/lit/ - Literature

>>3641486
>Something exists, and it's probably very similar to what we conventionally call reality
I don't know. I remember back when I was reading Descartes' first meditations (Part 1 and 2) and thinking 'what if this guy knew about the internet and had seen the film the matrix and...'. That is, he questioned reality because of his ability to dream, but the level of advancement that our species would come to achieve was well beyond his grasp. We are now discussing the possibility of technological consciousness in neurological simulations -- that shit would have blown his mind.

The next thought to me was 'what if we are like Descartes now?' That is, what if there is not only a huge amount of potential advancement unknown to us, but entire aspects of 'reality' that we don't know because we either lack the sophistication to perceive it yet, or it's always imperceptible.

Then, reading through the sceptics, I began to adopt scepticism, but also realised that the fine tuning of models guarantees their reliability -- with respect to self -- but doesn't validate them:

Imagine you are inside a peanut; that almost figure 8 shape of two distinct chambers. You are in the left chamber ... with a blind man. That blind man is feeling around the surface of the peanut and describing it to you, who is then writing it down. That description of the interior is what we have of reality -- it does model the inside of the peanut, and we can always tweak the descriptions to get a slightly more accurate one, but at any moment we could discover the other chamber.