Let us treat men and women well; treat them as if they were real.  
Perhaps they are.

56 responses total.

There is no evidence that peole are real.  Any ar4guments to that effect are
pointless and absurd.

Arugments that arguments that people are real are absurd are pointless
and absurd.

Nonsense.  Arguments suggesting that arguing the absurdity of the argument
that people are real is absurd are absurd and unfounded.

You might have to read that a few times, but since you are not real, you
don't.

Read it a few times?  I'd prefer not to read it at all!

#2> There's a sizable philosophical literature, the bulk of philosophy, going
back millenia, that argue whether people are real; Plato argues as much. Are
you saying that Plato's arguments were absurd and pointless?

(Sorry, Grex, couldn't let two gauntlets in a row lie still. ;} )

Quite a lot of what Plato & his conteporaries said was absurd; they were great
at coming up with theories but not so good at actually testing them.  For
instance, "ice floats because it is flat, while rocks sink because they are
round and able to break the surface of the water".  Apparently they didn't
try to float any flat rocks.

Plato argues no such thing. His argument, summaried at
http://www.historyguide.org/ancient/lecture8b.html, is that

"Building upon the wisdom of Socrates and Parmenides, Plato argued that
reality is known only through the mind. There is a higher world,
independent of the world we may experience through our senses. Because the
senses may deceive us, it is necessary that this higher world exist, a
world of Ideas or Forms -- of what is unchanging, absolute and universal. 
In other words, although there may be something from the phenomenal world
which we consider beautiful or good or just, Plato postulates that there
is a higher unchanging reality of the beautiful, goodness or justice. To
live in accordance with these universal standards is the good life -- to
grasp the Forms is to grasp ultimate truth." 

This is a far cry from arguing that people are not REAL. Plato only
argued that our knowledge of people is only in  our  minds - a tautology.

#6 slipped in.

I'm offended at the suggestion that I ought not to question the evidence of
my senses.  There is no evidence for the existence of other entities besides
the brain-in-a-jar that is me; in fact, any such "evidence" must necessarily
be the result of circular reasoning.  Note that I avoid the (mis)use of the
term "logic" here.  

Give the greek scientists a break--they had no bodies of evidence to base
things on. :)  The all-powerful scientific method was not well known.  

It depends on what you mean by "real," Rane.  Most philosophers don't argue
against the reality of our existence so much as our perception of it.  

#7> If you're going to summarize the entire works of Plato into 10 lines and
pretend that that's a sufficient and complete answer to my criticism -- which
referred also to all the other philosophers in the meantime -- and further
distorts my assertion (I did not say that plato argued that humans were not
real, I said he wrote articles about WHETHER they were real, i.e., about the
nature of objective v. subjective reality, which articles you provide a
summary for), then there's no point debating the point.

In other words, you agree with my assertion. Plato provided an argument abour
whether things in the universe (including people) were real. Do you disagree
that you agree with that?

#10, para 2> At least SOMEONE got my point. Thanks, senna.

I didn't mean anything by "real":  I was quoting an analysis of Plato.

But Plato had a point, even though not knowing what was to come. If you
were the size of a quark and materialized in the body of a horse, what
would you make of it? Certainly not a "horse". Perhaps something closer to
Plato's Ideas or Forms - masses of swirling fields. Our ordinary concept
of horse is conditioned by the interaction of light with one and our
consciousness (whatever that is), and our expectation that we cannot walk
through one, even though both the horse and we are (about) 99.9999999%
space empty of matter (or, at least barionic matter).

Re #11: Do I disagree or agree with what? Your statement in #5 that
"Plato argues as much" I understood to mean you were saying that Plato
argued that people were not "real". That's not how  I understood Plato.
But if you didn't mean what I thought you meant... you should be
clearer.

Seems to me Plato was just overestimating the effect of surface tension...

who knows who is real.  apparently on AOL, there is a virtual user, a
user that is actually a program.  This user chats with others and
goes into different chat rooms.  presumably, as a program, it can only
offer simple responses and couldnt answer questions that require non
generic answers.  But the item I read indicated the virtual user has
fooled some.  So who knows what the future holds, when programming gets
more sophisticated, and more interactive, and you really can't tell whats
real or not.  

It would be boring if people weren't real.  So they are.  Q.E.D.

Many people find unreal fantasies entertaining and hardly boring.

Some of them take those fantasies more seriously than others.

The way we perceive reality is also a fun subject.  Kant's structured
perception, for instance.  I think the "sense deception" argument used for
basing reality upon the intellect alone has been wiped out by scientific
advance, however.

Richard's "virtual user" has been around for years in IRC-land, in the
form of various "bots".  The most common bots these days respond to
simple commands to adminster the room, but there are many other forms,
some of which go to some length to mimic human behavior.  The idea of a
"virtual user" can also be traced back to the 60's, with programs such
as "Eliza".

