I'm not an idealist. Just pointing out that philosophical certainty is very rigorous. I agree that the sun will come up tomorrow, you're not a BIV, we will all die, and the universe will chug along just fine without perception.

Idealists die don't they? — Cavacava

I think so. Berkeley's not still among us. Maybe God grew tired of perceiving him?

What is the difference between the phenomenal that we sense, and what the BIV senses...? I don't see what's different so then what is the use of a distinction where there is no distinction. — Cavacava

For the idealist, none. Not everyone is an idealist, so ...

BIV....if it is a perfect simulation then how would it make any difference, and if it does not make a difference then what good is the notion. — Cavacava

It matters for the whole idealism/realism/skepticism argument. The skeptic would say that if the perfect BIV scenario is possible, then our claims to knowledge are wrong, since we can't be certain we're not perfectly envatted. The idealist would respond by saying we know what appears to us, and the BIV scenario could only exist for the mad scientist. And the realist would be left with the difficult task of bridging the epistemological gap.

We can certainly say who cares, it doesn't matter, nobody really acts like solipsism is true, etc. But it doesn't change the fact that these are well established philosophical problems. And that was enough to plague Witty throughout his life, or so I've read.

If it makes no difference in our lives, it isn't fit material for philosophy. — Bitter Crank

It was fit for Hume, Kant and many other philosophers, starting with the ancient skeptics. I don't delve into philosophy because it's practical, I delve into it because it's about the big questions we all wonder about.

I don't take the simulation or BIV argument seriously in everyday life, because they're made up scenarios based on our current level of limited technology, but I do sometimes wonder about appearances versus reality, which is more generally the Kantian concern, and is backed to some extent by the findings in science the past several centuries, particularly physics.

However, if we ever do get to an advanced enough technological level, then some of Bostrom's arguments take on more weight. One Star Trek Next Generation episode involving the infamous Holodeck malfunction ended with the crew pondering whether they were inside a simulation of someone else's construction. And if you have that level of technology, then it does become a real concern.

One in 60,000 is just to close for comfort. (You face higher odds of dying from other things that you continue doing, because your attitude allows you to.) — Bitter Crank

Sure, but this isn't the same thing as philosophical certainty. When we want to know if we're certain the sun rises tomorrow, we're not concerned about our feelings on the matter. Rather, we're concerned about knowledge claims. Can anything outside of logic or math be certain?

Example: I don't think I live inside a simulation of some sort, and it doesn't effect me in everyday life, but can I know that for sure? Is there a defeater for the simulation argument?

So it's not "Can we be certain that the sun will rise tomorrow?" but "Ought we be certain that the sun will rise tomorrow?" — Banno

In a sense, you're right. But if an astronomer were trying to asses the probability of the sun shining tomorrow, they would take into account the possibility of a black hole wondering into it's path, or whatever might result in it not shining 24 hours from now.

A physicists might say there's a non-zero chance all the atoms of the sun don't fuse tomorrow, or release their radiation until 48 hours, or pass through one another, missing the nucleus or what have you.

I used to subscribe to the singularity movement where many things will happen at once when AI arrives on stage; but, my personal opinion is that it might take longer than an instant for things to change. — Posty McPostface

The longer it takes, the better. A hard takeoff singularity is probably disastrous, as they're no way human society can adapt that quickly, and you end up with powerful technologies run amok. There's plenty of dystopian fiction exploring that sort of thing, and the friendly AI movement hopes the proper precautions are in place before we have general purpose AIs.

I also think we will likely become a multiplanetary species within the next decade or more. — Posty McPostface

I have my doubts. Mars is less hospital than the center of Antartica in the middle of the winter, and it's much farther away. That makes it very expensive and risky, and for what? To have a dozen or so humans call it home? They will be confined indoors on inside a suit at all times.

Exploring Mars with better robots and at some point human beings, sure. But living there? Maybe in the long, long run when we can terraform the planet.

How do you think changes will occur, or what is your conception about the future as you see it? — Posty McPostface

People at the turn of 20th century were similarly optimistic, then we had two world wars, a nuclear arms race, and wide spread environmental concerns. We could still have WW3, and an environmental collapse is a definite possibility.

That being said, I'm more on the optimistic than pessimistic side about human civilization persisting and advancing, despite whatever difficulties the 21st century holds. But we really don't know whether civilization is inherently unstable and always leads to collapse, no matter the level of technology. It has so with all past human civilizations. We don't anything know about alien ones, if they're out there. But one possible resolution to the Fermi paradox is that civilizations don't last, or there's a great filter ahead for us.

