Sunday, February 15, 2009

"Not The Matrix, Pal" by Anja Hartleb-Parson

Anja Hartleb-Parson has a perceptive (and NOW online) review of Quee Nelson's The Slightest Philosophy in The New Individualist (Spring 2009). (My own review is here.)

Hartleb-Parson likes the book a lot:
Nelson has written one of the most entertaining and lucidly written epistemology books I have read in recent years.
But she is careful to let us know that Nelson's defense of naive realism is not the Objectivist approach:
Objectivism does not pose realism as the best explanation; rather, it recognizes existence as an axiom.
Which brings me to the infamous question - how do you know you're not in a cybernetic vat - being fed false sense impressons  - like in the Matrix?

Is the answer that "existence exists" or is the answer that "there's no evidence for that"?

I think that, at least technically, the vat scenario does not violate the "existence exists" axiom. In the world of the Matrix, existence is real, it's just not what most people think it is.

Some theories "explain a lot"
even though the balance of the evidence indicates that the theory is not
so hot.

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