We've had a few on here, and there've been more on mnet.

Did  you enjoy 'Eliza', Marcus?

Emerson is only saying, treat men and women AS IF they were real.  He 
isn't trying to make the case one way or the other for them actually 
being real.  More interesting, I think, is that he seems to be implying 
that treating men and women as if they were real means treating them 
well.

#13: I was very clear. I wrote:
 #2> There's a sizable philosophical literature, the bulk of philosophy, going
 back millenia, that argue whether people are real; Plato argues as much
 
That is, Plato presents arguments whether people (and things in the universe
in general) are real.

I don't think I was unclear, I think that you assumed that I was saying
something that I didn't.

So, do you disagree that Plato presents arguments about whether people (and
things) are real?

Eliza had long since been translated into Basic, before I encountered
it.

You seem to like Basic more than Eliza. Does that trouble you?

That troubles the hell out of me.  Basic should be taken out and pummeled into
oblivion repeatedly by crazed chipmunks with tiny meat tenderizers for its
crimes.  

md, are you asserting that the reason people treat other people like 
crap is because they think of them as not being real?  Not sure I buy that. 

I hate when people speak of things being unnatural. Wouldn't anything done
by natural beings therefore be natural actions. I can't speak on humans being
real. All we know is our brains interpretation of stimuli. Our brains are real
or we would not be sentient.

... cogito ergo sum ...
 
If by #27, you mean that, since we have minds, it must be the case that there
exists something to hold that mind, called a brain, I agree. If you mean that
what we believe to be the container of our mind -- that gooey stuff in what
we believe to be our skulls -- exists solely by virtue of the existence of
ou rmind, I disagree.

On the other hand, I agree with Rane that arguing about whether things we
perceive to be in the universe are actually there, or are just figments of
our imagination, is irrelevant to anything constructive, and is little more
than an intellectual diversion for people who have little better to do. (I'm
extrapolting quite a bit, Rane, so forgive me if I'm misrepresnting your
position.) Even if everything we function within is a fantasy, we still have
to function within it.

You extrapolated off the end of the wharf, brighn.  I have no doubt that
*stuff* really exists without us around, but what it really IS, is rather
different from our perceptions of it.

Rane, I'm beginning to think that you change your stance just to disagree with
me. If the stuff that exists around us is rather different from our
perceptions of it, why do you so readily reject religion as silly, on the
grounds that there is no evidence of it, when that evidence is entirely
perceptual, which you've now claimed is not a reliable way for assessing the
stuff in the universe?
 
If you have a consistent worldview on this topic, now's the time to present
it, before I completely right you off as just yanking my chain, for good.

Write him off, maybe? :)

#26: No, I think you need some reason(s) to treat people well other 
than that you think they're real.  If you thought they *weren't* real, 
there'd be no reason to treat them well, but why does Emerson seem to 
imply that thinking they might be real --> treating them well?  For 
that to work, you need both cogito ergo sum and Do unto others, neither 
of which is implied in "Perhaps men and women are real."

#31> Heh. I've decided to do both. Now, if only I can stick to my resolve more
than a few days. =P

pipe

Re #30: I see no evidence for the existence of mystical conscious entities
that concern themselves with humans. I see PLENTY of evidence that the
reality of matter and energy is vastly different than we perceive it,
because of the limitations of our senses. We think there are "solids"  but
what they really are wave packets pushing against one another upon close
approach. There are endless examples of this. Electrical circuits are
actually boundary conditions on the solutions of Maxwell's Equations
(which in turn represent a reality we again only approximate - we don't
know what a "field" really is)  but our senses (with the crude instruments
we use to supplement them)  only see part of the solutions as crude
approximations to their reality. 

These crude approximations to "reality" are still sufficient to give us
the means to think and act (though never very fast, efficiently, or
necessarily correctly). We are trapped within our perceptual reality, but
still have clues to a wider reality far beyond our immediate perceptions. 
We do "push" our limitations, of course, or we would not know of the
existence of larger realities, and maybe someday we will be able to
include more of it in our daily lives, but we will STILL be constrained
to live with our perceptual abilities.

Rane, though, all of your evidence has been gathered through your perceptual
senses. That's my point. No matter how far you go, you're still constrained
by your perceptions. Upshoot: I think you misread my "off the wharf" comments,
thinking perhaps that I was referring to immediate sensory data (as you do
in #35). Your method of analyzing the universe is still through sensory data,
just more advanced sensory data than, say, picking up a rock and thus
determining that it's a solid object. Instead, you use a tool that is advanced
enough to break that object down to its molecules and farther than that...
but you're still talking about improving our understanding of the universe
through ever-refined methods of collecting sensory data, are you not?

