A philosophy webcomic about the inevitable anguish of living a brief life in an absurd world. Also Jokes

722

Philosophical Mythbusters

Adam Savage: Welcome to philosophical mythbusters! What are we testing today Jamie?"

Jamie Hyneman: "Well Adam, we are testing a very common myth, the myth of the given."
Adam: "What is that?"

Jamie: "This is a myth that what objects appear to our minds as they are, without being filtered through our own conceptual capacities."
Adam: "So basically that there is such a thing as raw â€œsense data?â€"
Jamie: "Exactly."

Adam: "And how are we going to test it today?"
Jamie: "By looking at things!"

Adam: "Let's look at this table."
Description: the both look intently at a table.

Adam: "Well it certainly does seem to be there."
Jamie: "Yes but doesn't our concept of the table and structure of our brain affect how it appears?"

Adam: "Probably, but what about just the color red?"
Jamie: "Let's test it out."

Adam, looking at a red square on the wall: "Yeah, hard to doubt that redness is appearing."

Adam: "I guess we are going to have to give this one â€œplausibleâ€."
Jamie: "Agreed."

Jamie: "Okay, our next myth is the myth of causation. This is the idea that one event causes another, rather than events simply occurring together. "

Adam: "I've set up a pool table and we are going to hit some balls together to see if we see causation in action, or bust this myth."
Jamie: "Sounds great."

Description: they both stare at two balls as they collide on the pool table.

Adam: "Did you see any causation?"
Jamie: "Not exactly, but it still really seemed like one event caused the next."
Adam: "Agreed, we can't really say we busted it, or confirmed it."

Adam: "So i guess we'll have to give this one a â€œplausibleâ€ as well."
Jamie: "Yep, in fact, that's the 58 times in a row we've given â€œplausibleâ€."

Adam: "Yeah, come to think of it, this concept for a show doesn't really work."
Jamie: "No, not at all. If these questions could be decided empirically they wouldn't be philosophical."

Adam: "Anyway, join us next week, we are going to push a fat guy onto a train track to see if it causes a net moral good."

"Perhaps we should design some kind of experiment to see if experimental philosophy works as a concept..."

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