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If I find the remains of another person who has been killed and eaten by an animal, should I assume that this can never happen to me because this world was crea

by svnt 3y ago

If I find the remains of another person who has been killed and eaten by an animal, should I assume that this can never happen to me because this world was created for me and this person was only a simulation? Because if all that exists is what I know then that would be pretty logical. I’ve never been eaten by an animal and I am the only one in here.

roenxi 3y ago
That is the big question, isn't it? We don't know enough about time to say. It is as philosophically plausible as any other idea that any particular thread of consciousness wends on infinitely in its own personal timeline, watching everything else decay and disappear until it is the last thing left. It is so implausible that the universe even exists for our statistical impossibility of self to have happened, it would be a bit of a chuckle if there was a third impossibility in the future.
- incompatible 3y ago
  It seems a bit odd that we exist at all though, doesn't it? Surely the natural state, or the starting state, would be to have nothing, no time and no space. But then, how would anything ever happen? But given that we exist, then perhaps things have always existed, before the apparent beginning of the universe that we can apparently observe? But if things have existed for so long, why are we in such a state of ignorance and imperfection? Surely given all this infinite time, something better would have been created by now? But consciousness doesn't seem to be a "thing" with a physical presence in the real universe. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. Like a web browser running on a computer. Go to sleep and the web browser shuts down, wake up the next day and a new one is instantiated. Then there's no continuity of consciousness, it only lasts for a few hours, and we can return to wondering why I feel like I exist in a here and now, one moment in a possibly infinite timeline.
  - vintermann 3y ago
    > It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. People need to be more careful about that word "useful". Saying something is useful, is always implying a who it is useful for. Saying it's useful, but it's not useful for anyone, is as meaningless as saying something is useful, but it's not useful for anything. (This was, as I recall, one of Kant's "categories of reason"). So by saying the brain creates something for a purpose, you're already assuming that the brain is a thing, and it's a thing that wants things. I'm not saying that's wrong, but given how hard it seems to not make circular arguments with it, maybe it isn't actually an empirical question.
    - incompatible 3y ago
      Useful from the point of view of helping an animal satisfy its needs, so allowed to survive by natural selection? Perhaps it's just a inevitable by-product of certain types of thought.
      - vintermann 3y ago
        That's assuming an animal is a thing that wants things. Again, not unreasonable, but also not actually an empirical statement, when you look critically at it. You're just pushing the teleology up a level.
        incompatible 3y ago
        At some level it's just trying to survive because trying to survive is what helped all its ancestors to actually survive. It doesn't even need to be expressed as a "want", since plants are doing the same thing without a nervous system, going through a sequence of actions programmed in DNA and expressed in a chain of extremely complex biochemical reactions.
kredd 3y ago
The way I am reading this comment chain — you will never be able to prove whether there is a reality outside of your own. The logic and whether solipsism is socially acceptable does not really matter in this context. I don’t buy into that idea, but any question about consciousness that will never be answered during my lifetime is always something fun to dabble with.
vintermann 3y ago
Yes, you can in fact assume that you will never die, in a very narrow sense. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good assumption, but by the time you could have an empirical experience proving you wrong, well you wouldn't have that experience because you would be dead. This illustrates that this question - only in this very narrow sense - is not an empirical question. It was in fact one of Kant's three "necessary postulates". He asserted that the question of subjective death was not empirical, and thus impossible to know or even gain confidence about one way or another, but he thought it was (for other reasons, related to his moral theory) necessary to assume that you would not subjectively die. Whether it's possible for this body you currently seem to be experiencing the world through to be ripped apart by a wild animal, though, that IS a highly empirical question.
- svnt 3y ago
  It’s only not an empirical question if you presume solipsism. If I presume we are all in here together then it is empirical, and then we can continue. If empirical is defined as applying only to a thing an individual can assess then science cannot function.

by svnt 3y ago

roenxi 3y ago

That is the big question, isn't it? We don't know enough about time to say. It is as philosophically plausible as any other idea that any particular thread of consciousness wends on infinitely in its own personal timeline, watching everything else decay and disappear until it is the last thing left. It is so implausible that the universe even exists for our statistical impossibility of self to have happened, it would be a bit of a chuckle if there was a third impossibility in the future.

incompatible 3y ago
It seems a bit odd that we exist at all though, doesn't it? Surely the natural state, or the starting state, would be to have nothing, no time and no space. But then, how would anything ever happen? But given that we exist, then perhaps things have always existed, before the apparent beginning of the universe that we can apparently observe? But if things have existed for so long, why are we in such a state of ignorance and imperfection? Surely given all this infinite time, something better would have been created by now? But consciousness doesn't seem to be a "thing" with a physical presence in the real universe. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. Like a web browser running on a computer. Go to sleep and the web browser shuts down, wake up the next day and a new one is instantiated. Then there's no continuity of consciousness, it only lasts for a few hours, and we can return to wondering why I feel like I exist in a here and now, one moment in a possibly infinite timeline.
- vintermann 3y ago
  > It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. People need to be more careful about that word "useful". Saying something is useful, is always implying a who it is useful for. Saying it's useful, but it's not useful for anyone, is as meaningless as saying something is useful, but it's not useful for anything. (This was, as I recall, one of Kant's "categories of reason"). So by saying the brain creates something for a purpose, you're already assuming that the brain is a thing, and it's a thing that wants things. I'm not saying that's wrong, but given how hard it seems to not make circular arguments with it, maybe it isn't actually an empirical question.
  - incompatible 3y ago
    Useful from the point of view of helping an animal satisfy its needs, so allowed to survive by natural selection? Perhaps it's just a inevitable by-product of certain types of thought.
    - vintermann 3y ago
      That's assuming an animal is a thing that wants things. Again, not unreasonable, but also not actually an empirical statement, when you look critically at it. You're just pushing the teleology up a level.
      - incompatible 3y ago
        At some level it's just trying to survive because trying to survive is what helped all its ancestors to actually survive. It doesn't even need to be expressed as a "want", since plants are doing the same thing without a nervous system, going through a sequence of actions programmed in DNA and expressed in a chain of extremely complex biochemical reactions.

kredd 3y ago

The way I am reading this comment chain — you will never be able to prove whether there is a reality outside of your own. The logic and whether solipsism is socially acceptable does not really matter in this context. I don’t buy into that idea, but any question about consciousness that will never be answered during my lifetime is always something fun to dabble with.

vintermann 3y ago

Yes, you can in fact assume that you will never die, in a very narrow sense. I'm not saying it's necessarily a good assumption, but by the time you could have an empirical experience proving you wrong, well you wouldn't have that experience because you would be dead. This illustrates that this question - only in this very narrow sense - is not an empirical question. It was in fact one of Kant's three "necessary postulates". He asserted that the question of subjective death was not empirical, and thus impossible to know or even gain confidence about one way or another, but he thought it was (for other reasons, related to his moral theory) necessary to assume that you would not subjectively die. Whether it's possible for this body you currently seem to be experiencing the world through to be ripped apart by a wild animal, though, that IS a highly empirical question.

svnt 3y ago
It’s only not an empirical question if you presume solipsism. If I presume we are all in here together then it is empirical, and then we can continue. If empirical is defined as applying only to a thing an individual can assess then science cannot function.