I voted “with philosophy” but the philosophy is pretty pragmatic and also kinda humorous: because nothing can’t exist, for there is no possible world at which there is no world.

No, that’s a way of saying YOU don’t understand metaphysics.

No it's not, it's humility. It's recognising that others might see things you don't, or in a way you don't understand. — Isaac

No, that’s what listening to others’ reasons is, which I advocated and do. You’re talking about whose word is gospel: my own or someone else’s. My actual answer is “nobody’s”, but you caricatured that as “just mine”, so I pointed out that the opposite of that is “everybody else’s”, which is equally absurd.

In a conversation long ago, someone asked me rhetorically “who gets to decide what is objective?” and my answer was “nobody — that’s what makes it objective.”

So back to my original question. If this is a satisfactory approach to determining the right approach to moral judgement, why isn't it equally satisfactory for determining correct behaviour? Simply consider all the reasons for behaving that way which seem to you to be sound. Why suggest some alternative system? — Isaac

To the extent that that is a correct description of my “meta-meta-ethicical” position, it IS also a description of my meta-ethical position itself. The analogue of the reasons are the experiences, and every moral agent has to fairly and honestly consider every experience everyone has (like we have to fairly and honestly consider every else’s reasons), and figure out to the best of their ability what possibilities are compatible with the sum of all of those experiences (like we each have to figure out to the best of our ability what possibilities are compatible with the sum of all the reasons we’ve encountered).

The alternatives are either to take someone’s word for it (possibly just one’s own), or else give up and say there are no answers (so anything goes). My whole philosophy is just what’s left after avoiding either of those options: don’t just take anyone’s word for it, but don’t just give up either. Assume there are some correct answers, and every proposal as to what they are is open to question. So consider the possibility of anything that might be an answer (otherwise you’ll have no choice but to give up), except those that can’t be tested against our experiences (otherwise you’ll have no choice but to take someone’s word for it).

As many do, he suffered, and is still suffering from those bad experiences — 3017amen

What bad experiences? As I said, I never had a particularly strong break away from religion. I don’t feel angry or bitter about Santa Claus either. That and religion are both things I just casually grew out of without any hubbub.

his frustrations over discussions relating to concepts about God. — 3017amen

I don’t feel frustrated discussing concepts about God. I just feel frustrated when people engage in them the way you do, with incomprehensible non-sequiturs, irrelevant questions calling for long in-depth answers that wouldn’t advance the main topic at all but only waste a ton of time, and then bad-faith reactions to those who wise up to your game and won’t fall for any of that.

It is that we can do so predictively. The assumption of objective moral truths has no equivalent reassurance. — Kenosha Kid

Moral claims aren’t in the business of trying to predict anything, so it’s not clear what you would even want from them to be the equivalent of “able to do so predictively”. It would have to be some kind of projection of past oughts to future ones. “X oughtn’t have happened, Y oughtn’t be happening, so Z oughtn’t happen in the future.” But to tell whether or not that “moral prediction” is true, you need a way to judge each “ought” in it, which is exactly what’s at question.

But you recognise that this isn't in any way objective? As in, this would not be something presumed to hold irrespective of the thoughts of those exact people agreeing. This would be two people defining and occupying a common frame of reference, if indeed they do reach agreement. Nothing has changed but their particular beliefs. — Kenosha Kid

There is nothing different in this scenario than the parallel scenario with regard to judgements about reality. Scientifically minded people, religious fundamentalists, and postmodernist social constructivists all disagree on how to judge truths about what is real. Only the postmodernists say that that means reality is relative. (You don’t want to be like them do you?) The fundamentalists still disagree with the scientists on how to judge truths about reality, even though both agree that something is objectively real. The scientist can never convince the fundamentalist of particular claims about reality until he can convince the fundamentalist to follow a more scientific epistemology. But that doesn’t make all the claims of science relative, does it?

Thanks @Echarmion for joining in, you’ve already said most of what I would have said in response.

