Honestly this is where so much stuff falls flat on its face. People claiming they 'know' on either end of the nuts/pragmatic/scientifc spectrum.
'I think therefore I am' - cliche ofc. Only thing I can prove.
BUT. Prove a damn thing after that. If you can, you're not logically correct, you have no proof of anything outside of your existence. It looks real to you - that's your 'proof'.
We've all thought this at least once: It could be a simulation, you can't prove it's not.
You are choosing to believe you're living on earth, and there's a universe, and you're in it, and it's made out of stuff.
You are choosing this (perhaps sensible) scenario, but it is a choice. Because you may well be here reading this to yourself, from yourself, by yourself in the vacuum of your own imagination - and you wouldn't know.
Anyways... once you pass all that, you get to pick and choose what you prefer, and life becomes easier, and kinder, and more fun.. in my little experience anyway. Because you know everything you see and do is half-bullshit, and it's alllllright.
Whether I live in my imagination or in an external reality moderated by my senses, it would appear the same to me, and part of that appearing the same is that it seems to follow rules beyond my conscious will that I can guess at based on past experience.
I don't see how the fact that it might all be a dream makes the experience of pain any less painful or the experience of pleasure any easier to come by. I experience it all the same.
It obviously does not help when you hit you little toe on the leg of a table, but it helps with more abstract problems. Realizing that philosophy can neither be right or wrong (only illogical) makes for a more relaxed life because you don’t have to worry about “the big questions”. You can just pick the answers you like.
Do you have examples? Depending on what the Big Questions are I may or may not agree with that.
For example: It would be nice to believe in an omni-benevolent god that would take care of me after I die. But that's the sort of answer that I'd want to have confidence in - and I'd be aware that it's equally probable that there's an omni-malicious god waiting to torture me forever.
If I'd started off believing in evil-god then the knowledge that I had no information either way would be a comfort.
If I'd started off believing in good-god then it would be a burden.
Uncertainty in that respect neither comforts nor disturbs without reference to a baseline belief, it just is.
And when we start talking about things like morality, there is a sense in which there's a question as to what we're doing when we use moral language. However, most of the thought experiments concern real life examples anyway - outside of very specific areas of realist metaethics I don't think that's something that most people think about very much.
I'm... struggling to think of any big questions about reality that would affect my life. Ontology, epistemology - again most of the stuff I know is more about how people think about their experience - or can be converted directly into that talk with no loss of effect - than it is about esoteric metaphysics.
> If I'd started off believing in good-god then it would be a burden.
I disagree on that point. Even a good-god would have rules that are probably either complicated or vague, so trying to fulfill those will actually be a burden on your everyday life.
We are not talking about uncertainty here. Quite the contrary: we are talking about the clear certainty that there just is no true or false in these questions, not that we can’t determine them.
At least for me, once I realized that, I stopped wondering about an afterlife and just assumed the most probable version: nothing. And It doesn’t bother me in any way.
For morals it also helped me a lot, as I realized that is no universal good/bad. We (and especially I) create these notions ourselves and only by ourselves. That means if am faced with moral questions, I can freely think about what _I_ think is right or wrong and I don’t have to wonder about those omnipresent values that kind of seem to be there.
But you referenced “most people” and I agree that they probably don’t spend a lot of time thinking about these thinks. But that obviously doesn’t change my perspective on the world.
But to give you more practical example: I guess everybody in the western world is at least in some way faced with the question of how they are going to handle the fact that their comfort and well-being is in a considerable degree made possible by the suffering of others. This of course not a situation that we created with our own hands, but we life in and by our everyday life support a system that works like this. I would say that if you believe in absolute morals, you either have to dedicate a significant part of your life to do something about that or you are probably a hypocrite.
The mentioned realization allows you to avoid this dilemma.
I believe there's an afterlife, because the system we live in is insanely complex. I won't discount that we may be simply living a temporary instance of a 'experience'. I won't discount that I may be completely wrong, and will vanish into a puff of nothingness. Either way I'm good.
However, regardless - I WISH there were more people like you on the planet, things would get a whole lot better if we just started discussions as thinking folk.
Drop the definitions of 'good vs evil' - decide on your own. What is your best guess as to the nature of the universe, how it works.
Your best guess is as equally right/wrong as everyone else's, but it will be something you can truly get behind. You don't have to search through only other people's ideas, to find something you like. You can simply create your own, if we didn't do that - humanity would have no definitions to play with. Why is yours any worse than some dude who died 800 years ago? It's not.
Shitty definitions will hurt you, better ones will be useful to you.
Are religious definitions the only definitions in existence, of COURSE NOT! - So choose outside of that paradigm if that suits you, mix and match from everyone's ideas and your own. The world will open up if you do that, you'll make mistakes, you'll learn stuff, you'll create stuff..
Anyway, that's my two cents.
This whole way of thinking, the idea that no-one knows shit - 'it's all just a best guess' is extremely liberating. At least for me. That's why.
'I think therefore I am' - cliche ofc. Only thing I can prove.
BUT. Prove a damn thing after that. If you can, you're not logically correct, you have no proof of anything outside of your existence. It looks real to you - that's your 'proof'.
We've all thought this at least once: It could be a simulation, you can't prove it's not.
You are choosing to believe you're living on earth, and there's a universe, and you're in it, and it's made out of stuff.
You are choosing this (perhaps sensible) scenario, but it is a choice. Because you may well be here reading this to yourself, from yourself, by yourself in the vacuum of your own imagination - and you wouldn't know.
Anyways... once you pass all that, you get to pick and choose what you prefer, and life becomes easier, and kinder, and more fun.. in my little experience anyway. Because you know everything you see and do is half-bullshit, and it's alllllright.