A restaurant where the food is happy to watch you eat. Is this the future of the industry? Read this week's thought experiment and see what you think.

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     After forty years of vegetarianism, Max Berger was about to sit down to a feast of pork sausages, crispy bacon, and pan-fried chicken breast. Max had always missed the taste of meat, but his principles were stronger than his culinary cravings. But now he was able to eat meat with a clear conscience.
     The sausages and bacon had come from a pig called Priscilla he had met the week before. The pig had been genetically engineered to be able to speak and, more importantly, to want to be eaten. Ending up on a human's table was Priscilla's lifetime ambition and she woke up on the day of her slaughter with a keen sense of anticipation. She had told all this to Max just before rushing off to the comfortable and humane slaughterhouse. Having heard her story, Max thought it would be disrespectful not to eat her.
     The chicken had come from a genetically modified bird which had been 'decerebrated'. In other words, it lived the life of a vegetable, with no awareness of self, environment, pain, or pleasure. Killing it was therefore no more barbarous than uprooting a carrot.
     Yet as the plate was placed before him, Max felt a twinge of nausea. Was this just a reflex reaction, caused by a lifetime of vegetarianism? Or was it the physical sign of a justifiable psychic distress? Collecting himself, he picked up his knife and fork...

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants To Be Eaten, 2005, p. 13.
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If you're a vegetarian, would you eat these meats? Or if you already do eat meat, would this hypothetical situation be weird for you? What does this thought experiment make you think about the current meat industry?

Have you been thinking about cyber sex all week? As a quick reminder, here was this week's thought experiment that I raised for consideration on Monday.
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     Like many people who had been married for several years, Dick was bored with his relationship. There was no passion these days. In fact, Dick and his wife hardly slept together at all. However, Dick had no intention whatsoever of leaving his wife. He loved her and she was an excellent mother to their children.
     He knew full well what the usual solution to this problem was: have an affair. You simply accept that your wife satisfied some of your needs and your mistress others. But Dick didn't really want to go behind his wife's back, and he also knew that she could not deal with an open relationship, even if he could.
     So when Dick heard about Byte on the Side Inc. ('Even better than the real thing!'), he had to take it seriously. What the company offered was the opportunity to conduct a virtual affair. Not one-handed cyber sex with a real person at the other end of the computer connection, but a virtual reality environment in which you 'slept with' a completely simulated person. It would feel just like real sex, but, in fact, all your experiences would be caused by computers stimulating your brain to make it seem to you as though you were having sex. All the thrills of an affair, but with no third person, and hence no real infidelity. Why should he say no?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 10.
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Why should he say no? Because Dick doesn't know dick. (As most of them don't...) He was bored with his relationship, but still "loved" his wife? He thought affairs were solutions to problems? He thought all his needs needed to be met? He thought he could deal with an open relationship? He thought a computer could provide the thrills of an affair? All of these beliefs are mistaken, held by someone who hasn't taken the time to understand himself in particular or human needs in general. Dick has not taken the time to "know thyself."

In my blog post How Exactly Do You Know Thyself?, I set up a logical structure to systematically study all the different elements that are used to describe human existence. I won't rehash that attempt at delineating all of those mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive pieces of the puzzle, but under the category of What Am I?, there was information on the Body, the Mind, and the Body x Mind interface. Drilling down, the Body x Mind interface produces Emotions, Personality, and Needs and Desires. Dick's "need" for sex is at the heart of this thought experiment, so let's look at this category more closely. Here's a bit of research I pointed out for this topic:
The body and mind together have requirements for them to function properly. Abraham Maslow in 1943 devised the currently definitive list and hierarchy of these needs.

1. Physiological: breathing, food, water, sex, sleep, homeostasis, excretion
2. Safety: security of body, employment, resources, morality, the family, health, property
3. Love / Belonging: friendship, family, sexual intimacy
4. Esteem: self esteem, confidence, achievement, respect of others, respect by others
5. Self-actualization: morality, creativity, spontaneity, problem solving, lack of prejudice, acceptance of facts

Sure, our physiological needs are the base requirement of this pyramid that need to be met for survival to continue, but they only take a limited amount. We have strong biological urges to eat, sleep, and drink, but we tame them to healthy levels so they do not run our lives and ruin them with unlimited excess. The need for sex is the same type of urge. Dick has already procreated (the experiment says his wife is an excellent mother to their children), so technically he's had all the sex his genes really need. And that sex has already helped him build the family, friendship, and sexual intimacy that lie higher up the pyramid of needs in the Love / Belonging category. The fact that Dick is bored with his wife says to me that he is struggling with the fourth level on this pyramid, that he is lacking some amount of self-esteem or confidence to contentedly move forward on his path through life, or he doesn't really feel respect for the most important "other" in his life.