So all you're saying here is "I don't care about what other people think, all that matters is what I think", which is relativism. — Isaac

Consider the negation of that. “I care about what other people think, that matters, not just what I think.” That’s basically majoritarianism. Whatever a majority thinks is correct? How is that not relativism? By your logic, absolutely everything would be relativism.

But in any case, my position is not “only what I think matters”. I don’t expect anyone to take anything just at my word. I only expect them to honestly consider the reasons I share with them, like I do others’. Then in light of all those shared reasons we’ve all got to make up our own minds. Because the alternative would just be to think what someone says to think just because they say so.

The idea that experience is the final arbiter for what is real is not itself real. It's an idea that cannot be tested against reality. So ultimately, all such testing requires prior reasoning to establish what does and does not count as evidence. — Echarmion

:up: :clap: :100:

Entrepreneurs create businesses, human social organizations that use wealth (or resources generally) to do something. The successful ones do something that can sustain the business itself, so those are the ones that stick around. But beyond keeping the business itself going, what the business does can be anything. It doesn't have to be creating new wealth, or making the world a better place. It can just be funneling wealth to its owner.

Kaarlo is saying that the kinds of entrepreneurship we tend to see is in our world today is the kind that does that. Probably because the only people who have the resources to succeed at it are the kind of people who tend to do that, because everybody else gets fucked the way we run things today and only the most ruthless (as well as lucky, and yes skilled too, but it's got to be all of those, not just the last one) can make it against the stacked odds.

Opinions of any sort are inside your head, so by your reasoning anyone who is of the opinions that objectivism is true (i.e. anyone who thinks objectivism is true) is necessarily contradicting themselves.

Which is nonsense, because your reasoning here is nonsense. Thinking something, even assuming something, doesn't make that thing subjective, especially when the thing being thought or assumed is "there is an objective answer to everything".

In any case, this is another non-sequitur just like Amen's. The point of the quoted bit is that there being a solution in principle is not the same thing as you having the solution in practice. Just because you don't know something doesn't mean it's not knowable.

Perhaps the missing piece of ethical sciences is what dissuades philosophers from entrepreneurship, if indeed they are thus dissuaded, which sounds plausible to me. I imagine engineering and philosophy get along better, because there is a bridge between engineering and philosophical topics about reality and knowledge: the physical sciences. I’ve proposed that a field of ethical sciences could likewise bridge the gap between the philosophy of morality and justice, and entrepreneurship:



Every practical activity involves using some tool to do some job. At the lowest level of abstraction away from the actual use of whatever tools to do whatever jobs, technological fields exist to maintain and administrate those tools, and business fields exist to maintain and administrate those jobs.

A level of abstraction higher, engineers work to create the tools that those technologists administrate, while entrepreneurs work to create the jobs that those businesspeople administrate.

Those engineers in turn heavily employ the findings of the physical sciences, which could be said to be finding the "natural tools" available from which engineers can create new tools tailored to specific needs. And though this step in the chain seems overlooked in society today, the ethical sciences that I envision could be said to find the "natural jobs" that need doing, inasmuch as they identify needs that people have, which we might also frame as market demands, toward the fulfillment of which entrepreneurs can tailor the creation of new jobs.

And those physical and ethical sciences each rely on philosophical underpinnings to function, thereby making philosophy, at least distantly, instrumental to any and all practical undertakings across society.

Never mind evidence for the existence of God, how about evidence against the existence of him? Hello Problem of Evil.

When we say that someone is biased (about something), we also mean that they are wrong, right? Or can a biased person somehow be right? — Pussycat

Yes, a biased opinion is a wrong opinion.

Thing is that there is no real criterion for bias, neither one can know whether they are biased — Pussycat

We can know someone is biased if we know of some reasons, some point of view, they are not accounting for.

We can never be sure that we are not biased, but we can tell when someone is and demand that they correct for that. And then keep doing that, forever, moving ever and ever closer to completely unbiased.

Seriously, just stop this. You’re arguing in bad faith.

