Quote from Automaton

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I guess that what I just said still doesn't imply the lack of an external world though, does it? It only implies that nothing can be known with 100% certainty about this external world.

Yep :)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is largely dedicated to trying to work out what we can know about things in themselves, ie. not just what we experience. It's a little bit weird and he makes big jumps similar to the idealism arguments, but the basic premise is the same as what you're saying: we can't experience the world itself but that absolutely does not mean the world itself is not there.

The thing that I really hate about the debating forum, is that people just seem to abandon their threads when they start losing. Its really friggin annoying

Quote from walker90234

The thing that I really hate about the debating forum, is that people just seem to abandon their threads when they start losing. Its really friggin annoying

Debating is not about winning. It's about learning from others and having and open mind. When people abandon their threads when losing it most likely means they've learned from their mistakes.

Quote from Preserve

Debating is not about winning. It's about learning from others and having and open mind. When people abandon their threads when losing it most likely means they've learned from their mistakes.

I would agree with this, except with threads like this and OPs like this I highly doubt they change their mind, they just give up arguing their point. There have been plenty of threads made where the OP has left due to losing and then came back a week later with another thread expressing the same ignorance.

seriously, has there ever been someone on the other side of a religious debate just say "shit.. you know what.. fuck, you're totally right. what the fuck am i even talking about? this shit is ridiculous!"
in their minds, theres no way their belief can be wrong, just like in our minds (minus the reasoning and logic, of course)

That reminds me, in philosophy class our teacher said something that pissed me off. We'd been debating god for the past couple of months, disproving the various arguments (ontological, design etc) for its existence, and then we started discussing bliks (coined by Hare). Bliks are essentially mindsets, there're religious bliks and scientific bliks, and they all shape how we view the world. He said something like "but now we have to question whether or not such-and-such (some atheist) simply has a different blik to the religious people which causes him to come to different conclusions. Is he not inferring the same amount as the religious person, but just differently?" That's essentially what he said, paraphrased. It pisses me off how people can say that something is just a different interpretation/blik and leave it at that, not once considering that maybe there's grounds to assess each interpretation. The argument he was presenting was that perhaps because everyone has their own blik, maybe assessing other bliks becomes biased as the assessment comes from your own. Meh, just thought I'd rant about the stupidity of shit like that.