AndrocatThere is no escaping Descartes' Daemon.
Descartes' own cogito falters quickly.
The first part seems reasonable - you can't be fooled if there is no "you" to fool. But this doesn't lead anywhere - it is not possible to say anything about what that "you" is, except a sensory nexus (a focus for streams of sensory information, whatever their source may be). That's as far as that trail will ever go.
What else can we do then?
Well, we could assert a Null Hypothesis of the type "the world is as it seems".
But this quickly leads to empiricism, which then quickly leads to a contradiction: The world is not as it seems. "What it seems" is actually percepts, meaning imposed by the brain on sensory data of unknowable origin (we see it only through stained glass, and we have no way of comprehending it uncut).
For instance, we know that "color" is not actually there. We know that light doesn't "look like anything" except as interpreted by our vision center. We know that pressure waves in air or water don't "sound like anything" without interpretation in our auditory center.
We're back to the sensory nexus.
The egocentric predicament is intractable.
However, since our method so far has not been deductive ("the world is as it seems" is an iherently inductive hypothesis), the conclusion is resistant to contradiction: It can be modified to "the world is there, but we can only observe it as filtered through the sense-making of our minds. E.g. It either has no colors at all, or it has a near-infinity of them, which we don't know how to interpret".
The demon, or the brain-in-a-vat issue remains, as indeed does the "infinitely-colored universe as seen by an ape with limited color perception" issue.
That's rock bottom for us.
Each of us is trapped in a mental model of an external universe, and these mental models probably do not overlap (unless we believe in some sort of magic - but this goes against the world being somewhat like it seems).
That means that nothing is objective, even in the "intersubjective" sense. Through what medium could an intersubject exist? Our conversations are fragmented into idiosyncratic reflections, one for each subject. My experience of what you told me, your experience of what I told you. And never the twain shall meet.
#Philosophy #Descartes #Putnam #BrainInAVat #CartesianDaemonology
Stephen Matheson🌵🌲
Pretty Gnostic Machine