[RockyMcNuts]

Yeah, exactly, before I can know anything else 1) I know that I exist, and 2) something has to be performing my little circlejerk of self-awareness.

Seems weird to me that some scientists say the self and self-awareness are an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.

I have trouble bringing myself to agree, my existence seems pretty real to me. I don't feel like an emergent property of a complex system.

In a way, we experience directly the metaphysical nature of our existence, and all the science we do is based on things much more indirectly observed and measured, and that metaphysical essence of our existence is sort of inaccessible to science.

[nitrogen]

Thankfully neuroscience allows us to turn philosophy's inside-out approach on its head and look from the outside in. The very existence (and broad conscious awareness) of things like brain damage, neurosurgery, and mind-altering substances demonstrates conclusively that the mind resides in the brain.

Any philosophical questioning of the existence of existence is rendered moot by its inherent begging of the question and lack of consequence to physical reality.

[RockyMcNuts]

moot? suppose we are all in a simulation by a higher power who is about to pull the plug...on the one hand the pulling of the plug is outside our reality and not something we can reason about and in that sense moot, and yet would not be moot with respect to our experience when the plug was pulled.

Sir Arthur Eddington:

Let us suppose that an ichthyologist is exploring the life of the ocean. He casts a net into the water and brings up a fishy assortment. Surveying his catch, he proceeds in the usual manner of a scientist to systematise what it reveals. He arrives at two generalisations: No sea-creature is less than two inches long. All sea-creatures have gills. These are both true of his catch, and he assumes tentatively that they will remain true however often he repeats it. In applying this analogy, the catch stands for the body of knowledge which constitutes physical science, and the net for the sensory and intellectual equipment which we use in obtaining it. The casting of the net corresponds to observation; for knowledge which has not been or could not be obtained by observation is not admitted into physical science. An onlooker may object that the first generalisation is wrong. "There are plenty of sea-creatures under two inches long, only your net is not adapted to catch them." The icthyologist dismisses this objection contemptuously. "Anything uncatchable by my net is ipso facto outside the scope of icthyological knowledge. In short, "what my net can't catch isn't fish." Or--to translate the analogy-- "If you are not simply guessing, you are claiming a knowledge of the physical universe discovered in some other way than by the methods of physical science, and admittedly unverifiable by such methods. You are a metaphysician. Bah!

[nitrogen]

...simulation...

Prove it.

Sir Arthur Eddington...

I've seen that analogy before and it's silly, because 1. people have prior experience with sea creatures smaller than two inches, and 2. scientists are keenly aware of the limitations of their "nets," and those limitations leave very little room for metaphysics.

[RockyMcNuts]

By definition science can't answer the question, "is there a reality that is outside science and what is its nature?" That's what I think Eddington is saying.

I think your 2. seems a little silly, metaphysics by definition is what is beyond science, which is the point Eddington is trying to make.

Thinking about metaphysics is a little like thinking about what happens inside a black hole, what happens to the physics and interactions and information. You can come up with a lot of theories but you'll never be able to test them. It's beyond our experience, but we can't say there is no reality going on beyond where we can measure and experience and reason about it.

[nitrogen]

The very phrase "beyond science" is a bit nonsensical though, and using it to define a category of knowledge that is "beyond science" is a bit like defining a new land called "metanorth" containing whatever is geographically further north than the geographic North Pole.

I don't think it's fair, either, to compare metaphysics to black hole physics. Everything in my layman's understanding of physics, astronomy, and cosmology suggests that the prevailing theories of what happens inside a black hole are supported by evidence gathered from what happens outside a black hole, rather than being invented from scratch with no evidential basis.