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Comment by nefitty | Hacker News Reader

Lamp 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.

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You'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.

The 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.

In other words, proofs cannot exist without axioms.

"The Simple Truth" addresses this from a different angle: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/X3HpE8tMXz4m4w6Rz/the-simple...

The '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.

The 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.

> 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

What 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.

That's just, like, your opinion man

> There are many deities

Proof demanded.

What 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.

> What would you call the 'God' worshipped by Christians, the many by Hindus, etc., if not deities?

One diety with many names or facets.

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