I don’t ‘choose’ to ignore the outer world. To make ‘supernatural’ or ‘god’ not trivially empty sets I have to come up with a sensible concept (in the sense of either appealing to intuition or theology or both) of these. One is to take ‘universe’ to mean some entity differentiatable (at least conceptually) from an outer/enclosing universe (which includes its ‘creator’ or creaing process). The concept of a creator god is of course quite common in theology and even if this leaves open the source of outer universe came from that doesn’t necessarily preclude the nesting to begin with.
Note: I didn’t down-vote you. I think you may validly ask why I chose this distinction.
I know you didn’t down-vote me, that was Eugene Nier. Why you didn’t up-vote me is another question.
And others have mentioned the “fundamentally mental” definition which seems at work here. The simulation hypothesis would technically give us reason to ask whether it really makes sense to assume the programmer(s) run on their own set of rules, which don’t mention minds. And yet it still feels like we shouldn’t believe the outer world will change its laws in the sense of all air turning to butterflies (or the outer-world equivalent) in the next second (our time). This feeling even seems somewhat reasonable, since a change to the outer world could easily affect ours. The grue-bleen problem means we would still need some more technical form of Occam’s Razor to even explain what we/I believe there.
I don’t ‘choose’ to ignore the outer world. To make ‘supernatural’ or ‘god’ not trivially empty sets I have to come up with a sensible concept (in the sense of either appealing to intuition or theology or both) of these. One is to take ‘universe’ to mean some entity differentiatable (at least conceptually) from an outer/enclosing universe (which includes its ‘creator’ or creaing process). The concept of a creator god is of course quite common in theology and even if this leaves open the source of outer universe came from that doesn’t necessarily preclude the nesting to begin with.
Note: I didn’t down-vote you. I think you may validly ask why I chose this distinction.
I know you didn’t down-vote me, that was Eugene Nier. Why you didn’t up-vote me is another question.
And others have mentioned the “fundamentally mental” definition which seems at work here. The simulation hypothesis would technically give us reason to ask whether it really makes sense to assume the programmer(s) run on their own set of rules, which don’t mention minds. And yet it still feels like we shouldn’t believe the outer world will change its laws in the sense of all air turning to butterflies (or the outer-world equivalent) in the next second (our time). This feeling even seems somewhat reasonable, since a change to the outer world could easily affect ours. The grue-bleen problem means we would still need some more technical form of Occam’s Razor to even explain what we/I believe there.
Huh? How do you know? I know how to find out about whole posts. But comments?
I tend to not up-vote questions which just ask e.g. for clarification except where this has clearly a general or novel aspect.