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

390

Become a Patron!

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 “sense data?”"
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 “plausible”."
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 “plausible” as well."
Jamie: "Yep, in fact, that's the 58 times in a row we've given “plausible”."

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..."
Follow on bluesky

Make sure to follow me on BlueSky

Support the comic on Patreon!
Follow on RSS Follow on bluesky Follow on facebook share with reddit share on bluesky share with your friends on facebook