I mean, he challenged me to prove that my mother existed, without seeing her. Obviously I couldn’t.
You didn’t have a phone number you could reach her with?
You didn’t have any memories of her?
These are all sufficient evidence for her existence. And sufficient evidence is what we call “proof”.
At the very least, you could tell him “I bet you a thousand dollars that I will later see my mother, when I go home” If he doesn’t accept the bet, that’s evidence he himself believes in the existence of your mother, as he expects to lose your bet.
His words babbling about “existence” mean nothing—as his arguments connects to neither the present and the evidence you have now (your memories of your mother), nor the anticipated future. It’s just babbling nonsense.
Sorry, my nitpick alarm went off at this. I think it makes more sense to say, “You don’t need infinite certainty, just sufficiently strong evidence, and in any case there will never be enough evidence for you to be 100% sure of anything.”
He still expects that people will exist in the future.
I think I’ve figured it out. This is what is wrong with his belief.
It doesn’t pay rent.
Even if he’s right, and people stop existing when we stop percieving them, it still won’t change how we behave, or what we’re expecting to happen. He expects to see his friends later, he just says he can’t prove they exist at the moment. (I asked him about memories, he said that we still have memories of dead people, are they alive?)
It’s not falsifiable. It doesn’t constrain experience, I can’t use this new idea as a model for future information. It’s utterly useless because it permits anything to happen.
When I think about it, it’s like the tree dropping in the forest analogy. We’re not anticipating different experiences. We both expect to see our mothers later. And we can both agree that we cannot percieve people when they aren’t in front of us.
He’s just choosing a rather complicated way to state the obvious. At least this is what I’m getting.
There is a sense of “prove” which implies certainty. If your friend is using this sense he is right- you cannot be certain that people stop existing when you stop perceiving them. In fact, he is not being nearly skeptical enough. You can’t be certain people people exist when you’re perceiving them either! Your senses could be lying to you- in fact people often dream or hallucinate people who aren’t really there.
But what we’re doing when we say something exists is making a model to explain our sense perceptions. There are models consistent with our senses that do not involve people existing—but they are bad models. Believing that all of reality is structured around your perception and that things come into and out of existence based on whether or not you sense them is not a very good model of the world. In fact it is a backwards and totally unhelpful model of the world. The point in saying “My mother exists” is to explain why you have all these sense perceptions: her image, the sound of her voice, memories of her, etc. The best way to explain and predict these perceptions is by thinking of your mother as an independently existing entity… “I saw my mother at 5:00 because that is when she gets home from work I didn’t see her before then because she was at work.” (note, one feature of hallucinations is that they usually don’t lend themselves to being modeled as externally existing entities). And this isn’t just true of people: it is true of all your beliefs.
Yes you are right, these are flaws in his argument.
I have trouble even expressing his position coherently. Is he really saying that objects in the universe blink out of existence when you are not perceiving them? If that is the case, how is state in those objects (such as the thoughts in your friend’s head) maintained when they do not exist?
Maybe its as if there is a meta-universe with some notion of working memory that stores the objects while they are not existing. Of course this is very question begging, isn’t the storage itself what we mean by existence?
Also the objects state isn’t simply maintained, it advances in ways that are logically consistent with what you know about the object. Like your friend has maybe read another chapter of the book before you see him again. So its as if we have to have computation over this set of working memory, to work out what would be happening in them to keep them consistent with your model of reality. I personally would call this computation “existence” so it might be be advantageous if your friend goes down this track.
At this point he may well acknowledge that objects exist in some sort of separate or parallel universe when outside your perceptions. If you can trick him into taking this position you’ll have him dead to rights.
You could also ask him what he would expect to happen if he were to close his eyes (or turn around), and you were to smack him on the head. Sure, you hitting him would be real in your “existence”, but would he expect not to feel pain in his? That kinda goes along with floating beliefs vs. testable hypotheses; it is at least something to work with. And then, you could make it even more solipsistic by asking what happens if you both close your eyes before you smack him!
There is also the possibility of getting to understand what he thinks about other forms of sensation. You could bring up echolocation, blind people, using magnetic fields to sense, IR vision (can the soldier see you if they are looking at your heat signature through a building in pitch black? Would either of you exist in one another’s world?)… the list can be long, but it all boils down to there being evidence that you existed that whole time. If you can reach out and touch someone; with hands, or with phones, or with innernets. If they can upload images on facebook, even when they left your country, and you can see pictures of them. Then you are not being honest of your meaning of ‘existence’ when you say “they don’t exist to me”.
You didn’t have a phone number you could reach her with? You didn’t have any memories of her? These are all sufficient evidence for her existence. And sufficient evidence is what we call “proof”.
