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I think it's another twist on John Locke's idea of perception in essays on human understanding. Basically, humans are the product of our sensors (vision, hearin

I think it's another twist on John Locke's idea of perception in essays on human understanding. Basically, humans are the product of our sensors (vision, hearing, touch, emotion, etc). I'm going to butcher the explanation here, but IIRC in this view, everything is imaginary because we have no way of validating our sensors without using the sensors and we process the world entirely through them.

ozim 7y ago
Great one! TV series look like "Dream argument", because what TV series or movies are, basically dreams come true while we are not sleeping. Then argument is about if mentally generated world can be real or not. We can see and hear those characters, we feel emotions towards them, and we feel empathy like their emotions in us. Only thing is that we cannot touch them. Unless you go to some conference where actor is also playing that role :) so in the end you could touch "Walter White" if Bryan Cranston is making that personality real somewhere in our world :D
- WoahNoun 7y ago
  Yea it gets even more interesting when you consider historical figures. Charlamagne is no more real to me than Walter White is (in fact, I'd argue due to the additional sensation of audio and video he might actually be more real from a perception sense). Yet I believe Charlamagne was a real human who did real human things centuries ago just as I believe Walter White is a character that was invented. Yet, without that external context, if someone were to watch Breaking Bad and was told it was a biopic on one of America's most notorious drug dealers, could they plausibly believe that? I watched American Gangster and I know that's based on a true story, because Frank Lucas was in jail and has court records. But again without that context, are the two stories really that different in believability? I think that the ability to plausibly place a story within your own reality creates stronger emotions than something like star wars or lord of rings than can easily be placed into fantasy.
  - trhway 7y ago
    >Yet, without that external context, if someone were to watch Breaking Bad and was told it was a biopic Reminded of exploration of similar idea in Galaxy Quest https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/

ozim 7y ago

Great one! TV series look like "Dream argument", because what TV series or movies are, basically dreams come true while we are not sleeping. Then argument is about if mentally generated world can be real or not. We can see and hear those characters, we feel emotions towards them, and we feel empathy like their emotions in us. Only thing is that we cannot touch them. Unless you go to some conference where actor is also playing that role :) so in the end you could touch "Walter White" if Bryan Cranston is making that personality real somewhere in our world :D

WoahNoun 7y ago
Yea it gets even more interesting when you consider historical figures. Charlamagne is no more real to me than Walter White is (in fact, I'd argue due to the additional sensation of audio and video he might actually be more real from a perception sense). Yet I believe Charlamagne was a real human who did real human things centuries ago just as I believe Walter White is a character that was invented. Yet, without that external context, if someone were to watch Breaking Bad and was told it was a biopic on one of America's most notorious drug dealers, could they plausibly believe that? I watched American Gangster and I know that's based on a true story, because Frank Lucas was in jail and has court records. But again without that context, are the two stories really that different in believability? I think that the ability to plausibly place a story within your own reality creates stronger emotions than something like star wars or lord of rings than can easily be placed into fantasy.
- trhway 7y ago
  >Yet, without that external context, if someone were to watch Breaking Bad and was told it was a biopic Reminded of exploration of similar idea in Galaxy Quest https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/ https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0177789/