But there may be an even deeper substance and so on for a bit. But only for a bit. The process of deconstruction cannot continue forever. It cannot be 'turtles all the way down'. — EnPassant

Even if that was true, which it isn’t, how do you decide where to stop and say “this is the last turtle”? How do you know your God is the last turtle, or that energy or spacetime or the inflaton field or something like that isn’t?

The Cosmological Argument says that contingent things must have a beginning. Otherwise there are only states without substance and I d — EnPassant

The cosmological argument hinges entirely on not understanding predicate logic. Just because every mouse is afraid of some cat doesn’t mean there is one particular cat of whom all mice are afraid; each mouse might be afraid of a different cat. And just because everything comes from something doesn’t mean there is one particular thing from which all other things come; each thing can come from a different thing.

I will take your silence as acquiescence to the inability of making factual statements about existing and non-existing things. — 3017amen

If you want to argue in bad faith, you do you. I’m out.

Because your sense of objective truth has limited your understanding. Otherwise please share how objectivity can provide for enlightenment? — 3017amen

You’re not even making the littlest sense anymore. Everything is a non-sequitur. I’m out.

One day we may be able to suspend death and live forever, yes? Does that mean we aren't dying now? — Key

Depends on what you mean by “dying”. Is someone dying of a terminal disease that later gets successfully treated “not really dying”?

the graphite is the substance of the concept of a circle — EnPassant

But you’ll also say that graphite is contingent, no?

The cell is just one complex property of energy — EnPassant

And is that energy contingent or not?

Interesting. Why don't you think so? Please share your theory, if you have one. — 3017amen

That would be a huge tangent from this thread, and I plan to do another thread on it in the future anyway.

once we dive into them, we find we can never know the answers — 3017amen

How would we possibly find that, rather than just finding that we haven’t been able to answer them YET?

But the nature of your will (how it really works, it's design, it's origin aka : the-thing-in-itself) is unknown. — 3017amen

The nature of it may be unknown (I don’t think so, but that doesn’t matter here), but there is some true nature of it anyway. That true nature is true (duh), even if we don’t know it.

The principle under discussion here says no.

Interesting take on it, and it may help clear things up if I say I take a completely accurate map to become a copy of its territory. (In general, not just with this moral stuff: a 1:1 scale flawless 3D map of an actual landscape just is a perfect copy of that landscape).

And that's the point. Objective nature is inferred from generalisation, not a single data point. — Kenosha Kid

But every single datapoint matters, and all we have access to are a bunch if single datapoints.

That is, you can present empirical evidence to someone with a belief and show them that that belief is credible or not. — Kenosha Kid

If they agree to consider empirical experiences as evidence. If they don’t agree on the methodology then you can’t convince them. Arguing why they should agree with that methodology is a philosophical, not empirical issue.

You cannot do this with morality. If someone disagrees with me, there's no means by which I can refer to a fact that makes one of our beliefs incredible. — Kenosha Kid

There is if they agree on a methodology by which to judge what is or isn’t moral. Arguing why they should agree with a particular methodology is s more general philosophical issue, not a moral issue.

If I believe it is better to give to charities in Africa than in Britain, and my friend believes that it is wrong to ignore misery on one's own doorstep in favour of classier 'TV' charities abroad, I might refer to facts of efficacy (my charity has achieved more change than his) or statistics, but I have no recourse to a piece of evidence that says one of us has a more compelling case. — Kenosha Kid

You do if you both agree on what counts as evidence, which is not a moral question but a more general philosophical one.

Interesting. I think we are making progress. Do you have examples of existential things that are true but are unknown? Let's take the Will for example. It seems like it is true you have a Will, yet the nature of such is unknown correct? — 3017amen

I can’t tell you that something in particular is true but unknown, because I would have to know that it is true to tell you that.

But I’ve given several examples already:

There’s something in a box. We don’t know what. Nevertheless some guesses will be correct and some will be incorrect, because there is some truth about what’s in the box, even though we don’t know what it is.