At the very least, you could tell him “I bet you a thousand dollars that I will later see my mother, when I go home” If he doesn’t accept the bet, that’s evidence he himself believes in the existence of your mother, as he expects to lose your bet.
His words babbling about “existence” mean nothing—as his arguments connects to neither the present and the evidence you have now (your memories of your mother), nor the anticipated future. It’s just babbling nonsense.
Sorry, my nitpick alarm went off at this. I think it makes more sense to say, “You don’t need infinite certainty, just sufficiently strong evidence, and in any case there will never be enough evidence for you to be 100% sure of anything.”
Thank you (and others who have posted) for helping me with this silly argument.
:) I’ll let you know how things turn out. He’s quite clever at thinking on the spot.
Update:
I confronted him with many of these arguments.
He still expects that people will exist in the future.
I think I’ve figured it out. This is what is wrong with his belief.
It doesn’t pay rent.
Even if he’s right, and people stop existing when we stop percieving them, it still won’t change how we behave, or what we’re expecting to happen. He expects to see his friends later, he just says he can’t prove they exist at the moment. (I asked him about memories, he said that we still have memories of dead people, are they alive?)
It’s not falsifiable. It doesn’t constrain experience, I can’t use this new idea as a model for future information. It’s utterly useless because it permits anything to happen.
When I think about it, it’s like the tree dropping in the forest analogy. We’re not anticipating different experiences. We both expect to see our mothers later. And we can both agree that we cannot percieve people when they aren’t in front of us.
He’s just choosing a rather complicated way to state the obvious. At least this is what I’m getting.
Am I right, guys?
There is a sense of “prove” which implies certainty. If your friend is using this sense he is right- you cannot be certain that people stop existing when you stop perceiving them. In fact, he is not being nearly skeptical enough. You can’t be certain people people exist when you’re perceiving them either! Your senses could be lying to you- in fact people often dream or hallucinate people who aren’t really there.
But what we’re doing when we say something exists is making a model to explain our sense perceptions. There are models consistent with our senses that do not involve people existing—but they are bad models. Believing that all of reality is structured around your perception and that things come into and out of existence based on whether or not you sense them is not a very good model of the world. In fact it is a backwards and totally unhelpful model of the world. The point in saying “My mother exists” is to explain why you have all these sense perceptions: her image, the sound of her voice, memories of her, etc. The best way to explain and predict these perceptions is by thinking of your mother as an independently existing entity… “I saw my mother at 5:00 because that is when she gets home from work I didn’t see her before then because she was at work.” (note, one feature of hallucinations is that they usually don’t lend themselves to being modeled as externally existing entities). And this isn’t just true of people: it is true of all your beliefs.
Yes you are right, these are flaws in his argument.
I have trouble even expressing his position coherently. Is he really saying that objects in the universe blink out of existence when you are not perceiving them? If that is the case, how is state in those objects (such as the thoughts in your friend’s head) maintained when they do not exist?
Maybe its as if there is a meta-universe with some notion of working memory that stores the objects while they are not existing. Of course this is very question begging, isn’t the storage itself what we mean by existence?
Also the objects state isn’t simply maintained, it advances in ways that are logically consistent with what you know about the object. Like your friend has maybe read another chapter of the book before you see him again. So its as if we have to have computation over this set of working memory, to work out what would be happening in them to keep them consistent with your model of reality. I personally would call this computation “existence” so it might be be advantageous if your friend goes down this track.
At this point he may well acknowledge that objects exist in some sort of separate or parallel universe when outside your perceptions. If you can trick him into taking this position you’ll have him dead to rights.
That’s probably the right answer. Still:
“Your see your nose in your peripheral vision whenever you have your eyes open. Does this perception cease to exist when you stop noticing it?”
You could also ask him what he would expect to happen if he were to close his eyes (or turn around), and you were to smack him on the head. Sure, you hitting him would be real in your “existence”, but would he expect not to feel pain in his? That kinda goes along with floating beliefs vs. testable hypotheses; it is at least something to work with. And then, you could make it even more solipsistic by asking what happens if you both close your eyes before you smack him!
There is also the possibility of getting to understand what he thinks about other forms of sensation. You could bring up echolocation, blind people, using magnetic fields to sense, IR vision (can the soldier see you if they are looking at your heat signature through a building in pitch black? Would either of you exist in one another’s world?)… the list can be long, but it all boils down to there being evidence that you existed that whole time. If you can reach out and touch someone; with hands, or with phones, or with innernets. If they can upload images on facebook, even when they left your country, and you can see pictures of them. Then you are not being honest of your meaning of ‘existence’ when you say “they don’t exist to me”.