Or maybe when we achieve a post-singularity world, they'll welcome us into the galactic club. However, imagine what a post-singularity world war would look like. Weaponized AI, gray goo, antimatter bombs, super virues, and I'm sure nukes can still have their place.

As I see it, phenomenalistic/subjective idealism faces three challenges:
1) Avoid the collapse to solipsism
2) Account for the apparent permance of particulars
3) Account for the apparent fact that numerically distinct people can perceive one and the same thing in different ways (i.e. from different perspectives). — MetaphysicsNow

I hadn't thought of number two. Regarding #1, idealists had attempted to dismiss it with the claim that idealism includes other minds from the start. The problem there is epistemological. How do they know about the other minds? And that leads to a justification issue. You can't just define other minds into existence and call that good.

I've seen at least one hard core idealist admit that #3 was a challenge. I don't recall seeing mention of #2, but it's definitely an issue. I think there were claims that each perception was a separate particular, and there was no permanence. Problem being that we do perceive objects persisting.

Whether you can have Berkelian idealism without also requiring God to be around in the quad is an interesting question. — MetaphysicsNow

We definitely have posters who have argued for subjective idealism without utilizing God, even saying that God was the flaw in Berkley's philosophy.

dealing with issues concerning nominalism v realism about properties , personal identity over time, adverbialism and representationalsim in the philosophy of mind, to name just a few. — MetaphysicsNow

Sounds interesting. I've wondered if there is a way to resolve fundamental metaphysical disputes with that sort of approach where you bring in the various related issues and try to tie them all together.

o have a role for God in the sustaining of the Universe. An earlier contributor is quite right to bring in quantum mechanics where the issue of non measurement comes to the fore as having an influence on events. — Edmund

Can a supernatural being perform a measurement? Is God collapsing the universal wave function to this universe, allowing us to evolve?

> For all these things I just mentioned, I see no better than the blind

For some reason, vision is often abused in philosophy as the stand-in for all perception and observation. Thing is that vision works differently than smell, where you're inhaling pieces of the thing itself.

> I only see the surface of the same side when I look at the moon, what are you guys looking at? I might as well ask if what's below the surface of the Earth actually exists because I don't look at it. Does my brain exist, heart, lungs, bones, etc

Indirect observation has been brought up several times in this thread. The moon's gravitational influence continues when we're not looking at it, and our bodies do all the body-things like pumping blood, breathing and digesting (or having thoughts) while we're not looking inside.

I take that as evidence that a naive form of idealism is no more tenable than naive realism.

Why is inherently selfish bad? — schopenhauer1

Selfishness is only bad when it harms others. Since we're social animals, and survival is a social matter involving a fair amount of reciprocation, selfishness is seen as a negative trait.

But if we were intelligent felines, it probably wouldn't matter.

Because pleasure isn't an intrinsic but an instrumental good and therefore inherently selfish. — Thorongil

So you're no hedonist. Does that mean hedonists would necessarily disagree with antinatalism, or only if pleasure outweighed the pain of being alive?

I am not advocating going backwards in time. I am just pointing to our ignorance and how beholden we are to larger forces we had no hand in and did not create ourselves but certainly dictate modern life for us. I can't explain its significance more than there is an alienation or atomization to this. — schopenhauer1

I see. Well, it might get worse if AI becomes more generalized in capability.

The point of my post was to address the fact that we are mostly ignorant of the very processes and things we take utilize in daily life. We become passive participants and eventually become beholden to the given which is: — schopenhauer1

Yes, and maybe there is something less than good about that. Thus the DIY movement, and all those shows about how STUFF gets made. But is it worse than what we had before?

Maybe a smith would know everything about how an object was made. Was their life better off overall?

Would I do a better job of providing all of these requirements myself? Emphatically no! I cannot be an expert in everything. — Shatter

Indeed! Specialization (along with automation) has allowed the standard of living to go way up, for all of us unfortunate souls who get to be alienated. Not saying it's a perfect result, but I would say it's generally less bad than what came before.

Although I have no idea what life was a hunter/gatherer would be like, but at least with civilization, the standard of living is much better now, for those who have access.

Now the burden is to show when things weren't bad, and why they weren't, and how we can maybe fix that. It's easy to decry things. It's very hard to explain how to make things better. — csalisbury

Indeed. If not being alienated from production means slaving away on a farm to make ends meet, I probably would rather be alienated with all my consumer goods, unless I'm really into farming.