In other words, if something is *completely* beyond any means of data
collection, either present or future, then its specific nature is suspect and
not of relevance. The only phenomena that are worth studying, or debating,
are phenomena which directly or indirectly effect our universe in a testable
manner (that is, whether God exists or not, and what the nature of the Gods
is, only becomes relevant if there were an argument by which the existence
of God affected the universe: To pervert [deliberately] Descartes' root
argument, either we are accurately measuring the phenomena in the world within
the limitations of our technology, or we are inaccurately doing so because
some supernatural force is deluding us; in either case, our results would be
identical, so we have no way of resolving the issue -- on the other hand, if
someone were to say that God created the world 3000 years ago and is making
no attempts to hide this fact, then we can provide reams of evidence to the
contrary: EITHER God did not create the world 3000 years ago, or some
elaborate attempt has been made to deceive us, because the evidence strongly
suggests otherwise).

Except (and perhaps including) the long parenthetical, would you agree with
the last paragraph.

Thanks for responding, by the way.

We are not entirely constrained by our perceptual senses alone. We
interpret, analyze, and theorize. These create something that goes beyond
direct perceptual senses. Maxwell's equations, for example. They imply
Special Relativety, which no one up to then had sensed. We do have the
good sense to then seek perceptual data that supports such (unexpected) 
implications, but nevertheless the implication existed prior to the
perception, which existed prior to the sensory data. 

Even omitting the parenthetical addition, I cannot agree entirely with
your last paragraph, unless you are defining that which is *completely*
beyond data collection to be those things whose "specific nature is
suspect and not of relevance".

I can think of exceptions. The spatial positions and velocities of all
atoms that came into existence following the Big Bang will never be known,
due to quantum uncertainties alone in addition to the impracticality to
attempt to determine them.  However their specific nature is not suspect
and hardly without relevance. This is generally true of all circumstances
and events in the past whose information has been degraded by time (and
the second law).

Para 1> That's fair. I think we're actually getting somewhere. =} It's true
that we can develop theories that rely on data collection which is beyond our
current means, but within our plausible (future) means. As to your second
paragraph, that's exactly how I'm defining it, so I infer that you agree with
me, then. While we may never now the spatial velocities, etc., of atoms
immediately following (or preceding, for that matter) the Big Bang, those
velocities have a relevance because of the chain of events that followed them,
and they therefore have an indirect effect on the universe as we perceive it
(and are therefore relevant to scientific pursuit).

In contrast, and to take religion out of the discussion, consider the Matrix:
All of reality is being fed into our neural nets, and everything is a
fabrication. Anything that we may perceive has been carefully orchestrated
(in theory) to deceive us. If I were to theorize that the reality posited in
the Matrix were real, right now, how would you set about disproving me? If
it were constructed carefully enough, any test you might create would
demonstrate what the Matrix wants it to demonstrate.
 
Likewise, there's a common dilemma about free will and predeterminism that
posits that *all* things are predetermined, and that randomness in scientific
phenomena (even at the quantum level) is an illusion. If that's the case, then
there's no such thing as free will, because we're destined to make whatever
decisions we're destined to make. If that were true, it would likewise be
impossible to disprove, because any attempt to do so could be argued to have
been a predestined attempt.
 
In either case, though, what's the relevance of the theory? If either the
Matrix theory (really, just a secular version of Descartes' "cogito ergo sum"
reasoning) or the Predestination theory is correct, so what? In the former
case, there's not a whole lot we can really do about it, since any attempt
to enlighten ourselves about the Matrix would be orchestrated by the Matrix,
and in the latter case, any choice we make in an attempt to get around it
would be a manifestation of it. Either way, we're in the same boat we're in
if we assume that both theories are wrong: That we at least *perceive* that
free will exists, and that our universe has certain characteristics. The msot
constructive course, then, is to ignore these possibilities and focus on what
we *can* devise testable hypotheses about.
 
I think where you and I deviate, philosophically, is that I reserve the right
to accept such theories as possibilities, but not ones I'm going to trouble
myself with except for idle amusement, and you appear to reject such theories
for their uselessness. Either way, the net effect is the same.

Are we on the verge of actual agreement? ;}

The Matrix theory and No Free Will theories are like what'is name's theory
that everything was created ca. 4000 years ago:  pathetic. It is an empty
idea because, by definition, no evidence against it is acceptable and no
evidence for it exists. (I see no connection between the Matrix Theory and
"Cognito ergo sum".) These ideas are jokes. Momentarily amusing, perhaps,
but not worth any time (they define themselves as not beingh worth any
time!). What can you "do" with these theories? Nothing.

In regard to what you were referring to inre "As to your second paragraph,
that's exactly how I'm defining it, so I infer that you agree with me,
then.", note that I stated your definition in reverse, making it a
tautology. One does not agree or disagree with tautologies - one just
identifies such.

- Backtalk version 1.3.30 - Copyright 1996-2006, Jan Wolter and Steve Weiss