Try measuring something without believing it exists and see how far you get.
Ok.
:reads his horoscope, takes an IQ test, speaks to a reiki healer, analysis of the fungi shei of his bedroom, using a dowsing rod, and gets his thetan level checked.
What do I win?
Belief is a binary so it’s not like you can neither believe nor disbelieve in the thing you’re measuring.
:reads his horoscope, takes an IQ test, speaks to a reiki healer, analysis of the fungi shei of his bedroom, using a dowsing rod, and gets his thetan level checked.
You’re equivocating two different gestalts of “existence” there. You know that there are things known as horoscopes, IQ, reiki, etc etc, and that you can measure them, you just don’t believe that it has any real effect. The existence I’m talking about is more literal: it isn’t there. I don’t think you’re even really trying to understand what I mean? This smacks of an “I fucking love science” facebook page-level of understanding. To bring it back: the implements you use to measure the non-phenomenal exist themselves in the same non-phenomenal capacity, because they’re just objects in that non-phenomenal world, so you’re relying on feedback from that world in order to prove that that world exists, so it’s more akin to seeing a drawing of a dragon and concluding that the dragon exists because you can see it. René Descartes’s famous quote “I think, therefore I am” is about how the only truly knowable thing is that your own mind exists, because any other experience of the outside world could be a trick of the mind. I’m certainly not talking about how horoscopes “don’t exist”.
Assertion please prove this.
You can’t rightly ask someone to prove that something doesn’t exist and I don’t think it helps the conversation to worry about it.
Ok.
:reads his horoscope, takes an IQ test, speaks to a reiki healer, analysis of the fungi shei of his bedroom, using a dowsing rod, and gets his thetan level checked.
What do I win?
Assertion please prove this.
You’re equivocating two different gestalts of “existence” there. You know that there are things known as horoscopes, IQ, reiki, etc etc, and that you can measure them, you just don’t believe that it has any real effect. The existence I’m talking about is more literal: it isn’t there. I don’t think you’re even really trying to understand what I mean? This smacks of an “I fucking love science” facebook page-level of understanding. To bring it back: the implements you use to measure the non-phenomenal exist themselves in the same non-phenomenal capacity, because they’re just objects in that non-phenomenal world, so you’re relying on feedback from that world in order to prove that that world exists, so it’s more akin to seeing a drawing of a dragon and concluding that the dragon exists because you can see it. René Descartes’s famous quote “I think, therefore I am” is about how the only truly knowable thing is that your own mind exists, because any other experience of the outside world could be a trick of the mind. I’m certainly not talking about how horoscopes “don’t exist”.
You can’t rightly ask someone to prove that something doesn’t exist and I don’t think it helps the conversation to worry about it.