Jaco_van_der_Westhuizen comments on Wrong Questions - Less Wrong

34 Post author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 08 March 2008 05:11PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Comments (126)

Sort By: Old

You are viewing a single comment's thread.

Comment author: Jaco_van_der_Westhuizen 24 June 2008 01:35:19PM 0 points [-]

I believe that you are correct about the concept of existence, that it is not a real thing, but rather an artifact of our perception.

Which is why positivists say that something is only real if it can be perceived, directly or indirectly. They say that we only need to take into account things that can be perceived, because if it affects us, we are perceiving it.

Now that I think of this again, I see one possible flaw, if something is imperceptible now, it might still become perceptible later. For physical objects there might be a law to protect us, but our knowledge of non-physical (i.e. mental) objects leave much to be desired.