If anyone wants to pick up any of the discussions I've dropped over the last eight months or so, PM me. You may have to wait in line, but I'll be able to make good on my promise to "continue when I have more time" for the next two or three weeks.

RomanJoe wrote:

Why were nominalist, mechanistic, and voluntarist ideas taken seriously enough to eventually have influence?

It's worth distinguishing nominalism and blob nominalism. Nominalism is the thesis that everything is particular; blob nominalism is the thesis that everything is particular and there are no properties or property-instances. Nominalists can believe in tropes (modes, instances, accidents); blob nominalists can't. Ockham was a nominalist, but not a blob nominalist (cf. Adams's William Ockham and Spade's "Ockham's Nominalist Metaphysics: Some Main Themes").

I bring this up partly because I think a lot of the hostility towards the dreaded nominalism comes from people assuming that all nominalists are blob nominalists. A lot of scholastics (including Aquinas) were either nominalists or conceptualists (i.e. thought that universals existed, but only in minds). Partly, to help contextualize the shift that is supposed to have happened between Aquinas and Ockham and Descartes.

(I realize I'm being a bit pedantic in this post, haha.)

Cosmyk wrote:

I don't think so either, but the fact that it is possible to model the world like a video game (for example, to model space as pixilated and model reality as being created by observation) seems suspicious. I'm not saying reality is actually any of these things, just that it is possible to model them like that. Perhaps a Bayesian argument could be made: If reality is virtual, we would expect to be able to model reality in those ways.

You could say the same about pencil drawings.

Cosmyk wrote:

John West, what are your thoughts on Digital Physics?

I don't know much about it. I don't think that the world is reducible to mathematics (i.e. the output of a computer program) though, if that is what you're asking. Do you?

Did you read the paper I linked ("Moore Against the New Skeptics")? You don't sound like a man who read the paper I linked.

Cosmyk wrote:

The trouble here, I suppose, is whether we can know if hands have properties different from virtual objects.

The way you put the simulation argument presupposes a distinction between the fleshy base world, which contains brains in vats and scientists stimulating them, and digital worlds in its meaning. I'm just drawing that out. (I'm more than happy to be Humpty Dumptyist here and let the words mean whatever you want them to mean, but if they mean something radically different from what they usually mean you need to give me some definitions or I literally don't know what you're saying.)