[enkid]

I totally disagree that people intuitively understand Plato's cave (which is what Feynman is referring to). Simply listen to the arguments in support of things like the flat Earth and you will hear people explicitly referring to what they see as being reality instead of the scientific process of discovery. This quote is a gross over simplification of what epistemology is and takes for granted a lot of thinking which goes hand in hand with a scientific education. If we don't have people exploring what we know and why we know it, the foundation is able to be undercut by people with "intuition" contradicting what a scientist says.

[EGreg]

That’s not what Feynman is saying. He was against cargo-cult science based on end-results and appearances only. What he is referring to here is what he goes into at length about the “deep meaning” behind “why” something is happening, rather than just describing “what” is happening.

Here is a full clip: https://themultidisciplinarian.com/2016/07/21/feynman-as-phi...

It’s similar to what David Hume, the great skepticist, observed centuries earlier, that one cannot really explain the endless “why” of physical processes, just the “how” of the apparent physical law determined by correlation.

Today we call it “shut up and calculate.”

[enkid]

He calls it dopey philosophy. That's pretty disparaging of the deeper questions needed to answer how to we know what is real.

[EGreg]

Watch the video. Not quite!

[jacobmoe]

I agree. Seems like what Feynman really wants to say here is “this isn’t a question I’m personally interested in”, but frames it as “it’s dumb to be interested in this question”.

We are only experiencing the end result of what our senses sample and our brain processes. That’s clearly true. How much that end result diverges from the real thing is difficult to answer, but in a straight forward way you can look at an optical illusion to see that there is some divergence.

[mannykannot]

I, too, can speculate about what Feynman's message is, and while I think you are right in supposing he was not interested in the problem, I also think he is saying that not much in life depends on answering the question. It's not like even philosophy itself is hung up on this issue in the way that, for example, fundamental physics seems to be at something of an impasse over string theory.

Neither our sensory perception nor our language are entirely accurate representations of the world we live in, but they are both good enough for most purposes, so long as we don't get nerd-swiped into obsessing over questions of what it all means.

[mannykannot]

I very much doubt that many flat-earthers and the like would be likely to change their minds on reading the Republic. After all, they have already rejected much more pragmatic arguments.

[mistermann]

It's also contradictory to the answer Feyneman gave in his "Aunt Minnie is in the hospital" story in response to being asked "If you get hold of two magnets, and you push them, you can feel this pushing between them. Turn them around the other way, and they slam together. Now, what is it, the feeling between those two magnets?":

https://fs.blog/2012/01/richard-feynman-on-why-questions

A somewhat similar approach can be taken to the simulation question itself - rather than the default response of pondering the likelihood of it being true or how it might be implemented, I much prefer the ~"Is there any utility in the question itself?" approach taken by George Hotz starting at the 2:30 point in this interview on the Lex Fridman podcast:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_SpptYg_0Rs

[Hotz] ...it wasn't a very practical talk about how to actually escape a simulation, it was more about a way of restructuring an us-versus-them narrative. If we continue on the path we're going with technology, I think we're in big trouble - like, as a species, and not just as a species but even me as an individual member of the species. So if we could change rhetoric to be more like...to think upwards...like, to think about that we're in a simulation and how we could get out...already we'd be on the right path. What you actually do once you do that, well, I assume I would have acquired way more intelligence in the process of doing that, so I'll just ask that.

[Fridman] So the the thinking upwards, what kind of ideas, what kind of breakthrough ideas do you think thinking in that way could inspire, and what did you say, upwards? Upwards into space are you thinking?

[Hotz] The space narrative that held for the modernist generation, doesn't hold as well for the postmodern generation. Like Elon Musk...like we're gonna build rockets, we're gonna go to Mars, we're gonna colonize the universe. The race to space. That was a great modernist narrative, but it doesn't seem to hold the same weight in today's culture. I'm hoping for good postmodern narratives that replace it.

My interpretation of his thinking is, regardless of whether we are actually in a simulation, it is possible to think of reality as a simulation - it (and the characters within it) behaves like a simulation, and it can be acted upon as one can act upon a simulation (changing variables, observing the result, etc)...so, let us (humanity) start to collectively conceptualize it in this manner, and collectively act upon it in a logical, coordinated, systemic manner. The benefit of this approach is it can help humanity and the individuals within it break out of this kind of "trance" we seem to be in where we kind of act and think as if the state of the world is mostly beyond our control, that ~"nothing can be done" beyond that what we are doing now (what we have ~always done).

Whether this idea would actually work is obviously speculative, but considering the existential predicament we find ourselves in, it seems to me like a fairly decent idea, especially compared to the competing ideas.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Hotz

The original talk being discussed in the interview:

Jailbreaking the Simulation with George Hotz | SXSW 2019

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESXOAJRdcwQ