My name’s Dan LaVine. I forget exactly how I got linked here, but I haven’t been able to stop following internal links since.
I’m not an expert in anything, but I have a relatively broad/shallow education across mathematics and the sciences and a keen interest in philosophical problems (not quite as much interest in traditional approaches to the problems). My tentative explorations of these problems are broadly commensurate with a lot of the material I’ve read on this site so far. Maybe that means I’m exposing myself to confirmation bias, but so far I haven’t found anywhere else where these ideas or the objections to them are developed to the degree they are here.
My aim in considering philosophical problems is to try to understand the relationship between my phenomenal experience and whatever causes it may have. Of course, it’s possible that my phenomenal experience is uncaused, but I’m going to try to exhaust alternative hypotheses before resigning myself to an entirely senseless universe. Which is how I wind up as a rationalist—I can certainly consider such possibilities as the impossibility of knowledge, that I might be a Boltzmann brain, that I live in the Matrix, etc., but I can’t see any way to prove or provide evidence of these things, and if I take the truth of any of them as foundational to my thinking, it’s hard to see what I could build on top of them.
Looking forward to reading a whole lot more here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to contribute at least a little bit to the discussion as well.
Hi LW,
My name’s Dan LaVine. I forget exactly how I got linked here, but I haven’t been able to stop following internal links since.
I’m not an expert in anything, but I have a relatively broad/shallow education across mathematics and the sciences and a keen interest in philosophical problems (not quite as much interest in traditional approaches to the problems). My tentative explorations of these problems are broadly commensurate with a lot of the material I’ve read on this site so far. Maybe that means I’m exposing myself to confirmation bias, but so far I haven’t found anywhere else where these ideas or the objections to them are developed to the degree they are here.
My aim in considering philosophical problems is to try to understand the relationship between my phenomenal experience and whatever causes it may have. Of course, it’s possible that my phenomenal experience is uncaused, but I’m going to try to exhaust alternative hypotheses before resigning myself to an entirely senseless universe. Which is how I wind up as a rationalist—I can certainly consider such possibilities as the impossibility of knowledge, that I might be a Boltzmann brain, that I live in the Matrix, etc., but I can’t see any way to prove or provide evidence of these things, and if I take the truth of any of them as foundational to my thinking, it’s hard to see what I could build on top of them.
Looking forward to reading a whole lot more here. Hopefully, I’ll be able to contribute at least a little bit to the discussion as well.
Welcome!