h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Me too. For the moment.......

I'm not here.

I was here.......but am now elsewhere considering if I should be here instead.......

So here we are out from under the thumb of the Beeb and back as an independent little site. Lets see if we can resurrect our old community and live again. I have a little project trying to see if I can start a religion based on the emulation of someone who is clearly fictional: Superman. I spent a better part of the evening chatting with strangers how there is and will be in the future more historical evidence for the existence of Superman than there will be of Jesus Christ. I mean you can even go today to Metropolis, Illinois, see claims of being Superman's hometown and take a picture of the statue. Been to Nazareth Lately? Its had many locations over the years and Origen a 2nd Century Christian Scholar lived a stone's throw from modern Nazareth but could not find any evidence of the place and called it a myth.

Freedom!

Wow I haven't been around in a while.

Supermanism, eh? Problem is, there are so many different incarnations of the guy we'd have schismatics off the bat. Originally the guy couldn't even fly. And, for example, a lot of people take this Jedi thing awfully seriously. One has to be careful about starting religions as people are apt to actually believe in them.


Also Batman's better.

What can I say, other than "L: Ron Hubbard"?

Noggin

*Yaaaaaaawn* /stretch/

Hello.

Yes, indeed... are there any particular updates to the page I should be making? I imagine the roster may be a tad out-of-date?


GTB

OK, if there's anyone still alive here --- I'm back.

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It's me. Pattern-chaser.

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Don't you remember me?

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Is that an echo, or is someone responding?

Hello PC.

Welcome back.

F.

Thanks, Fathom. Do enough people ever congregate here to have, say, a discussion?

Not recently. Anything you'd like to discuss?

F.

Always. I don't want to repeat what's been said here, though. When I left, the culture here was one of philosophical naivete. People were appalled at the thought of a non-objective philosophy. No-one could even grasp the possibility that there was (just possibly) not a world that looked like the picture their perception delivered to their conscious mind. They just fell back on ad hominem attacks. I've been hiding in a philosophy forum since I left, and am much more secure in my beliefs than I was as a beleaguered minority of one. [I'm making it sound worse than it was, but this is essentially correct.]

What do you like to talk about? Any pet subjects you'd like to explore?

What's a non-objective philosophy? Is that a subjective philosophy or one that doesn't require objectivity?

F.

That's me being unclear. I mean any philosophy which is not wholly objective. Associated with this is any definition of a human who is not wholly rational (Vulcan). Neither humans nor (human) philosophies are always and wholly rational or objective, in my experience. [They *are* be rational, and they *do* approach objective ... once in a while.]

>>"No-one could even grasp the possibility that there was (just possibly) not a world that looked like the picture their perception delivered to their conscious mind. They just fell back on ad hominem attacks."

If you're going to complain about ad hominem attacks, can you see that it might seem a touch hypocritical to make sweeping statements claiming that no-one else was bright enough to grasp the concept you were suggesting?

I'm quite aware that my senses are not merely imperfect in terms of limited coverage, resolution and accuracy, that my image of 'reality' is a constructed one prone to all manner of potential illusions, that some of my impressions of reality (like 'colour') don't relate to any simple physical properties, and that some 'people' 'see' things which I don't believe exist.

However, things I perceive as being other 'people' do seem to generally share my views about the gross physical nature of the world, and I appear to experience significant consistency in that I make continual predictions about future sense data which have an extremely high degree of reliability - when I walk, I feel contact with the ground at very much the time and place I expect to given predictions made by visual and other data.

Now, it's *possible* that other people don't exist, and it's *possible* that 'reality' is part of some dream or simulation, but to be honest, I've yet to see anything remotely useful coming out of philosophers (even proper philosophers) actually talking about such things, including any useful suggestions as to how I could actually work out whether any of those possibilities might be more than purely self-indulgent speculations.

It would seem rather unlikely that I am actually living and moving in a physical universe which I am seeing in a completely wrong way, and that I am tripping over things while I think I am walking with competence.
It's *possible*, but if there is such a universe and I am simply deluded about what I am doing in it, again there would seem to be no useful suggestions from philosophers as to how I could determine that I was deluded or what the universe was actually like.

In fact, if by some magical method I could be genuinely certain that 'reality' was seriously different from my images of it, to the extent where my view of it was not simply a poor approximation but actually completely wrong, I'm not sure that all the philosophers in the world could get me a single step closer to understanding what was 'really' going on.

In any case, in *reality*, you seem to have a rather subjective view of history.

People seemed happy to acknowledge the imperfectness of perception.

Among others, both Edward the Bonobo and I were, seven years ago, (page 418 onward) engaging in detail with what you were saying, but simply asking what the *use* of it was.

OK, the philosophy can wait for another time; an apology can't.

"it might seem a touch hypocritical to make sweeping statements claiming that no-one else was bright enough to grasp the concept you were suggesting?"

It seems I very expressed myself very poorly, for which I apologise. It certainly was NOT the case that no-one was or is bright enough to grasp the concepts I was suggesting. On the contrary. There were some who, with a good grasp of the concepts in question, chose to ridicule me instead of addressing the argument. I got fed up of that.

Reading what I wrote at the time, it would seem like I wasn't fully aware of what precipitated your leaving, and it seems like something I found hints suggesting I didn't want to find out.

However, whatever happened elsewhere, the main issue on this thread seemed to be that you were claiming something was desperately important which other people seemed to conclude, despite considering it in great detail, was not important in as you claimed it was.

For example, you claimed that logic was 'invalid' if applied to situations where we didn't have absolute certainty.
I explained *my* view that even in such situations, logic was a useful tool as long as people were capable of remembering that they weren't basing it on absolutely certain input and didn't pretend that the conclusions were more valid than the inputs.

Given my position, your continued demands that I accept logic was 'invalid' for virtually all practical situations seemed likely to have only one outcome, and it was likely an outcome that you were going to end up more upset than I was - that's the way when someone demands other people take them seriously despite having an externally unconvincing case.

We can use mathematics based on measurements as well as on synthetically perfect numbers, we simply need to have the the wit or maturity to realise the difference between the two and to treat the result accordingly, but we don't need to invent a differently-named mathematics for the measurement situation, we simply need not to be daft enough to be fooled by a label into believing the results perfect when we know quite well that they are approximate.
The same goes for logic.