[AnimalMuppet]

> The whole point of philosophy is to invent a fiction that lets you cope with reality in a productive way.

I think that if there's one thing that philosophers agree on, after arguing with each other for a couple of millennia, it's that the point of philosophy is not to find a clever way to lie to ourselves - it's to find out something true.

[jeffreyrogers]

I think people are getting a bit hung up on my (admittedly poor) phrasing and less on the substance of my comment. Yes, philosophy wants to find out something "true", but reality as a whole is to complex to think about head on. Any philosophy with the goal of being completely factually true has to deal with a lot of information that isn't really relevant, e.g. physical (meaning atoms, etc.) interactions.

Since that is too much information to deal with you have to selectively ignore parts of it. A useful philosophy lets you get rid of essentially all the irrelevant information while keeping and fitting into a mental framework what is relevant. So in a sense it is a lie, but it is one that hopefully preserves the important parts. My argument was that Bostrom's philosophy ignores too many of the important parts by dismissing his critics' viewpoints as unfounded. Hopefully that clears things up a bit.

[eli_gottlieb]

Sure. But that, of course, is why we invented scientists and mathematicians: to find out something true that grounds itself in checkable realities external to the mind of the perceiver, rather than ultimately grounding itself in the intuitions, rationalizations, and delusions generated by human psychology.