Elsewhere in my categories for how to know thyself, I wrote about topics Concerning Others. There were elements for Family, Friends, Spouses, Children, Acquaintances, and Strangers. Here were my main ideas about spouses:

Spouses
Finding a romantic partner is natural and useful. A good one will provide the focus of your secure attachment needs in adulthood, thus providing much safety and comfort for exploration. Primal sexual urges lead some to believe that monogamy is not natural, but that is short-term yielding to gratification at the expense of long-term happiness and satisfaction. A spouse can be your companion through life. Find one that can grow and develop with you over the long term. Find one whose life goals are compatible with yours. Find love - love being the admiration of a person’s life.

It takes time to know someone, to hear their stories, know their beliefs, see them in action, see them respond to stress. It takes time to find love. Do not mistake the short-term feelings of desire, lust, and curiosity, strong as they may be, for the long-term feeling of love. Do not believe in the myth of love at first sight - that denigrates the actual meaning of the word. Do not believe that there is only one soul mate out there for you. There are no souls, and there are many people worthy of love if you are worthy of it yourself.

To me, Dick should be giving these ideas much more consideration than whether or not a cyber-affair is the right thing to do. In fact, philosophers throughout history have generally stayed away from this topic of love because they saw it as a kind of madness that clouds reason. The existentialist psychotherapist Irvin Yalom even said in his non-fiction book Love's Executioner and Other Tales of Psychotherapy that he generally has a rule not to treat someone who is in the beginning throes of love because they have no rational perspective about life, and from his own experience they are temporarily incurable. So for Dick to treat his problem of how to live his life with a solution that would likely impair his ability to think clearly about it is completely regressive and ultimately unhelpful.

"But we're not talking about an actual affair!" you say. "It's just a computer simulation." Well, all the more reason that A Byte on the Side won't ever be able to address his inability to reach the higher plateaus that Maslow described. Rather than work on his love and belonging and esteem issues, Dick is trying to fill his life with base physiological needs. A little fantasy can sometimes help people live and strive, as long as it doesn't affect their ability to accept reality, but Dick apparently hasn't managed to come to terms with his, so he shouldn't be wasting any more time in fantasy land.

I don't know how much sex with a spouse is enough; I'm sure it differs for each individual and couple. In the HBO show Tell Me You Love Me, which is about three different couples and the therapist they all shared, one of the couples was married with two small children. They had been married for about a decade, but it had been years since they had had sex. They couldn't bring themselves to do it even though they both acknowledged it was a problem. It had, in fact, become such a massive problem in their minds that even though they were both attractive, and attracted to each other, they became scared over time of what might happen if they finally 'did it' and some fatal flaw would be revealed about their marriage. The therapist, who I'm sure would have been well-grounded in Maslow's hierarchy of needs, explained to them how they had come to place way too much importance on the sex act. Perhaps Dick and his wife have done this as well.

Or sometimes people go down paths when they are young that lead to a dead end in a relationship. Affairs can be exciting to these people because they open up new and sometimes better paths to higher levels of happiness in life. A computer simulation though, no matter how technologically advanced, cannot really ever lead to this. If Dick just needs a quick computer-assisted wank every now and again, that's probably not a problem. Expecting anything more from this activity though is fundamentally misunderstanding what you really need in life.

Anyone else dare to share their thoughts about this topic?

Two weeks ago, I finally watched this fascinating movie about a man falling in love with a new, powerful operating system capable of very advanced artificial intelligence. If you haven't seen it yet, I think it is really entertaining and well worth watching. I bring it up because this week's thought experiment is somewhat related to the central idea of this movie, and it would be helpful to really consider the issue thoroughly as you might just get into a lot of trouble if you answer it wrong...

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     Like many people who had been married for several years, Dick was bored with his relationship. There was no passion these days. In fact, Dick and his wife hardly slept together at all. However, Dick had no intention whatsoever of leaving his wife. He loved her and she was an excellent mother to their children.
     He knew full well what the usual solution to this problem was: have an affair. You simply accept that your wife satisfies some of your needs and your mistress others. But Dick didn't really want to go behind his wife's back, and he also knew that she could not deal with an open relationship, even if he could.
     So when Dick heard about Byte on the Side Inc. ('Even better than the real thing!'), he had to take it seriously. What the company offered was the opportunity to conduct a virtual affair. Not one-handed cyber sex with a real person at the other end of the computer connection, but a virtual reality environment in which you 'slept with' a completely simulated person. It would feel just like real sex, but, in fact, all your experiences would be caused by computers stimulating your brain to make it seem to you as though you were having sex. All the thrills of an affair, but with no third person, and hence no real infidelity. Why should he say no?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 10.
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Uh oh. There are a lot of relationship landmines sprinkled into that problem. How would you negotiate them? 

Taken together, those are a lot of potentially thorny issues to avoid in either direction. And that's the real point of this experiment - that it's difficult to change our minds and even harder to confidently add to our store of knowledge. But we do know the way to do so, even if it's slow.