I’m holding up some number of fingers. You can’t see me so you don’t know how many that us. But still there is some true number of fingers I’m holding up, and your guesses would be objectively right or wrong because of that, even though you don’t know.

The synthetic a priori is the closest you can get to assumptions yet to be solved. — 3017amen

I don’t see how this is relevant to what you’re responding to.

Really? So life is all objectively logical? Surely you don't believe that do you? — 3017amen

In a sense, sure, but honestly I’m not sure I can make any sense of most of what you’re saying.

Point is, unanswerable questions can be rejected logically, but if those questions are about the nature of your existence (or any existence), they become unanswerable metaphysical questions. Therefore, why should you reject them, when they lead to other discoveries? — 3017amen

I think you’re still completely misunderstanding the principle in question here.

I’m not saying to reject certain questions became those questions are unanswerable.

I’m saying to reject the notion that any question is unanswerable to begin with.

Can something that is objective be, at the same time, incorrect?
Is there such thing as "without bias"? — Pussycat

Something can be objectively incorrect, sure.

And we may not in practice be able to eliminate all bias, but me can move arbitrarily far in the direction of less bias, and have a notion of the unbiased ideal we are moving toward.

But ultimately this process of deconstruction cannot go on forever, there must be a necessary substance to keep contingent realities in existence. — EnPassant

This is the main point of contention that you seemed to just brush past in the first part of your reply. Why can’t it go on forever? Every contingent thing has a source. Sometimes that source is another contingent thing. Which might in turn be sourced to another contingent thing. Why at some point must it be different? Why not an infinite string of contingent things sourced from other continent things?

And even if for some reason that’s not possible, how do you decide at what point it has to stop? If you get back to God, why can’t you ask where God came from? And conversely, if you can just stop at God, why not just stop at energy, or spacetime, etc?

This is what distinguishes ideas about reality from ideas about 'oughts' or metaphysics. I can't believe the wall is not solid, or that I can fly, because it will have such beliefs tested by conflict with reality. — Isaac

You can believe those things if you refuse to undergo the experiences that would test them and refuse to believe those who say they have undergone such experiences that have refuted them.

The strength of this disagreement has not swayed you in the slightest bit from your position, nor has the strength of the disagreement of literally hundreds of educated and experienced moral philosophers who all disagree with you — Isaac

It never matters who or how many people agree or disagree with a position, all that matters is the strength of their reasons. All those disagreeing with me are telling me things I already knew and don’t disagree with, so there’s nothing there to change my views. My counter-arguments are presenting what additional reasons I’m also accounting for that they seem not to be. Most of the remaining “arguments” here seem to be about clarifying what exactly is being said, or what the right definitions of words are.

With all moral choices one is weighing some harms against some benefits. Taking account of them in this way only gives you the full measure of all the harms and benefits involved. How does it then give you any objective answer to which harms outweigh which benefits? We don't all assign them equal value. — Isaac

This question is the moral equivalent of epistemology, while what we’ve thus far been discussing is the moral equivalent of ontology. Ontology is about what kinds of things are real, and we’ve thus far been talking about questions of what kinds of things are moral. Epistemology meanwhile is about how to sort out which particular things are most likely to be real given those criteria for what makes something count as real, and this question you’re asking is about how to sort out which particulars things are most likely to be moral given those criteria for what counts as moral. The full answer is long, but the short version is it’s the moral analogue of falsificationism.

My point is that even if you're not actually experiencing a flower, your experience of what seems to be a flower is still an experience of something. People mis-perceive all the time, but perception is not sensation. You're sensing something, even if your perception of what that something is, is wrong.

So you can't really have 2 without 3, you can just have 1 misinterpret 2 to get at the wrong 3, but there's still some 3 or another that 2 is the experience of.

Great. I'll wait for your answers to those questions about the nature of those things we are parsing. — 3017amen

How many times to I have to tell you that there being an answer doesn't mean anyone knows the answer?

I don't know the answers to those things. But there are answers. Because to assume otherwise is simply not to try to answer them.

