Does Matter Create Consciousness? Or Vice Versa?

[Angrboda]

(If we are deceived, we are deceived completely, and that we are deceived, is, itself a deception. This is the same logical catch-22 that all forms of radical skepticism face. They are logically incomplete philosophies.)

That sort of reminds me of a maxim of Pyrrohnian skepticism:

"You can't know anything, including this."

Which just makes me go straight-lipped. Anyway, does it really follow that if you are deceived completely? I don't think so. :0

I was waxing poetical. However you might want to ask yourself what sense you could put to only being partially deceived (about realism). How would you know which part.

Anyway, this might be applicable, but it's been a while since I posted it, and I don't think I fully agreed with Priest to begin with, so maybe not.

http://atheistforums.org/thread-14548-po...#pid329604

However, I'm not sure your post is quite as applicable to Benny's post as you might think. I mean, all you really have in terms of having certainty in existing is your own subjective experience, right? Whatever metaphysical conclusions you draw about reality will depend on the assumptions you make about whatever may lay "behind" them. But can those assumptions ever be proven? I mean, I call myself an indirect realist, but I'd have to be honest and say that I really just assume that some kind of realism is true.

You're attempting to cleave the two halves of the argument and refute the one while ignoring the other. The point, made before by others, is that radical skepticism denies the possibility of all knowledge, including knowing that radical skepticism is valid. It tends to be self-refuting in that sense. Even if we allow a provisional pragmatic skepticism of this radical variety, it guarantees we can't cash out anything in terms of truth, including itself. It becomes very nihilistic by necessity. I think nihilism itself is an empty position, but radical skepticism doesn't seem to offer any virtues in terms of understanding the world, whatever "the world" happens to be, and, all too often, radical skepticism is employed just like presuppositionalism, as a sort of nuclear option to deny the opponent victory, rather than to secure it for yourself. What inferences of any value can you draw from the radical skepticism of Benny's variety. I can't be sure I'm real. Okay, so what? I've already noted that cogito ergo sum is a flawed and invalid inference. So we have no way of knowing that "world" exists, including us. So what? Where do you go from there?