Jan Ardena:
Your responses regarding the brain-in-a-vat hypothesis suggest to me that you are unfamiliar with this particular philosophical condundrum. If you're interested, try googling it for some more information. This is twice in the space of a couple of days whether you have jumped to unsupportable conclusions on two well-known philosophical questions.
I know I'm not a brain in a vat.
No, you don't know that. And previously you admitted as much. Now you appear to be back-tracking.
I have a brain, and it is situated in my body.
That is your perception, but you don't (
can't!) know it is true.
Why on earth would you think you're a brain in a vat.
Since you're new to this, I'll walk you through it.
You're familiar with the idea of a computer simulation, I hope. You're also familiar with the idea that all of our senses are ultimately wired electrically through our brains. If appropriate electrical signals are applied to your brain, you can be made to experience things that are indistinguishable from your usual sensory experiences, except that the causes of what you experience are not "real" events but electrically "simulated" ones.
For example, suppose we were to electrically stimulate the part of your brain that senses pain in your arm. Suppose that, as a result, you feel like your arm is being pressured by something (say a needle). Now, we ask you to close your eyes and answer the question: is somebody really sticking a needle into your arm, or is that just an artificial perception? You would have no way of knowing, since your perception of the pain/pressure would be identical in both cases.
Now, extend this idea to the situation where we could somehow remove your brain and wire up every nerve to a computer that was able to duplicate the sensations your brain would normally receive due to "real" pain or "real" light or "real" sound etc. We could place that brain in a vat and you'd never be able to tell the difference between that situation and your having a "real" body existing in a "real" world (assuming a sophisticated enough simulation).
It is more likely that I have a body, because I actually have one.
If you were a brain in a vat, you'd still feel exactly as if you had a body, but you wouldn't actually have one. See?
Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things unseen.
That's what's called a deepity, as I pointed out before. It sounds profound, but when you break it down it's meaningless waffle.
So you don't believe in operates purely naturally. Sorry. My bad.
There is always a possibility of something supernatural. You often make the same mistake about what you think atheists believe.
It's quite possible that some, people cannot tell the difference, and that some, can.
Don't you think it's possible?
It's possible. There's no objective evidence that it's true, of course.
That goes both ways, you only believe the world operates without the supernatural, you don't know it. Do you?
Right. I can't be 100% sure. But my belief is based on the absence of any good evidence for your position.
Unless I say ''I'm going to convince people'', why would I need to convince people?
You might, for example, care whether what they believe is true or not, perhaps out of a concern for them. Hypothetically.
Do you go around trying to convince people of things (especially things they don't want to be convinced of)?
Yes! Absolutely. And I think that, in reality, you probably do too.
Why didn't it remain that maggots generate from meat?
I would say, because some people knew that they didn't, and of course they were right.
No, people really didn't know.
It is hard, from today's perspectives, to put yourself into the shoes of people who had far less knowledge than we do. For example, if you investigate something like the bubonic plague, people had very little idea as to what the risk factors were in transmission of the disease - in part because they had no notion of what the underlying cause might be.
People already knew maggots didn't spontaneously generate out of mean, long before scientists found that they didn't.
No, they really didn't.
It's the truth. I'm not a brain in a vat.
It is true that I have a brain and it is situated in my body.
Just to emphasise: these are truths according to your senses. But if your senses are untrustworthy, what follows?
Because I do not know everything, does not mean that I don't know, or recognise truth.
You mistake is to take too many things on faith. You can't "intuit" truth. You may think that you can, but to do so is to put too must trust in the infallibility of your own perceptions. Human beings are notoriously easy to fool, and the easiest person of all to fool is yourself.
