OK I was worried about solipsism and temporal solipsism (where you and your memories are also "frozen" in time) and my concern is problem of induction by Hume. Inductive reasoning makes solipsism in any form probly false but it seems like there's no reason to believe it.
Sure it feels like it works but wouldn't it be like when christians say "I feel god exists"?

We can survive because the common sense view of external reality is adequate for our needs.

We can demonstrate that said common sense view is imperfect - the world is not flat, the sun does not rotate about the earth, the stars are not immobile etc.

We have demonstrated that empiricism improves our understanding of the external world, and from understanding of probability and stochastic events we have shown that future events are predictible up to a point.

In so doing we have also demonstrated that our understanding remains imperfect. So naval gazing allows us to consider completely improbable explanations - religion, solphisim etc. Does not make them any more likely and since they make no testable predictions, they remain a mind game.

asdfjkl wrote:Inductive reasoning makes solipsism in any form probly false but it seems like there's no reason to believe it.

There is no reasoning that supports the use of reasoning either. Get over it ...or be condemned to wallow in bellybutton lint forever.

asdfjkl wrote:OK I was worried about solipsism and temporal solipsism (where you and your memories are also "frozen" in time) and my concern is problem of induction by Hume. Inductive reasoning makes solipsism in any form probly false but it seems like there's no reason to believe it.
Sure it feels like it works but wouldn't it be like when christians say "I feel god exists"?

Technically it is not solipsism that induction establishes, it is the external world.

Evidence for solipsism is stronger than evidence for the external world, so you're working backwards to solipsism when you should be working forwards away from it.

Explanations that require gods are moving still further from the evidence base; solipsism -> external phenomena -> god did it.

Inductive reasoning makes solipsism probably false tho.
That's def. certain.
How do we no it works?

asdfjkl wrote:
How do we no it works?

I'll bet you a million dollars the sun will rise tomorrow.

Just as an experiment why not try disbelieving in induction for 24 hours and see how you get on.

jamest wrote:

Pebble wrote:So naval gazing allows us to consider completely improbable explanations - religion, solphisim etc. Does not make them any more likely and since they make no testable predictions, they remain a mind game.

How did you work out that God; solipsism; etc., are 'improbable'? Can I see the maths behind your claim?

Probability works with large numbers - solipsism requires that the only valid number is n=1 and that all else is delusion. So maths is hardly the apropriate medium. The concept of improbability comes from the ridiculous nature of the required assumptions.

In religion there is no such problem, thousands of discarded religions, requiring for most just one more.

I'm not sure I understand the proposed connection to solipsism, but the real problem of induction is that it is notoriously unreliable. A lot of the time it works just fine, but every now and then it leads you to an incorrect conclusion - sometimes very incorrect. And Pebble has got to be very careful when talking about probabilities. Even when it works with large numbers.

There has not been a "major" strike on the earth from a comet/asteroid since the dinosaurs got wiped out 65 million years ago. So if somebody had been on the Earth observing what happened for the last 64 million years then, using inductive reasoning, they might conclude that each day that passes without a major strike makes it more likely that there aren't going to be any more major asteroid strikes. But surely this is nonsense! Just because it hasn't happened for the last 64 million years, it doesn't follow that it any less likely that it might happen some time in the next million, does it? Seems like inductive reasoning can't be relied on...except that in this particular case we can now say that the person who inductively arrived at the conclusion that a major strike isn't likely would actually have arrived at the right conclusion. We now have the means to scan the sky for cosmic bodies that might intercept the orbit of the Earth, and we know about all of the big ones (they are the easiest to find), and there aren't any out there as big as the thing that hit the Earth 65mya. It just happened to be the last big object left out there on a near-Earth orbit. Not that this means it is completely impossible...

Inductive reasoning is unreliable because there is always a possibility of there being something critically important about which you have no knowledge yet, and may never have any knowledge of.

logical bob wrote:Just as an experiment why not try disbelieving in induction for 24 hours and see how you get on.

One must appeal to faith where a proof is impossible.

campermon wrote:
I'll bet you a million dollars the sun will rise tomorrow.

Have you got a million dollars to bet?
Because I would win that bet. The sun does not rise. The Earth rotates creating an illusion of the sun rising.

Science uses inductive reasoning, but scientists (real ones anyway) never claim proof for anything. Instead, they create models, which are regarded as strong if lots of attempts to falsify them fail to do so, and weak if there is minimal or ambiguous test results.

jamest wrote:

The problem with most people who attempt to do philosophy, it seems, is that they really have no idea of what 'objectivity' means from a philosophical perspective. Hence, they cannot do philosophy.

My approach is that if the conclusions bear no relation to reality, and cannot be validated - then the conclusions are more likely to be wrong than right. If you wish to insist on bringing maths into it - the logical way forward is to consider all the ideas ever generated by and defended by man, consider the subsection where those ideas could be formulated as hypotheses that were testable, and then look at the 'hit' rate - the tiny percentage that have not been disproven.

The conclusion would be that most of the ideas we generate end up being wrong. This is not to say we should stop - but we should move toward preferring ideas that can in some respects be shown to have validity, or at least fit with what we know to be so within available understanding of the universe.

Lance wrote:

campermon wrote:
I'll bet you a million dollars the sun will rise tomorrow.

Have you got a million dollars to bet?
Because I would win that bet. The sun does not rise. The Earth rotates creating an illusion of the sun rising.

Can you proof that?

jamest wrote:
Nonsense: "If something cannot be seen, then it probably doesn't exist." (is what you are effectively saying). All you are doing here is repeating the incorrect assertion that the ontological/metaphysical validation of something is to be acquired through observation/experience.

Not at all what I am saying. I am observing that in the subset of ideas where observation plays a role - we learn that most ideas, insights or hypotheses prove incorrect. From this I am deducing that the same is likely to be true where we cannot validate the ideas, given that ideas are ten a penny - but correct ideas are rare.
In fields where no validation is possible, the choice lies betweengiving all ideas however ludicrous equal weight, or creating some proxy for validation. Internal consistency of the construct is one possible approach - but has no more value than other suggested solutions - mine is that it must not lead to conclusions that are at variance with observed reality.

DrWho wrote:

logical bob wrote:Just as an experiment why not try disbelieving in induction for 24 hours and see how you get on.

One must appeal to faith where a proof is impossible.

What we're being asked for is a deductive justification for induction. What puzzles me is why we need this. Since when did we require proof of everything we hold to be true? Life isn't formal logic, and even in formal logic we've known since Godel that in any system there are truths that cannot be proven. It's far from obvious to me why we should expect to be deductively certain of things. Can anyone explain this?

logical bob wrote:

DrWho wrote:

logical bob wrote:Just as an experiment why not try disbelieving in induction for 24 hours and see how you get on.

One must appeal to faith where a proof is impossible.

What we're being asked for is a deductive justification for induction. What puzzles me is why we need this. Since when did we require proof of everything we hold to be true? Life isn't formal logic, and even in formal logic we've known since Godel that in any system there are truths that cannot be proven. It's far from obvious to me why we should expect to be deductively certain of things. Can anyone explain this?

Let's put it this way...

You seem to be saying that we hold certain things to be true and that we require a proof for some of those things but not others. How do you decide which truths require a proof and which do not?