Wait a minute I don't understand. I thought you said you knew everything objectively? — 3017amen

Now I'm starting to feel trolled. I never said I know or that anyone knows, just that it can be known. Do you not understand the difference between "can" and "is"?

How many fingers I'm holding up right now? Is there some correct answer to that question? Since you can't see me, the answer to the first is "I don't know", but the answer to the second is still "yes", because I am holding up some number of fingers, and anyone who guesses a different number is guessing wrong, and anyone who guesses the number of fingers I'm holding up is guessing right, but nevertheless nobody knows. "Unknown" doesn't mean "neither right nor wrong".

How many times do I have to say that?

But would that not suggest omnipotence of some sort? — 3017amen

Only if for something to be true it has to be known. But it doesn't. Things can be true, but not known. Like see above. There doesn't have to be some omnipotent being for there to be a specific objectively correct number of fingers I'm holding up despite that nobody knows how many that is.

Objectivity doesnt have to do with right or wrong, it just means descriptive. — Pussycat

"Objective" absolutely does not mean "descriptive". That redefinition would just prima facie rule out any possibility of objective morality, or subjective reality. A prescription can conceivably be objectively correct, and a description can conceivably be only subjectively correct.

"Objective" just means "without bias": correct or incorrect without regard to any point of view. (But not without regard to the contents of the state of affairs being evaluated: who or what you're talking about, when and where they are, etc, can make a difference in what is correct or incorrect to say about them. But whatever is correct to say about them, is correct for everyone to say about them, and incorrect for anyone to say contrary).

And "right and wrong" can mean either "true or false" or "good or bad".

People kill people. Is that true? Yes.
People kill people. Is that good? No.
People kill people. Is that right? That depends on whether you mean "right" as in "true" ("yes that's right, people do kill people") or "right" as in "good" ("no that's wrong, people oughtn't kill people").

Does that qualify as an unanswerable question? It kind of seems so... Yet you would reject such a question. I'm confused. I thought you said objectivity solves everything,? — 3017amen

Objectivity means always proceeding on the assumption that things can be solved.

It doesn't mean that you already know how to solve it.

I don't know how many times I have to repeat that.

Could that mean that it's metaphysical? — 3017amen

What does that even mean?

Things are either true or false.

Orthogonal to that, they're either known or unknown.

So they can be known true, known false, true but unknown, or false but unknown.

Whether you know it or not has no bearing on whether it's true or false.

How is that germane to the question about my love of ice cream? — 3017amen

The only thing subjective about your love of ice cream is that it’s about you. My height is about me. Both of those can be objective without everyone else having to be the same in that regard, which is what you said that I was replying to.

How is it an objective fact that I love ice cream just a little bit? Quantify my partial love of ice cream objectively. — 3017amen

That we haven’t invented a scale to measure it by doesn’t mean that there’s no particular amount that you love it.

What does that really mean,? — 3017amen

What I just said.

true or false or unknown — 3017amen

This is the problem. “Unknown” isn’t an alternative to “true” and “false”. Something can be true but not known. Unknown isn’t UNKNOWABLE or NO-TRUTH-VALUE.

Wait a minute, I thought you said you're sure that objectivity can explain those things that exist? — 3017amen

Yes? I’m having a hard time following your sentence structures. There are objective answers to questions about those things. Where have I ever said otherwise?

I don’t understand the rest of your questions about domains. Asking why you have all those mental states is a psychological mental question. I don’t know the full psychological answer to them, especially because each answer would involve particulars about your life that I don’t know. But that doesn’t mean the answers to them aren’t objective, i.e. there is one correct answer that everyone should give to the questions about you, even if the answers about themselves are different, even if they don’t know the answers about you, etc.

But that would qualify as a subjective opinion that extends to arbitrary feelings of Love. If it wasn't it would mean the all people either like or dislike ice cream — 3017amen

Not at all. I am 72 inches tall. That is an objective fact about me. It being an objective fact about me doesn’t mean that everybody is and always has been 72 inches tall. It just means that anyone who says I am a different height is wrong .

