Marchesk

Not if when choosing they knew it could cause great suffering to other people. You would have to not care about the fate of others. It doesn't matter ...

The imaginer can tell the difference when choosing to enter the dream machine. The not being able to tell the difference afterward is just to maximize...

They did, because the main characters on Star Trek always find a way out of every predicament, but one character, the bad guy of the episode, didn't. ...

Yes, if you don't want to end up homeless and bankrupt. Or not achieve any life goals. If you don't care about those things, then well go for it. Dela...

But I can make perfect sense out of an episode of Star Trek where the crew ends up stuck inside a Holodeck program that goes wrong, where the program ...

That's correct, which is why I mentioned subjective idealism.

And one other objection concerning long term planning. Plenty of people do engage in long term planning to achieve some goal they highly desire. Profe...

Someone in this thread mentioned the pleasure machine, which is a version of the dream machine. In the first Matrix movie, the character Cypher choose...

From what TGW wrote of the Cyrenaic view of the good, it would seem perfectly consistent for my good to be your bad. If it causes me pleasure to tortu...

And what if you were Swamp Bitter Crank?

Also, it just seems that way as a matter of experience. It appears that I am looking out at the tree as I walk by it, not that light from the tree is ...

I don't think Wittgenstein was right. First of all, I think ordinary language expresses naive realist views. Secondly, science has an awful lot to say...

That's very interesting, but I have a hard time reconciling it with ontological considerations. So if I adopt scientific realism, and I'm wondering ab...

I always thought ontology is about what exists, whether that includes minds, material things, forms, etc. And maybe with the qualification of what fun...

Agreed, very good post. Silicon Marchesk will not feel the same fatigue, hunger, thirst, cravings, kinesthesia, etc. Silicon Marchesk probably won't b...

I'm my body, and embodied cognition is largely correct, but ... The cells of a nematode worm have been fully mapped, including its nervous system. Tha...

So your point is that ontology is the destination, not the starting point, otherwise you end up with intractable disagreements.

I I take it that on the account of realism, X is whatever makes up the world regardless of whether we know or perceive it. That could be ordinary obje...

What i'm saying is that it's a challenge along the lines of illusion or hallucination, because it potentially breaks down the difference between verid...

Sure, but the interesting thing is losing the ability to discriminate what's going on in your head from some potential outside source, so that it seem...

I recall reading something interesting about Schizophrenia were schizophrenics lose the ability to tell the difference between what's in their heads, ...

You're not a realist if you don't believe that, because otherwise, your position is no different from anti-realism, as I'm sure Michael well tell you,...

No, it's like saying I directly experience hearts, but sometimes dream of, hallucinate, have the illusion of, falsely remember, imagine, clubs.

It's a bit confusing, because Platonists are considered realists about math. The anti-realists in the debate would be conceptualists or nominalists, s...

I think that's God's way of trolling us.

Except that when the song status up again, it appears as if stuff was going on while the song was stopped. The time on the clock, the snow on the grou...

It's consistent with taking science at face values which explains the universe's development from the Big Bang where there were no minds to star forma...

But what makes a perceived tree more real than a dream tree for the idealist?

We also experience unreal things, so the realist needs something more to justify what's considered real.

One problem with the argument is that dreams are epistemically distinguishable from waking experience, in that they do differ quite a bit from waking ...

Weren't there idealists and skeptics about the external world in ancient Greek, Indian and Chinese philosophy? I don't see how the realist/anti-realis...

Not until electron tunneling microscopes were invented. Atoms were purely theoretical constructs created to explain the various forms matter takes (or...

Material chairs are made up of physical stuff such as atoms and their bonds. Mathematical chairs only have mathematical properties. There is no physic...

Maybe so, but there have always been parts of the world invisible to us. A lot more of it has been made visible to us thanks to technology, but there ...

By chairs being true, you mean chairs exist? So when you say that idealism is true, you don't mean that chairs exist because we perceive them, you mea...

That would be an anti-realist lens to look at the other frameworks with.

I can be curious about scientific or historical findings that have no impact on my daily life, so that's simply not true. Humans can be interested in ...

How can you be a realist and not suppose there are things in themselves? What exactly are you a realist about? This is very confusing. If I'm a metaph...

It matters the same reason for asking any sort of questions about existence. How do we get here, how big is the world, did it have a beginning, and so...

Yeah, seems like imagined, visualized, pictured, and conceived are all getting jumbled together. So, I don't think any human can actually visualize a ...

Being able to visualize and being able to conceive are separate abilities.

I can conceive of building a starship and traveling to a nearby star, but I can't actually imagine it. Hasn't stopped people from writing stories abou...

In the optimal, tailored life of your own choosing, you can to do exactly that. In the real world, plenty of people would like to become a genius, ric...

I mean we experience the world as if stuff happens when nobody's around. I used the word appear to avoid realist sounding language. The subjective ide...

The objective idealist can do that. I don't see how the subjective idealist can perform those steps. It's just a brute fact of experience that a lot o...

Cause of the Big Bang. There are entire fields of science to explain how the forest got there.

No possible way TGW prescribes to naive realism. I would be beyond shocked. That would be like Landru coming on here and explaining why he voted for T...

But why the forest and not some other experience, to reiterate Tom's question. Realism has a really simple explanation. What's the (subjective) ideali...

But why did you feel like it? Reminds me of the Radio Lab show where it mentioned one of the detectives who gave the Green River Killer a series of in...

If it's just an intellectual challenge, akin to playing chess or doing crossword puzzles, then nothing wrong. But I suspect for a lot of people intere...