I don’t agree with the conclusion that Mickey makes. Yes, our senses can’t be fully trusted, but they are the only way we will ever get any empirical information. Arguing against a materialist worldview by noting that our senses can’t fully be trusted implies that the materialist worldview is flawed. My issue here is that any alternative has even more dubious foundations. (this is why I raised Occam’s razor in my original comment). Would any inherent cosmic meaning even be relevant if we can’t ever know about it? I doubt that Donald here would be reassured about the theoretical possibility of meaning existing somewhere beyond our senses. I am not.

The allegory of the cave, as I’m sure you know, came about in the context of Platonic idealism. That’s how I’ve been talking about here as well. The allegory becomes moot if the objects casting the shadows and the shadows themselves are essentially the same thing. You need a dichotomy between two completely different things for it to be relevant. If it’s matter casting metaphysical shadows which we perceve as matter, then Mickey has no argument and it’s just accurate observations with extra steps.

That’s a different question. However society enforces norms. Personally I would prefer some consensus seeking mechanism.

It stops being a paradox if you treat tolerance as a contract between parties in a society, instead of a principle. They break that contract and thus are no longer covered by it.

I never said completely. Sure it’s fun to entertain such possibilities, but science doesn’t bother with unverifiable claims. That’s the realm of metaphysics, unless somebody clever or lucky finds an actual glitch in the Matrix which would allow the claim to be verifiable.

Boltzman brain sure is an interesting concept. If I am one and you’re a thought within it, then I must say that it’s a bit funny that it popped into existense with the correct theories of thermodynamics and cosmology that explain the brains own existence. Also means that the universe has seen or will see every possible brainstate, nightmare and daydream, infinite beauty and horror. Oh yeah and we may as well be living in a Boltzmann galaxy that popped into existence in a similar manner. But alas, the relative improbability of our own (non-Boltzmann brain) existence is not proof against it. Same goes for the simulation hypothesis.

Care to explaing what “subscribing to philosophy” would even mean? If you instead meant to say a philosophy, then yes. I do have my own worldview, as I think every thinking being does. I apologize if I was unclear in my previous comment, I was commuting while I typed it and had to rush it a bit. The first paragraph was a response to the first paragraph of your preceding comment, the second one to the second and the third to the rest of it. I’ll elaborate a bit:

If we don’t make the assumption that our senses and measurements could possibly derive information about the nature of the reality around us, then trying to do so (empirical science) would be quite insane in my opinion. Why would anybody seriously try to do something which they think is categorically impossible to do?

If some physical phenomena is found which can only be explained via some sort of substance dualism or idealism, I’ll let you know.

weird unknown forces we can’t explain

I assume you’re referring to dark matter with this one. It’s just an unsolved mystery. It sure would be interesting if it was ghosts, but we have no reason think so as of currently.

the results of tests looking different depending on if it’s being observed or not

How do you feel something without touching it and thus affecting it? To see something requires the object of observation to reflect or emit light. At small enough scales that will affect the object itself in a significant manner. Quantum physics sure is weird, but I don’t see how that would be a reason to think that ideas could exist independently outside of a brain or similar material substrate.

Quite a low bar considering that I don’t need a car of my own.

I suppose I should’ve emphasized the “on such a foundational level” -part of that sentence. Questioning and refining observations is obviously of paramount importance, but that’s only valid if we assume that deriving knowledge about the nature of reality is at all possible via our senses and observations.

That’s where the distinction between physics and metaphysics comes in. Metaphysics is philosophy and thus inherently unverifiable.

The things we imagine do exist, as patterns of activity in our brains, emerging from the complexity of a whole bunch of neurons in brains and as part of societies. I said as much in a previous comment about emergent materialism.

I regularly walk through a pedestrian area that has such heating here in Helsinki. Most of the time it works, but when it gets cold enough and there’s a lot of new snow, the snow just turns into a wet slush that people walk through until it freezes into a horrible icy mess dotted with deep footprints. It’s quite a contrast to the nice and relatively even packed snow around the place at such times. Drainage is important, as is keeping the power level adequately high. Half measures will fail if the conditions get bad.

If they also plow the bulk of the snow off when it’s fresh, then it could work nicely.

The wording is a meme, but yeah, somewhat detached from reality nowadays.

“Apex predator” my ass, I will hug the teddy bear.

And that fresh new video generator by Google is scary good

Our senses and measurements (or are those the same thing, with one merely augmenting the other?) tell us that we live in a purely material universe. I’m not claiming that our senses are perfect or that science is over with every secret revealed, but questioning the validity of our observations on such a foundational level invokes questioning the validity of the worldview (metaphysical materialism) built on top of them. That’s what I interpreted Mickey was on about in the meme.

Donald is despairing about the inherent meaninglessness of a purely material universe, so I assume that Mickey, with his radical rejection of all that Donald says, represents at least some sort of metaphysical dualism or idealism which would allow for inherent cosmic meaning.

I know. The matrix (or any other metaphysical idealism for that matter) is an example of a situation where we cannot trust our perception for knowledge about the true nature of the universe (much like the allegory of the cave), although taken to the extreme. The epistemological and metaphysical aspects of Plato’s cave are very much intertwined.

Eliminative materialism isn’t my thing no. Emergent materialism is what I roll with. So the human mind and culture and numbers are things that exist as emergent properties of other things.

Sure it could all be a lie with us living in the matrix or so on, and it’s fun to entertain such thoughts every now and then. But I won’t accept it as truth without a better reason than “but technically it’s possible”.

Yes, and my response to what Mickey said was that why would we think that we’re in the cave looking at shadows? Why should I complicate my view of the world with the added baggage of metaphysical idealism when materialism works just fine to explain everything I see? Sure our perception of the world is limited to our senses and measurement techniques, but the scientific framework we’ve built onto that base appears very consistent and functional with its predictive power. It’s definitely not omniscience, but it works.

I only brought up the Cogito argument to point out that Mickey is incorrect in saying that no certain knowledge exists.

An interesting take, but surely there would still have to be some substrate to facilitate the thinking (a thinker)? A brain in a jar might not be what you think of yourself, but whatever is thinking the thoughts which you consider your own, definitely has to exist.

I think the usage of the word absurd in this context entails the third definition of the word here:

Occam’s razor defeats Plato’s cave. There’s no reason to think that the world we experience would be just metaphysical shadows on the wall. The burden of proof is on Mickey’s shoulders.

Oh yeah and Cogito Ergo Sum. So there is one bit of definitely provable knowledge.

All of them will be very rude to you

Rammstein disagrees