a process by which we come to know about the world doesn't mean the world is cons...
That's a really excellent critique. It undermines much of the bite of the hardcore idealist means of arguing where it's just one experience followed b...
It isn't like a belief in a unicorn on mars at all. We do have good reasons for thinking objects exist unperceived: 1. They're still around when we do...
Maybe you can bring that up on the unperceived things not existing thread? OP is looking for a reason not to doubt. He mentions the idealist Stace who...
Why is reason defined as deductive logic? Seems that animals and humans rely heavily on inductive reasoning. Deductive is something we came up with ra...
Nothing and we have no grounds for expecting things to happen for no reason, particularly when it comes to large, complex objects like the sun. It's l...
That's why I said the world could be depicted by math. E=MC^2 means that the amount of energy in certain amount of mass is equal to that mass times th...
What if you had a camera take a picture of the paper every nanosecond while it's in the drawer, and send that image to be processed by some software e...
I'm familiar with the speed of light being a constant against which measurements of length and time are made across different inertial frames. Note th...
Ask a cosmologist. In general, why anything exists is a question everyone has a problem answering. And I wouldn't agree with that depiction of materia...
And I explained how I disagree with that, given that we can depict the world mathematically without a perspective, and given that our lack of a abilit...
Sure, why not? The brain recognizes that it has a limited lifespan. It sees that it's made of the same biological stuff that everything else is, which...
Would such verificationism also commit one to not being able to speak of past experiences except as memories now, or future experiences except as anti...
The idealist can make this move, but there is also the possibility that experience just ceases. Other people will infer that the falling piano or onco...
There's a thousand different variants of this. Someone slips an odorless, tasteless poison into your drink when nobody else is looking. They leave the...
Thought experiments are used in philosophy. And this one can be performed in the real world. But you can change it to an actual situation where there ...
Well, it is ridiculous when taken to it's logical conclusion. If the paper in your drawer no longer exists unperceived, then the piano falling toward ...
Well, the solipsist argues that others do not exist. And then the Buddhists and other like-minded folk say the self does not exist. Descartes can be c...
Indeed. There were huge disputes over some of these absurd commitments back on the old site. Something just occurred to me. Can you classify a visual ...
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