Pragmatism. This knowledge is not practical in any way so why bother tackling this problem?
If you're going to take the pragmatist line here, you're going to have to define what you mean by "
ractical" knowledge. William James, a renowned pragmatist, said that was is pragmatic is what is expedient to believe. But this gets us into a infinite regress: is it expedient to believe that it is expedient to believe that x?
The move here is to say that pragmatism isn't so much a theory as it is a light suggestion, so it doesn't have to hold up to the scrutiny it demands. Even with this response, we can press the question as to whether we are really here is a pragmatic question.
It sure seems to be - if we know that we aren't really here, this would certainly affect the way we live our day to day lives (this is a more broad version of pragmatism).
If you're wanting to argue that this question isn't meaningful because it isn't verifiable, well, then you're just a verificationist. And that's become sort of a bad world in contemporary philosophy.
take biology 1 and you'll get a deffinition of reallity
I doubt that completely. Besides, any scientific field will have to presuppose certain conditions - one of which being that we actually exist in the way we seem to exist and that the world is pretty much how it appears to us. But this is exactly the question we're asking. Biology, or any science, cannot answer this question.
I think we are all strapped in the Matrix...
What does a skeptical scenario like this do to our knowledge? Consider the following argument:
1) If I know that I have hands then I know I'm not just in the Matrix being deceived into thinking I have hands.
2) I don't know that I'm not in the Matrix.
3) Therefore, I don't know that I have hands (Modus Tollens: 1,2)
This is a valid argument that is meant to motivate skepticism. Philosophers have tried to reject 1 or 2 in an effort to preserve our knowledge from the skeptics, but results are mixed. Is this argument a genuine threat to our ordinary knowledge claims?
I wonder if my colour blue looks the same as your colour blue.
This question was thought to just be a purely philosophical thought experiment. It was considered impossible for the longest time to verify that someone has color inversion. But then, doctors discovered that a very low number of people actually do have color inversion. What looks green to us looks red to them, although they would still call that color red because they learned the color empirically. What's interesting is that if we had the same color experience as one with color inversion, we would identify those colors differently.
This fact could motivate skepticism about the status of our knowledge of our internal states - a very problematic result.
I wonder if the same outcome could be motivated by general skepticism about reality...
My thought isn't really about a tree, it's just about an object that I think is there which really isn't.
If you proved that you weren't real would you cease to exist?
This question is actually pointless. The topic is certainly not. If you don't think this is a genuine question, then don't post here.
