- 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.
Some fundamental questions, but we'll never be able to find an answer.
There are an infinite number of these types of logically pendantic questions that are immensely uninteresting to think about.
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.
That seems like a tautology. If I'm not on Hacker News, then of course the server must be down. Why else would I not be on HN?
=> (Stratoscope is on Hackernews) is false.
=> (Stratoscope and Hackernews) is false.
=> Stratoscope is true.
______________________________________________________
Hackernews is false.
A lot of discoveries of interesting stuff resulted from something uninteresting being considered interesting and deeply contemplated. Others look and say "what an idiot, spending such time on such uninteresting x", I say, "you're only my self-imagined disagreeable other, I'm your god, your consciousness is my consciousness, what say you now?" and they would say nothing since the puppeteer has been revealed and there is nothing left to say. I guess this is why God will never prove he exists.
But your eyes are just another set of equipment, similar to a light meter. Just because your eyes are attached to the rest of your body, it doesn't make them inherently more trustworthy than equipment that's not part of your body.
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.
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.
And then people invented video cameras to trick the universe to stay the same when they go to sleep
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.
"The Simple Truth" addresses this from a different angle: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple...
Proof demanded.
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.
One diety with many names or facets.