What's the point of philosophy any more?

[bennyboy]

If you disagree with this, you tell me how you would determine whether you exist in the Mind of God, exist in a Matrix or that everyone else is a figment of your own imagination to the point where you could reliably convince everyone else enough to find out for yourselves and come to the same conclusion.

To start with, I'd use science to determine to the best of my ability what the Universe is made up of. Then I'd discover that at the finest resolution, the Universe is 99.9999999% empty, and that the 0.00000001% that might consist of something cannot be represented unambiguously in time and space. I would come to the conclusion that we live in a world of information, not of stuff, and that the stuff we perceive is necessarily representational of information, and not vice versa as seemed intuitive to me.

Having established with 100% certainty that the Universe is not, and cannot, be as I perceive it, I would begin to doubt very much that there is any point in defining reality except in the context of certain sets of perceptions, or as defined by certain axioms. I'd make sure that whenever I talked about truth, I'd always reference the philosophical choices which are axiomatic to the context I'm working in, so as not to conflate truth in one context with that in another.

For example, it's true on the daily level in which I normally function that Brenda in the office is a fucking bitch. I do not believe that is likely to be true at the quantum level, or at a cosmic level. I would be upset to the extreme if, in studying QM, I found any vestige at all of the truth that Brenda-is-a-fucking-bitch.


So, I wouldn't say that we are literally in the mind of a Biblical creator God, because that's clearly a bunch of made-up bullshit. But I think God as a metaphor for the way the Universe is, and the degree and manner to which we are forced to interact with it, would be a fair enough view.