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"all worlds are private worlds" means that all of our experience are necessarily private - I don't have access to your world simulations. The delusion is that w

"all worlds are private worlds" means that all of our experience are necessarily private - I don't have access to your world simulations. The delusion is that we have access to the external world directly. So, breaking through the delusion doesn't mean gaining access to the some shared, public world, it's a recognition that such access is impossible.

pmoriarty 8y ago
In that case, how does one get access to the external world?
- ZeroFries 8y ago
  One can make inferences based on sensory input and a nervous system attuned to the environment over millions of years of evolutionary shaping.
  - pmoriarty 8y ago
    That already presumes a world view in which there is an external world or environment in which we're in, that we have senses through which we get input from that world. But since all of that is outside our experience (since the model you're arguing for is that we don't have direct access to the external world), the question of how you arrived at that world view remains. The lack of direct access to the external world (if there is one), seems to me to be a hard barrier through which I see no way of breaking, as no matter what you sense, intuit, or think, they are all compatible with any number of ways the external world could be -- such as you're insane, hallucinating, deceived, brain injured, mind controlled, etc, and there's no way to get outside your experience and compare whatver you've concluded, sensed, or believe with what actually is the case. No amount of collaboration or cooperation with others can get you to get at the external world (again, assuming it exists) either, since whatever interactions you have with others is through your own experience, and the same objections regarding their presumed input applies.
    - ZeroFries 8y ago
      Natural selection, combined with a limited number of ways of fitting all the observations together into one or even a few coherent wholes means the representation correlates well enough with the external world so as to confer reproductive fitness. The agent with the representation most conducive to successfully navigating the environment, avoiding danger, and reproducing passes on the genes which informs the next generation's representation. It does mean however, there's always epistemic uncertainty with regards to what reality is actually like. See Kant's noumenon for further details.
      - pmoriarty 8y ago
        Neither natural selection nor even something arguably even more fundamental like physics or chemistry can be appealed to for evidence regarding anything in the external world, for they and the observations that presumably led to them may not be from or about the external world at all. Once again, all of them could be merely hallucinations, or you could be insane, or manipulated in to thinking them, or your thinking may be impaired, etc. You or I might think they make sense, but that doesn't matter, since our beliefs about them does not in any way endow them with the power to be an accurate description of the way the external world is, nor do we have any way to check to see if that's the way the external world is. Kant's noumenon is not merely something we are uncertain about, but something that is completely and utterly inaccessible to use, that we are hermetically sealed off from by our experience (at least from Kant's and the representationalist's point of view). Of course, you can come up with probabilities regarding some conjectures you have regarding the noumenon, but as you can never get to the noumenon there's no way to test or verify them, so they're completely pointless and essentially arbitrary. In any event, those probabilities (and any other thoughts you may have) are all subject to the same objections as those listed in the first paragraph, as they're all just more experience.
        ZeroFries 8y ago
        They can be used as evidence, though they don't definitively prove anything (Popper style). What you stated is basically post-modernism in a nut shell, but the problem with post-modernism is there's only a limited number of parsimonious explains those which can account for all observations. Everything could be brain-in-a-vat delusion, but it's not the most parsimonious explaining because it drags with it a bunch of other complications and assumptions. It's true, though, that one can only be sure of one's own existence.

pmoriarty 8y ago

In that case, how does one get access to the external world?

ZeroFries 8y ago
One can make inferences based on sensory input and a nervous system attuned to the environment over millions of years of evolutionary shaping.
- pmoriarty 8y ago
  That already presumes a world view in which there is an external world or environment in which we're in, that we have senses through which we get input from that world. But since all of that is outside our experience (since the model you're arguing for is that we don't have direct access to the external world), the question of how you arrived at that world view remains. The lack of direct access to the external world (if there is one), seems to me to be a hard barrier through which I see no way of breaking, as no matter what you sense, intuit, or think, they are all compatible with any number of ways the external world could be -- such as you're insane, hallucinating, deceived, brain injured, mind controlled, etc, and there's no way to get outside your experience and compare whatver you've concluded, sensed, or believe with what actually is the case. No amount of collaboration or cooperation with others can get you to get at the external world (again, assuming it exists) either, since whatever interactions you have with others is through your own experience, and the same objections regarding their presumed input applies.
  - ZeroFries 8y ago
    Natural selection, combined with a limited number of ways of fitting all the observations together into one or even a few coherent wholes means the representation correlates well enough with the external world so as to confer reproductive fitness. The agent with the representation most conducive to successfully navigating the environment, avoiding danger, and reproducing passes on the genes which informs the next generation's representation. It does mean however, there's always epistemic uncertainty with regards to what reality is actually like. See Kant's noumenon for further details.
    - pmoriarty 8y ago
      Neither natural selection nor even something arguably even more fundamental like physics or chemistry can be appealed to for evidence regarding anything in the external world, for they and the observations that presumably led to them may not be from or about the external world at all. Once again, all of them could be merely hallucinations, or you could be insane, or manipulated in to thinking them, or your thinking may be impaired, etc. You or I might think they make sense, but that doesn't matter, since our beliefs about them does not in any way endow them with the power to be an accurate description of the way the external world is, nor do we have any way to check to see if that's the way the external world is. Kant's noumenon is not merely something we are uncertain about, but something that is completely and utterly inaccessible to use, that we are hermetically sealed off from by our experience (at least from Kant's and the representationalist's point of view). Of course, you can come up with probabilities regarding some conjectures you have regarding the noumenon, but as you can never get to the noumenon there's no way to test or verify them, so they're completely pointless and essentially arbitrary. In any event, those probabilities (and any other thoughts you may have) are all subject to the same objections as those listed in the first paragraph, as they're all just more experience.
      - ZeroFries 8y ago
        They can be used as evidence, though they don't definitively prove anything (Popper style). What you stated is basically post-modernism in a nut shell, but the problem with post-modernism is there's only a limited number of parsimonious explains those which can account for all observations. Everything could be brain-in-a-vat delusion, but it's not the most parsimonious explaining because it drags with it a bunch of other complications and assumptions. It's true, though, that one can only be sure of one's own existence.