Let's not kid ourselves. Before capitalism there was feudalism, and that was not better for most people, despite there being a lot less alienation with production. And there are still parts of the world where people have to produce their own goods. They tend to be rather poor, and many of them would rather have access to the alienated labor and goods.

If being alienated means I have clean drinking water, abundance of food choices, access to healthcare, education, travel, etc. then that's magnitudes better than most humans had before me.

"If this interpretation of the data is correct, then aging is a natural process that can be reduced to nanoscale thermal physics—and not a disease" — StreetlightX

But there are some organisms that don't age, and our reproductive cell line is immortal and doesn't age. So aging is not necessary, at least for some types of cells, and there is ongoing research showing some promise into slowing or even stopping the aging process in various animals, including humans.

Over the last few years, machine learning has taken off. It's not new, but the data and processing power available reached a threshold where it started to give good enough results for everyone to jump on board.

The VR/AR stuff is seeing some commercial adoption. Someone already mentioned self-driving cars, although they're still in the testing phase, so that puts them behind VR. Big Data has been rather influential. Progress is being made on quantum computing.

It's probably a matter of when certain highly visible technologies gain widespread adoption, even though they existed in some form for years before then.

However, I'm not convinced that technology has been accelerating the past several decades compared to the late 18th century though the middle of the 20th. I think it has slowed down a bit, relatively speaking. At least as far as big transforming technologies go. We have computers, the internet and cell phones. They had electricity, automobiles, aircraft, vaccines, major breakthroughs in physics, etc.

At first sight, consciousness seems redundant. Seemingly a person or animal could react to the world 'normally', without the intervening step of internal consciousness. Kind of like a machine following an algorithm, or the Behaviourists’ black-box model of stimulus-in / response-out. But dead inside, like a Zombie. This notion raises the question of "why do we need consciousness?" — Kym

Wouldn't this suggest that the bottom-up model is missing something?

An illusion? Well, a convenient fiction at least. It turns out the these is no distinct redness in the material world. There is in fact a seemless array of available wavelengths across very wide spectrum (most of which is quite invisible to us but still real). We perceive a distinct redness after our red colour cones are triggered by a certain range wavelengths. — Kym

There is a problem with taking this approach. If red is an illusion or convenient fiction, then what makes light waves any more real?

We've come to explain vision in terms of photons bouncing off objects into our eyes because we perceive color in the first place, and then did a bunch of experiments to explore the phenomenon and came up with a physical theory as a result.

Empiricism is undergirded by subjectivity. If you make the subjective an illusion, then there goes the basis for knowledge about the physical world.

the problem has always been one of legitimacy. In allowing arguments from racists, say, to be aired, what is conferred upon them is legitimacy: one admits it as an option to be considered at all in the first place — StreetlightX

Mill would have strongly disagreed with you. In his day, the equivalent was obscenity or atheism as far as what was deemed unacceptable by society at large. That's the danger. Most of us will agree that racism is wrong, but if we give society the power to deny that speech, then what speech will be denied tomorrow?

It's all good when we agree with the speech being denied, but someone else gets into power or society changes their mind and we might no longer agree. It could be our speech that's being prohibited. That's why the US is so hardcore on free speech, and the ACLU will bend over backwards to defend the most outrageous speech.

Mill thought it was important for us always to have to defend our ideas against all-comers. It's important for society's growth to have to hash out dissenting ideas.

I expect Kant would have been entirely comfortable with the notion that our in-built mechanism for arranging information is an approximation to a paradigm whose differences are only visible at scales that are beyond ordinary human experience. — andrewk

I highlighted the interesting part, because what does it mean for Kant for something to be beyond ordinary human experience, particularly in context of:

we process raw inputs within a framework of three space dimensions and one time dimension. — andrewk

Also, modern physics has entertained higher dimensional space and colliding branes, along with multiple universes. I wonder if those concepts could fit into the transcendental aesthetic since they're so far beyond the normal framework of space/time.

It is not going to destroy the fabric of society. — Maw

What is the fabric of society that everyone's so worried about destroying?

Yes, it mind vibrating. — Rich

So the universe is made of vibrating mind instead of those tiny higher dimensional strings of energy?

That said, the world's total fertility rate has been declining for some time and will continue to decline, so the world's population is not expected to continue increasing at an exponential rate for very much longer. — Thorongil

We're supposed to top out around 10 billion at mid century, so it becomes a question of whether Earth can support 10 billion for the second half of the century.

