Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire So you don't think God answers prayers?

It's only a basis of Ontology. Prove that you exist. In Trekkie terms how do you know that you, and all around you including all of physics, isn't a few lines of code in some alien simulation. If you can't prove that you exist using logic than you can't prove anything.

And new age hippy BS? It come from only about 300 BC.

Well then, instead of all the huffing and puffing and displays of outrage, that should be done. Saying is not the same as doing.

Solipsism.

Did it before, Starman is recycling his BS.

OK. Using logic prove you exist.

I didn't see it.

Short version: What's the purpose of the bible, to teach morals or physic? And why can't it use literary devices to do so?

Or is its purpose solely to keep peasants under heel and priests fat and happy?

Go sell your conspiracy theory to Rachel Maddow. Though I doubt even Rachel would touch that one.

Cogito ergo sum.

This.

Classic circular argument. You have to presume you exist before you can state that you think. Try again.

No need, in order to think one must necessarily exist. Something that does not exist, cannot think. Not everything that is circular is a fallacy....Google that and stick it in your pipe.

You're not thinking, it's all programmed into the simulation.

No logic needed. Empirical evidence is sufficient and abounds. Look in the mirror!

That is a fallacy...why you ask? Well, because even a simulation is something rather than nothing. Once it is established that something rather than nothing exists - cogito ergo sum - it's only a matter of exploring what that something might be.

A simulation is not a single independent being capable of rational thought, what the ancient Greeks thought of as a person, and has persisted as a basis of Western thought.

So a simulation exists, is it capable of thought? There was a computer program called Eliza. It was written to give responses similar to what a psychoanalyst might give. A sizable proportion of users would become so entranced by the responses they would tell their deepest secrets to the computer. Eliza - Cogito ergo sum.?

So we're back to

I think
(which presupposes that there is something capable of thinking)
Therefore I am
(Which we had to presuppose to assert "I think" as a truth

Which is not a proof but a restatement of the presupposition. And that, strangely enough, is the solution to the riddle. We cannot prove we exist, it must be an a priori, before anything else, assumed that we exist (as independent beings capable of rational thought). Not so horrible an assumption, I don't think you would find many who would disagree with it.

A simulation, if sufficiently complex may have characters with independent processors/brains, senses and algorithms that enable decision making....some propose that our universe could be one of countless quantum simulations being generated by super advanced civilizations.

Which, if true, is still something rather than nothing.

I have written simulations. They all follow rules (algorithms) that I have dictated by my code, they are capable of nothing more. They are not independent but extensions of myself which would be unnecessary if I could do simple transformations that fast.

Nobody is talking about current technology, current processing power or current capability. Think quantum computing and a few thousand years of technological .progress