It’s been my experience that people who call things uninteresting are merely sharing their own unusual disinterest in something otherwise interesting. It’s also been my experience that said people are usually the most uninteresting in the room.
Also, I don’t know what it says about you that you went from effectively “trees falling in the forest” to the Hacker News infrastructure to defend your point about fun, thought-provoking idioms, but I do know it’s remarkably uninteresting.
Fair enough. By calling my comment uninteresting, have you also rendered yourself to likely be the most uninteresting person in the room, by the logic in your first paragraph? If so, who wins the title of the most uninteresting person in the room?
You initially would for having claimed something interesting is not, however you also started a discussion which is pretty interesting, including your own further comment, which also adds interest to the situation. Paradoxically you two now may be the most interesting here.
Tell that to Schrödinger. Even questions that seem utterly pointless and mundane at first glance can lead to captivating insights if explored at depth.
A lot of discoveries of interesting stuff resulted from something uninteresting being considered interesting and deeply contemplated. Others look and say "what an idiot, spending such time on such uninteresting x", I say, "you're only my self-imagined disagreeable other, I'm your god, your consciousness is my consciousness, what say you now?" and they would say nothing since the puppeteer has been revealed and there is nothing left to say. I guess this is why God will never prove he exists.
My point in bringing up the light meter is that in these "tree falls in the forest" thought experiments, it's taken for granted that your own biological senses are an absolute source of truth.
But your eyes are just another set of equipment, similar to a light meter. Just because your eyes are attached to the rest of your body, it doesn't make them inherently more trustworthy than equipment that's not part of your body.
However, our expectation is that a tree falling in the forest could kill us even if we didn’t hear and see it. That’s why we look when we cross the road. The fact that we’re subject to all sorts of things that can cause us harm without sensing them makes the case a lot more compelling that the light meter exists when we blink.
Lamp lights are not dependent on whether you can see them or not, unless they are programmed to.
The state of an individual person’s consciousness has no bearing on whether the sun is shining or not.
Refrigerator lights turn off when the door closes. It’s usually easy to find the mechanism that handles this and manually trigger the light to switch off.
Regarding God, I assume you mean the Abrahamic god. There are many culturally specific deities and superstitions and there doesn’t seem to be any verifiable reason why one would be “realer” than any other.
You're assuming any of this has an existence independent of your mind, that more than the present moment exists, and a whole lot of other things.
You make reasonable assumptions, but proving them is hard, because any attempt you make to prove them still end up being filtered through your potentially unreliable senses.
In practice we decide to just accept that a material world with semireliable senses exists, because the alternative is no certainty at all.
The alternative without falling into skepticism is idealism. But scientific explanations of many things like disease, chemistry and physical forces are very compelling compared to the world just appears the way it does as ideas in our mind.
The 'issue' is that these are essentially 'commonsense' answers. By definition it's impossible to empirically study the unobservable.
Though of course whether these questions are at all interesting - after all the answer has no effect on anything or it would be observable - is another matter.
The problem with this argument is that it's begging the question. You're assuming that the Universe is behaving in a way that is consistent with how it appears.
There is no possible experiment you could in principle do to verify that the universe stays the same when you're not looking. We can say that the universe behaves consistently as though it does, and I'm not saying that doesn't matter, but it's not quite the same thing. Furthermore we can't tell whether the universe is tricking us some of the time, or all of the time, or never.
What if the world is just a dream? Then an individual person's consciousness has a massive influence on the weather. And there would be new arguments for the existence of God.
What would you call the 'God' worshipped by Christians, the many by Hindus, etc., if not deities?
We sentient beings are fortunately capable of discussing abstract thought, things not known to exist, and even things known not to exist; we can give them names without requiring that they 'are', and we can discuss what it means 'to be' anyway, and whether those things 'are' after all merely by virtue of our discussion.
And did you even read the rest of that sentence? Other commenter is basically 'on your side'.
It's atheism like this that makes me describe myself (dissociatively) as agnostic, frankly.