I would assert, that a lot of this speculation has more to do with people not establishing confidence in the ways that we confirm reality; by that, I mean being overly sensitive and speculative, because of a lack of confidence in existential proof. That issue of confidence seems to come first, before the mental gymnastics performed to contrive that everything is a simulation. Here are some issues with the simulation views:
1. It often anthropomorphizes it's causes and ultimate explanations.
2. It assumes order or purpose even though it often starts from the POV that these values aren't apparent ("order" and "purpose").
3. It confuses organization and levels of organization with intelligence, often not properly defining intelligence or answering the question of whether or not order is an arbitrary concept (and how we would know whether order is arbitrary or not).
4. Because of the lack of criteria and order established, any old type of simulation or theory for our reality being a false projection, has the same status.
How do we know we don't live in a simulation, or our own created reality, or some other kind of false projection? When I have the time I'll get after this more rigorously, but in order to offer basic support and exposure to my views, I'll make a few references to some concepts you folks may or may not be familiar with:
Counter-factuals.
The existence of other minds; which more of you are probably familiar with, and which I think is a pretty iffy subject.
Originality of phenomena.
Cogito ergo sum; many of you are probably familiar with Descarte.
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/exist ... sm/#ExiTod
Quote:
1. The Emergence of Existence as a Philosophical Problem
Sartre's existentialism drew its immediate inspiration from the work of the German philosopher, Martin Heidegger. Heidegger's 1927 Being and Time, an inquiry into the “being that we ourselves are” (which he termed “Dasein,” a German word for existence), introduced most of the motifs that would characterize later existentialist thinking: the tension between the individual and the “public”; an emphasis on the worldly or “situated” character of human thought and reason; a fascination with liminal experiences of anxiety, death, the “nothing” and nihilism; the rejection of science (and above all, causal explanation) as an adequate framework for understanding human being; and the introduction of “authenticity” as the norm of self-identity, tied to the project of self-definition through freedom, choice, and commitment. Though in 1946 Heidegger would repudiate the retrospective labelling of his earlier work as existentialism, it is in that work that the relevant concept of existence finds its first systematic philosophical formulation.[1]
As Sartre and Merleau-Ponty would later do, Heidegger pursued these issues with the somewhat unlikely resources of Edmund Husserl's phenomenological method. And while not all existential philosophers were influenced by phenomenology (for instance Jaspers and Marcel), the philosophical legacy of existentialism is largely tied to the form it took as an existential version of phenomenology. Husserl's efforts in the first decades of the twentieth century had been directed toward establishing a descriptive science of consciousness, by which he understood not the object of the natural science of psychology but the “transcendental” field of intentionality, i.e., that whereby our experience is meaningful, an experience of something as something. The existentialists welcomed Husserl's doctrine of intentionality as a refutation of the Cartesian view according to which consciousness relates immediately only to its own representations, ideas, sensations. According to Husserl, consciousness is our direct openness to the world, one that is governed categorially (normatively) rather than causally; that is, intentionality is not a property of the individual mind but the categorial framework in which mind and world become intelligible.[2]
A phenomenology of consciousness, then, explores neither the metaphysical composition nor the causal genesis of things, but the “constitution” of their meaning. Husserl employed this method to clarify our experience of nature, the socio-cultural world, logic, and mathematics, but Heidegger argued that he had failed to raise the most fundamental question, that of the “meaning of being” as such. In turning phenomenology toward the question of what it means to be, Heidegger insists that the question be raised concretely: it is not at first some academic exercise but a burning concern arising from life itself, the question of what it means for me to be. Existential themes take on salience when one sees that the general question of the meaning of being involves first becoming clear about one's own being as an inquirer. According to Heidegger, the categories bequeathed by the philosophical tradition for understanding a being who can question his or her being are insufficient: traditional concepts of a substance decked out with reason, or of a subject blessed with self-consciousness, misconstrue our fundamental character as “being-in-the-world.” In his phenomenological pursuit of the categories that govern being-in-the-world, Heidegger became the reluctant father of existentialism because he drew inspiration from two seminal, though in academic circles then relatively unknown, nineteenth-century writers, Sören Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche. One can find anticipations of existential thought in many places (for instance, in Socratic irony, Augustine, Pascal, or the late Schelling), but the roots of the problem of existence in its contemporary significance lie in the work of Kierkegaard and Nietzsche.
Later, I'll start composing arguments for the viewpoint that empiricism represents what is truly real.
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There is no wealth like knowledge, no poverty like ignorance.
Nahj ul-Balāgha by Ali bin Abu-Talib
15 Apr 2012, 10:00 am
