All of the last set of comments were directed at Huemer, but I’ll add a few comments of my own.
1.To my mind, part of the problem with questions like “Is there a God?” is not that they are meaningless or that they have no answer. Rather, it’s that they are unanswerable.
Are questions like, “Does Bigfoot exist?” answerable? How about, “Did aliens build the pyramids?” Or how about, “Do ghosts exist?” My answer to all of these is, “Almost certainly not.” Am I wrong?
In order to create an accurate description of “only” the brain in its vat, the scientists, and the brain apparatus — as if that were all that existed, without relying on the simple rules of physics playing out from a (presumably simple) original condition — you would need an absolutely absurd quantity of description. Overwhelming.
Doesn’t it depend on the required degree of accuracy? Yes, it would be immensely difficult to simulate every detail down to 10 decimal places of accuracy, but most people are barely paying attention to most stuff anyway, much less measuring stuff with any precision. I say a lot of novels contain more details about what the characters are experiencing than most of us typically pay attention to in real life.
I sympathize both with the skeptical view and the defenders of knowledge. I think the skeptic’s claim that we cannot know anything with 100% certainty must be correct.
At risk of sounding like a 17-year-old Objectivist, “must be correct” sounds about the same as claiming to “know with 100% certainty.”
READER COMMENTS
Michael Huemer
Jun 17 2021 at 5:07pm
What do you mean by “answerable”? If you mean answerable with 100% certainty, then no, none of those questions are answerable. If you mean answerable with high probability, then yes, we can answer all of those with high probability (the answer being “no” to each).
Jasper
Jun 17 2021 at 7:06pm
I would go a step further and separate “answerable” into two parts. In a world where Bigfoot/ghosts/God exist and are directly observable, the question of whether they exist is clearly answerable with 100% certainty. It would be like asking whether emus or lightbulbs exist; the answer is of course they do, you can see them and touch them. If there is sufficient (foundational) evidence of the existence of a thing, then that thing exists, and the question of its existence is easily resolved. Without such evidence, the thing can either exist or not exist, and that conditional still holds–the question might be answerable, or it might not. All we can say for the likely “no” answers is that the existence of Bigfoot, ghosts, or God is somewhat or very improbable.
Todd Moodey
Jun 17 2021 at 10:24pm
In regards to your response to Hellestal, even granting that your difficult-to-assess assumptions about the degree to which people pay attention to details has a measurable effect on the complexity of the BIV simulation, the description of a simulated world with attenuated detail is vastly more complex than the world. All the more so if, as Hellestal pointed out in a follow-up post, you compare the the BIV configuration plus the world to the world.
Henri Hein
Jun 18 2021 at 1:11am
That’s funny. I don’t know if it was meant to be an argument or just funny, but as an argument, it strikes me as a straw-man. Skeptics claim we cannot be certain about the world. That’s doesn’t include abstract concepts. I doubt any skeptics dispute mathematical proofs. Knowledge is abstract. An inability to know things about the world would not preclude us knowing things about knowledge.
Lawrence
Jun 20 2021 at 5:47pm
It seems to me “Does God exist” is in a different category from the questions you are analogizing it to. Your questions are things within our universe, that we should expect to find evidence for or against by looking for it. If God – an omniscient person who created the universe – exists, then we should expect that any evidence we get will be on God’s terms, which may or may not have anything to do with looking for evidence. Whether or not God exists, religious stories like the Tower of Babel get to the heart of this: we can’t build a (physical or intellectual) tower and ‘catch’ God; we don’t set the terms. Whether this is the inscrutable design of a being far beyond our comprehension or a convenient arrangement to perpetuate a sham is of course the question, but that question isn’t analogous to anything got to do with hunting through the woods to see if a large hairy hominid left big footprints in the mud.
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