Objectivists means that whether an opinion is right or wrong doesn’t depend on who you ask. It absolutely can and must depend on who or what (and what time and place etc) you’re asking about.

In other words what if I only loved ice cream a little bit. How would you quantify a little bit? — 3017amen

Objective facts don’t have to be about boolean properties. Am I tall? Kinda. I’m a little tall, but not like pro basketball tall. I can tell you exactly how tall I am: 72 inches. And in principle one could say on some scale just how much you love ice cream. And that would be an objective fact that you love i e cream just that much, just as it’s an objective fact that I am just this tall.

But if I'm understanding that correctly you would reject unanswerable questions as a temporary state of existing. — 3017amen

I would not call something that is only temporarily unanswered “unanswerable”, just unanswered. We can never know for sure if an unanswered question will ever be answered until it is, but my principle says to always proceed on the assumption that some day it can be.

In other words what domain is appropriate for the philosopher to study here? Is it some sort of synthetic a priori knowledge? — 3017amen

This sounds like a non-sequitur. The domain of philosophy isn’t “the unknown” or “the mysterious”. Science investigates lots of unknowns too.

The domain of philosophy was broader in the past, incorporating things like science too, but today I would say it is the investigation of how to go about answering various kinds of questions and why to do it that way instead of some other way. What are we even asking, what kind of thing would count as an answer, how do we apply those criteria, who is to do so, what does it take for them to do it, why bother, etc.

I'm not sure (and I'm not sure if you're sure) whether you're talking about the fact that you have those states of mind, or a moral evaluation of the contents of those states of mind.

In either case, yes there is an objective right or wrong evaluation of them, that may or may not be practical to figure out, or in practice accessible to anyone but yourself.

In other words, what kind of truth's do those things represent (?). — 3017amen

This makes me think you're wondering about moral evaluations of the contents, in which case that question is the topic of meta-ethics, about which I have a thread going right now, and my answer to which became the focus of another recent thread.

What is it about my love of ice cream that makes it a correct opinion? — 3017amen

It is a correct opinion that you love ice cream (assuming you actually do). Whether you love it or not is an objective fact.

Your love of it inasmuch as that means an intention to eat it is in and of itself only correct or incorrect in some ethical sense, but that is something that is objectively correct or not too. In any given instance, you eating a particular ice cream is either the right thing to do then or not. It's impractical to figure out whether it is, just like it's impractical to figure out all the positions of all the particles that make up your ice cream, but there's some truth of the matter anyway.

But in this case, keeping in mind modal truths is important. Much more practically, we can say what is possible good or necessarily bad, which is to say, permissible or forbidden. And unless there's some extenuating circumstances I don't know about, it's probably usually permissible (not necessarily bad, i.e. not forbidden) for you to eat ice cream. Objectively permissible, because modal claims are still objective claims.

Does that qualify as an unanswerable question? If not please provide an objective explanation for the feelings I have for the love of ice cream. — 3017amen

Just because I don't know the answer doesn't mean there isn't one. That's the whole point of the principle this thread is about: never assume there is no answer, just because you don't know it yet.

If not, then I guess it's counter-intuitive to let it bother me. — JacobPhilosophy

Exactly. If it is true that nothing matters, then it doesn't matter that nothing matters. If it doesn't matter that nothing matters then it's not a problem that nothing matters, so why worry about nothing mattering?

If we're talking about the nature of your own conscious existence is that not a metaphysical truth? — 3017amen

I'm not clear what you mean by "metaphysical truth" exactly but it's a truth of some kind, an objective one, in that any claim about it is either right or wrong, even though those claims are about what a subjective experience is like, and even if nobody but the person having those experiences can know whether those claims are true.

Any ideas how Descartes argued for a non-physical "thinking thing"? — TheMadFool

Pretty much exactly how you did. "I can doubt that there is anything physical, but I can't doubt that I exist, so I can't be just a physical thing".

