5 ms·
- Is the lamp still on while blinking? - Is the sun still shining during a nap? - Is the fridge's light still on while it's closed? - Does God exist? Some fund
by nnamtr 5y ago
- Is the lamp still on while blinking?
- Is the sun still shining during a nap?
- Is the fridge's light still on while it's closed?
- Does God exist?
Some fundamental questions, but we'll never be able to find an answer.
- nefitty 5y agoLamp lights are not dependent on whether you can see them or not, unless they are programmed to. The state of an individual person’s consciousness has no bearing on whether the sun is shining or not. Refrigerator lights turn off when the door closes. It’s usually easy to find the mechanism that handles this and manually trigger the light to switch off. Regarding God, I assume you mean the Abrahamic god. There are many culturally specific deities and superstitions and there doesn’t seem to be any verifiable reason why one would be “realer” than any other.
- nnamtr 5y agoWhat if the world is just a dream? Then an individual person's consciousness has a massive influence on the weather. And there would be new arguments for the existence of God.
- ImprobableTruth 5y agoThe 'issue' is that these are essentially 'commonsense' answers. By definition it's impossible to empirically study the unobservable. Though of course whether these questions are at all interesting - after all the answer has no effect on anything or it would be observable - is another matter.
- pieshop 5y agoThe problem with this argument is that it's begging the question. You're assuming that the Universe is behaving in a way that is consistent with how it appears. There is no possible experiment you could in principle do to verify that the universe stays the same when you're not looking. We can say that the universe behaves consistently as though it does, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but it's not quite the same thing. Furthermore we can't tell whether the universe is tricking us some of the time, or all of the time, or never.
- ithinkso 5y ago> There is no possible experiment you could in principle do to verify that the universe stays the same when you're not looking. And then people invented video cameras to trick the universe to stay the same when they go to sleep
- vidarh 5y agoYou're assuming any of this has an existence independent of your mind, that more than the present moment exists, and a whole lot of other things. You make reasonable assumptions, but proving them is hard, because any attempt you make to prove them still end up being filtered through your potentially unreliable senses. In practice we decide to just accept that a material world with semireliable senses exists, because the alternative is no certainty at all.
- goatlover 5y agoThe alternative without falling into skepticism is idealism. But scientific explanations of many things like disease, chemistry and physical forces are very compelling compared to the world just appears the way it does as ideas in our mind.
- kubanczyk 5y agoIn other words, proofs cannot exist without axioms. "The Simple Truth" addresses this from a different angle: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple-truth https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple...
- TrueGeek 5y agoThat's just, like, your opinion man
- aasasd 5y ago> There are many deities Proof demanded.
- OJFord 5y agoWhat would you call the 'God' worshipped by Christians, the many by Hindus, etc., if not deities? We sentient beings are fortunately capable of discussing abstract thought, things not known to exist, and even things known not to exist; we can give them names without requiring that they 'are', and we can discuss what it means 'to be' anyway, and whether those things 'are' after all merely by virtue of our discussion. And did you even read the rest of that sentence? Other commenter is basically 'on your side'. It's atheism like this that makes me describe myself (dissociatively) as agnostic, frankly.
- lupire 5y ago> What would you call the 'God' worshipped by Christians, the many by Hindus, etc., if not deities? One diety with many names or facets.
- podric 5y agoUh, use a light meter? Your comment assumes that that only way to assess the presence of light is with your eyes.
- briefcomment 5y agoDoes the light meter function properly while blinking?
- podric 5y agoAre the Hacker News servers down when you're not on Hacker News? There are an infinite number of these types of logically pendantic questions that are immensely uninteresting to think about.
- Mary-Jane 5y agoI'm sure the comments were made in jest...
- Etheryte 5y agoTell that to Schrödinger. Even questions that seem utterly pointless and mundane at first glance can lead to captivating insights if explored at depth.
- smichel17 5y agoSchrödinger's cat was originally intended as a reductio ad absurdum.
- ooi10 5y agoIt’s been my experience that people who call things uninteresting are merely sharing their own unusual disinterest in something otherwise interesting. It’s also been my experience that said people are usually the most uninteresting in the room. Also, I don’t know what it says about you that you went from effectively “trees falling in the forest” to the Hacker News infrastructure to defend your point about fun, thought-provoking idioms, but I do know it’s remarkably uninteresting.