From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Sun Jun 09 2002 - 17:14:36 MDT
Thanks to Martin Moore for attempting to change the subject
of this thread to something more appropriate. I find the
level of the SL4 threads to be extremely thoughtful and
sophisticated, so am disappointed that sometimes no effort
is made to spawn appropriate headers.
Ben writes
> What is most interesting to me in late 19'th century & 20'th century
> philosophy is the attempt to forge a middle way between shallow, naive
> rationalism/empiricism (which holds there is a single objective reality, and
> a single right answer to every question)
While rationalism/empiricism (which I might have called
scientific materialism) does conjecture that there is a
single objective reality, it hardly maintains that there
is necessarily a single right answer to every question.
---- Elsewhere I thought that you wrote (but perhaps it was someone else) that we could all be talking about the same thing, but using different terms (and perhaps different concepts). Yes, it should be possible even starting from a solipsist POV that having a *model* of an objective reality would be very practical, and certainly could not be dismissed out of hand as an hypothesis. Specifically, where do you find fault with the conjecture that there is a material universe "out there" and that we are evolved creatures within it? (Pace your raising the issue of our brains being in vats in Moscow or are emulated in a simulation---see below.) > Perhaps our communication is getting tangled up in the > various shades of meaning of words like "objective reality." Perhaps. But (again speaking from the POV that starts with our own subjectivity) *objective reality* begins with the claim that the galaxies, stars, and our own Milky Way galaxy exist independently of Earth life's evolved attempts to learn about them. David Deutsch, in whose PCR and objective camp I'm squarely in (see his brilliant "The Fabric of Reality") extends this basic claim to: there is a multiverse. To address, I think, some of these questions you also wrote: > And how do you know there IS any material substrate? How do you know you're > not in a simulation right now, which is running in another simulation, which > is running in another simulation? You can't. The best you can do is have > faith. Faith? Why, no. It's entirely possible that *this* is a simulation, although the point is seldom made that *this* as a pointer may have more than one referent. Evidence seems to indicate that the multiverse is real, and so *this* evaluates to both the simulations in some universes and an original material evolution from a big bang in others. > This is elementary stuff, but realist philosophers don't seem to get it. Realist philosophers going all the way back to J. J. C. Smart have dealt quite adequately with hypotheses that our brains are in vats. > This kind of denial of the obvious reminds me of religious doctrines, > which is why realist philosophy often reminds me of a religion. Well ;-) this realist is quite prepared to listen to any evidence that surfaces that *this* is also a simulation. I support efforts to look for such efforts, e.g. GUT theories like Fredkin's. Indeed I do think it likely that *this* evaluates to a simulation as well as to the several original material instantiations. Lee Corbin
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