There is no necessity for the physical - it could be an illusion — TheMadFool

All of the particulars of it could be an illusion, but so could all the particulars of yourself. That there is something you are experiencing at all cannot be doubted, and more than you can doubt that someone is doing the experiencing; and the physical world just is the world that is accessible to experience, as opposed to supernatural things that are not amenable to experience.

I made a long post explaining this earlier in this thread, I'll quote it here again since I keep repeating this summary of it...

Descartes famously attempted to systematically doubt everything he could, including the reliability of experiences of the world, and consequently of the existence of any physical things in particular; which he then took, I think a step too far, as doubting whether anything at all physical existed, but I will return to that in a moment. He found that the only thing he could not possibly doubt was the occurrence of his own doubting, and consequently, his own existence as some kind of thinking thing that is capable of doubting.

But other philosophers such as Pierre Gassendi and Georg Lichtenberg have in the years since argued, as I agree, that the existence of oneself is not strictly warranted by the kind of systemic doubt Descartes engaged in; instead, all that is truly indubitable is that thinking occurs, or at least, that some kind of cognitive or mental activity occurs. I prefer to use the word "thought" in a more narrow sense than merely any mental activity, so what I would say is all that survives such a Cartesian attempt at universal doubt is experience: one cannot doubt that an experience of doubt is being had, and so that some kind of experience is being had.

But I then say that the concept of an experience is inherently a relational one: someone has an experience of something. An experience being had by nobody is an experience not being had at all, and an experience being had of nothing is again an experience not being had at all.This indubitable experience thus immediately gives justification to the notion of both a self, which is whoever the someone having the experience is, nd also a world, which is whatever the something being experienced is.

One may yet have no idea what the nature of oneself or the world is, in any detail at all, but one can no more doubt that oneself exists to have an experience than that experience is happening, and more still than that, one cannot doubt that something is being experienced, and whatever that something is, in its entirety, that is what one calls the world.

So from the moment we are aware of any experience at all, we can conclude that there is some world or another being experienced, and we can then attend to the particulars of those experiences to suss out the particular nature of that world. The particular occasions of experience are thus the most fundamentally concrete parts of the world, and everything else that we postulate the existence of, including things as elementary as matter, is some abstraction that's only real inasmuch as postulating its existence helps explain the particular occasions of experience that we have. — Pfhorrest

Or to quote from an essay I wrote in college:

The root of this problem is that I can only conceive of that which I could hypothetically perceive. That is to say that, if asked to conceive of something with no perceptual qualities, I am as unable to do that as I am unable to conceive of square circles — I don’t even know where to begin trying. So, as Descartes’ description of this thought experiment has no perceptual qualities different from the real world, it seems that all I am conceiving of is just the real world itself. But let us attempt, for the sake of charity, to put some more effort into conceiving of a situation where all my normal perceptions are false.

I could perhaps conceive of the real world, plus the ostensible belief that all of my perceptions are false. That is, I could conceive of myself apparently here in my room, writing this essay, and being disposed to say things like “all perception is deception”, or thinking those words, or agreeing with such statements. I can imagine how I might behave if I believed such a thing, other thoughts that I might think because of those beliefs, and so forth. Perhaps I would, as a result of those beliefs, become a religious person and start to attend church regularly. But as things in themselves, separated from our experience or perception of them, by definition have no perceptual qualities (being so separated from them), I cannot conceive of such things directly, and thus I cannot “clearly and distinctly” conceive of it being the case that something is in fact true or false. I can only conceive of what such a thing might look, sound, smell, taste, or feel like, and in this case the only differences as such between this conceived world and the real world are differences in my own behavior. It seems that all I have conceived here, and thus, all I have shown to be logically possible, is that I could believe that my experiences are entirely deceptive.

That is non-controversial, as anyone can believe practically anything they want, and showing that a belief is possible — merely that it would be possible to believe something, not that the thing believed is itself possible — is not helpful to Descartes’ argument.

Let’s try this again then, another attempt to conceive of all of my perceptions being false.

