David Deutsch's 'The Fabric of Reality' Chapter 4 “Criteria for Reality” Part 1

In this podcast we cover realism: the common sense claim that there exists an external reality beyond our own minds that we can come to understand through the tools of science and reason more broadly. We compare this to some of the popular rivals that have cropped up over the years out of academic philosophy including, chiefly, solipsism: the claim that "it's all a dream". We explain how we cannot logically disprove solipsism and we can mount no scientific argument, or bring forth evidence, to show solipsism is false. However we can do something more powerful: we can refute it by philosophical argument. This episode is chiefly about what is real, what exists and how we know with some asides on Mill and issues around free speech.

[drxyd]

This for me is David's deepest idea, I've argued about this with various philosophers and it is has held up very well.

[Philosophie]

This refutation of sollipsism is wonderful and so obvious when you explain it. I love. Solipsism never stops re-explaining everything, a 2nd time, a 3rd time, ... without any gain for our understanding of the world.

[Lance_Lough]

Nice work and valuable service as usual, Brett. Thanks for your industry and effort.

[kaveinthran]

any chapters on the idea of meaningless universe?

[Philosophie]

Thanks for sharing, it's a great job. I haven't read this chapter by David Deutsch yet, I can't wait to find out. About extra-terrestrial life, I thought Popper was leaning more towards the fact that it doesn't exist. Since in most of the Universe life is not possible although there is an infinitely large amount of planets in the observable Universe. We can very well think that the passage from matter to life, the passage from life to consciousness and that from consciousness to human thought are situations that are almost impossible to achieve and therefore perhaps unique in the Universe.

[harrisonisrael]

Doesn't saying that it's really just realism dressed up with a bunch of extra things, refute not the possibility of solipsism, but the relevance of it?

[rayhan]

Great video Brett 👍🏽 ... Moving forward are you only releasing audio or will we be able to see you read out passages in the future (I feel like that worked very well!)

[tshddx]

If your job depends on you saying or not saying certain things, then this is efficacious as laws infringing on freedom of speech. This is an odd take. If your job depends on you being in a certain location at a certain time, do you really have freedom of movement and basic bodily autonomy? Or one could take this even further and ask if your being sheltered and fed depends on you working at a job, so you even really freely choose to work at the job?