If we were much more efficient and more focused on sustainable technologies, then I think the answer would be yes. But so far, we've been very wasteful and uneven in resource distribution. Maybe that will change in the future out of necessity.

The skeptic' is a bogeyman in philosophy discussions, nothing more. — fdrake

Well, there is Nick Bostrom's simulation argument. Sounds like he and quite a few others took it somewhat seriously.

You had Elon Musk asking physicists to find a way out of the simulation! Maybe they told him to shoot a Tesla into space. That would break the simulation for sure.

The skeptical challenge remains the same in both scenarios. — Moliere

So the skeptic claims that we can't know about the external world because it's possible to doubt it?

That's a really high standard for knowledge. There are rare psychological cases were someone comes to believe their family has been replaced by imposters. And how can you be certain that doppelgangers didn't replace the people you know while you were asleep last night?

On the skeptic's standard for knowledge, I can't know the people I claim to know.

Conditional: brain in vats and memory editing. Should be believed? Nah. Kind of thing people can get therapy for. — fdrake

Maybe the evil demon created us as BIVs 5 minutes ago with false memories of a past. But the evil demon itself is a simulation, so he has to trick us into thinking we know about transcendental numbers.

Listened to a Science Friday podcast recently where they had physicists on answering questions about what they're excited about. This one physicist said we're just at the beginning of learning about the nature of space that will take us a thousand years.

Yes. But as long as they are understood to be idealizations and not actualized, then I don't see the problem. As an analogy, we have a concept of infinity. It doesn't follow that the universe is necessarily infinite. Similarly for the simulation. — Andrew M

You don't think it would be a problem for the simulation computing our coming up with those idealizations?

Here's an interesting question. Could a simulation learn about the halting problem?

I have no idea how that addresses my point, which is that given our axioms and definitions, that Pi is irrational deductively follows. Unless you want to say that a simulated world can defy logic, the same is true in a simulated world. — Michael

Just pointing out that Sagan though the exact value of PI could be determined by the shape of space one exists in. It's not exactly the same, but it goes to the notion that PI's value might be calculated to be different depending on the world one lives in.

Given the same axioms and definitions, whatever deductively follows in the real world will deductively follow in a simulated world. — Michael

At the end of Carl Sagan's Contact book, a human computer finds a binary representation of a circle inside PI created by aliens who shaped our universe in a way such that PI would have that value so that any sufficiently advanced race who evolved could find out they were inside a created universe.

I always wondered how the value of PI could be modified by the shape of space, but Sagan put that in his story. If it can, then that might have bearing on the value of PI computed inside a simulation.

I always thought PI had to be the same value regardless, but it seems some disagree with this.

Why would you suppose reality has a value for pi? — Andrew M

We do have a mathematical value for PI which is irrational and cannot be computed (in full). A circle's definition is determined by the full value of PI, mathematically speaking.

I think fdrake is arguing that the simulation would have to compute us coming up with irrational numbers and other things which aren't computable, such as transfinite numbers. Or the halting problem.

Didn't realize that BIV discussion would result in a debate on whether a computer can simulate squaring PI.

All that shows is that you are mistaken about what you possess being subtlety. Subtlety cannot be heavy; its character is the very opposite of heaviness. — Janus

His subtle wit was so enormous that it sucked the mood of the room into a slowly forming vortex of chuckling, collapsing into outright laughter, swallowing all seriousness in a black hole of guffaws.

1) All ideas must be perceived. — Bishop Berkeley

Question for anyone: how does Berkeley distinguish between other experiences and perception? Is my dream tree not an idea? Must ideas be public/intersubjective?

Anyway, from reading those two arguments, I think Berkeley would side with materialists over atheist subjective idealists if he was forced to choose between the two.

He seems to fundamentally agree that objects persist and have causes, both of which subjective idealists tend to deny.

In the first argument, a is interesting:

a) Our ideas of sense must have a cause — Bishop Berkeley

Because Berkeley ignores Hume's point, but many idealist love to use Hume's skepticism to undermine materialist arguments for causation.

Materialists would agree with this premise as well!

Alright, thanks. The second argument I find interesting:

1) All ideas must be perceived.

2) Sensible objects are collections of ideas.

3) Objects continue to exist even when they are not perceived by any finite minds. 4) Therefore, there is a nonfinite spirit or mind which perceives objects. — Bishop Berkeley

Materialists would agree with the bolded part. It's interesting because subjective idealists tend to disagree that objects continue to exist outside human/animal perception.

Now why would Berkeley be convinced that objects continue to exist, given that he was a subjective idealist?