I suppose that I could conceive of myself apparently here in this room, writing this essay, and then suddenly, all my perceptions stop. I lose all vision, hearing, senses of touch and taste and smell, even my sense of kinesthesia or proprioception, even the residual images in my eyes and the sound of my own blood flowing in my ears. I imagine that I utterly cease to experience anything. But in conceiving of such a thing, it seems that all I am conceiving of is nothing at all.

As I can only conceive of things which I could perceive, when I conceive of not perceiving anything I have simply stopped conceiving entirely. This lack of conception — not inconceivability, but simply willful lack of conception — clearly does not prove anything. So let us modify this thought experiment. I do not imagine that this is what Descartes had in mind, but I feel obligated out of charity to give my best support to his argument, and in doing so thoroughly dismiss it when it still fails.

So I will now imagine that I am sitting here in this room, writing this essay, when suddenly my vision grows dark, my ears ring out into a dull monotone, my skin grows numb, and my sense of balance and space becomes skewed. Then my senses become refined again, and I find myself lying on a floor in a vast dark room, with a small, lanky, muscled figure grinning an evil grin at me. I imagine that he tells me that he is The Evil Genius, and that all of my experiences up until and including this very moment as I lie here before him are and always have been entirely false, that there is no material universe, and he and I are all that exists, utterly disembodied — even his visage before me now is a deception, as even he has no physical form. I imagine then that he tells me he will now return the normal stream of experiences, and I feel the sensation of rushing through the darkness above me as the little figure recedes into the distance and vanishes, and suddenly I feel a hard jolt as I am once again in my chair.

I imagine that I would then begin to wonder who had laced my food with drugs this evening. And I would be right to doubt the veracity of that experience, as even Descartes would agree, although for different reasons. I would doubt it because, on the surface, it seems utterly incompatible with my other experiences, and would require either a fantastic explanation such as those to be described below, or a more mundane explanation such as hallucinogenic drugs. In short, I can agree with Descartes at least that any individual experiences, or at least our interpretations thereof, are dubious. Descartes would likely doubt such a thing because he finds experience on the whole to be dubious. Either way, this imaginary me would find himself doubting the veracity of these extraordinary experiences, and though perhaps they might be the thing which planted the notion of universal deception in his mind, the fact remains that all that I am imagining when I conceive of this doubtful self is the possibility that I might, for some reason, believe all my experiences to be false. I still have not directly conceived of my experiences being false, and thus have not proven that to be logically possible. At this point I can still find no means by which to doubt that some material universe exists, even though my beliefs about the specifics of that material universe are dubious.

But I can imagine a situation which could demonstrate with irrefutable mountains of evidence that all my experiences up to the point of revelation had been false. I can imagine that as I sit here writing this, I once again become blind, numb and disoriented and wake up in a room with this lanky Evil Genius, yet instead of returning me to my normal set of experiences, he takes me out of this large dark room and shows me the world as it really is. I can imagine seeing nightmarish landscapes and ominous buildings, and being told that I am to live here now until I die, for he and I are the only people in this desolate world, and everything up until now has been signals fed into my brain to allow me to believe that I was living a life on Earth. I can even imagine that I am not human, that I have a small form like his, as we are perhaps the last of some dying alien race. Perhaps Earth and humanity never existed and were merely a fantasy conjured up to spare me this hideous existence. I concede that it is entirely conceivable, and thus logically possible, that the world which I am in fact experiencing right now is not the real world. But even in conceiving this, I have not conceived that the physical world does not exist. Merely, I have conceived that the physical world is nothing like what I thought it was. But still I am conceiving of it existing. I can even conceive that the above world might itself be a deception, that perhaps I am a really brain in a vat being experimented on by scientists. Perhaps those scientists and my vat are themselves not real, and that entire world is in fact inside the Matrix. I can imagine as many layers as I like, but at some point I must always conceive that some physical world exists.

To do otherwise is simply to conceive nothing, as shown earlier, which does not prove anything.

It seems that I simply cannot conceive of no material world existing at all. — Inconceivable, or: You Keep Using That Word, I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means