When I was 13, I believed in the Christian God, I thought homosexuality was wrong, and I cheered on the second term of Republican President Ronald Regan. Now, at 43, every single one of those position have been reversed. Why? How? I was raised in an observant Catholic household in rural Pennsylvania that subscribed to The American Spectator magazine and had a membership in the NRA, so my early beliefs were clearly a product of my early environment. But somewhere along the line in one of my high school classes on biology, chemistry, or physics, it finally sunk in about how to question ideas and search for countervailing facts to test my theories. I learned about the scientific method, and the course of my life was changed. A class on logic during my freshman year in college helped me navigate the fallacies listed above and elsewhere too. I'm not certain I've found the right answers yet, but I'm at least certain I'm using the right methods to get there.

A few months ago when I profiled Francis Bacon - the father of the scientific method who introduced it with the publication of his book Novum Organum (New Instrument) in 1620 - I listed a few of his quotes that happen to be excellent reminders of what to consider when thinking about Dhara's issue:

If a man will begin with certainties, he shall end in doubts; but if he will be content to begin with doubts he shall end in certainties.


But by far the greatest obstacle to the progress of science and to the undertaking of new tasks and provinces therein is found in this - that men despair and think things impossible.


Read not to contradict and confute; nor to believe and take for granted; nor to find talk and discourse; but to weigh and consider.

There are still plenty of areas of inquiry that the scientific method has failed to confidently uncover - e.g. the best diet to eat, the best cure for diseases, the best forms of exercise - and in these realms we can really only act carefully and conduct our own experiments that contribute to the search for truth. And this is precisely what Dhara should have done in 1822 when she first learned about the properties of "ice"; she should have kept an open mind until more and better information came in.

What do you think? Are there any other issues you worry about when considering new facts?

Time for my own ideas about this week's thought experiment. As a quick reminder, here is the problem I shared on Monday:

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     Dhara Gupta lived all her life in a village near Jaisalmer in the Rajasthan desert. One day, in 1822, as she was cooking dinner, she became aware of a commotion. She looked up to discover that her cousin, Mahavir, had returned from a trip he had begin two years before. He looked in good health, and over dinner retold them of his adventures.
     There were tales of robbers, wild animals, great mountains and other incredible sights and adventures. But what really stunned Dhara was his claim to have seen something called "ice".
     "I went to regions where it was so cold, the water stopped flowing and formed a solid, translucent block," said Mahavir. "What is more amazing is that there is no state between where the liquid thickens. The water that flows freely is only slightly warmer than that which has solidified."
     Dhara did not want to challenge her cousin in public, but she did not believe him. What he said contradicted all her experiences. She did not believe it when travellers told her of fire-breathing dragons. Nor would she believe this nonsense about ice. She rightly thought she was too intelligent for that.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 7.
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We know now that Mahavir was completely right about his description of ice, but does that mean Dhara should have believed him? We don't know anything about his previous actions and general reliability, but Dhara seems to have committed quite a few fallacies in rejecting his report the way the thought experiment stated it. Just choosing the most obvious ones from the lengthy List of Fallacies on wikipedia (which contains 128 separate entries), we see Dhara falling prey to the:

• Confirmation bias fallacy - the tendency to favor information that confirms one's beliefs or hypotheses and to ignore information that disagrees with one's point of view.
• Appeal to the stone - dismissing a claim as absurd without demonstrating proof for its absurdity.
• Argument from (personal) incredulity (divine fallacy, appeal to common sense) - I cannot imagine how this could be true, therefore it must be false.
• Ad hominem argument - the evasion of the actual topic by directing an attack at your opponent.
• Appeal to tradition - a conclusion supported solely because it has long been held to be true.

Still, should Dhara have accepted Mahavir's story exactly at face value? We didn't hear the story she heard in its entirety, but had she believed it, Dhara might have committed one of these errors:

• Anecdotal fallacy - using a personal experience or an isolated example instead of sound reasoning or compelling evidence.
• False attribution - an advocate appeals to an irrelevant, unqualified, unidentified, biased or fabricated source in support of an argument.
• False authority (single authority) - using an expert of dubious credentials or using only one opinion to sell a product or idea.
• Cherry picking (suppressed evidence, incomplete evidence) - act of pointing at individual cases or data that may contradict that position.
• Appeal to authority - where an assertion is deemed true because of the position or authority of the person asserting it.

How do know if something new is worth believing? This thought experiment may seem simple, but do you always know the answer? We're offered new information all the time that we have to accept or reject. How well do you determine which one you do?

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     Dhara Gupta lived all her life in a village near Jaisalmer in the Rajasthan desert. One day, in 1822, as she was cooking dinner, she became aware of a commotion. She looked up to discover that her cousin, Mahavir, had returned from a trip he had begun two years before. He looked in good health, and over dinner retold them of his adventures.
     There were tales of robbers, wild animals, great mountains and other incredible sights and adventures. But what really stunned Dhara was his claim to have seen something called "ice".
     "I went to regions where it was so cold, the water stopped flowing and formed a solid, translucent block," said Mahavir. "What is more amazing is that there is no state between where the liquid thickens. The water that flows freely is only slightly warmer than that which has solidified."
     Dhara did not want to challenge her cousin in public, but she did not believe him. What he said contradicted all her experience. She did not believe it when travellers told her of fire-breathing dragons. Nor would she believe this nonsense about ice. She rightly thought she was too intelligent for that.

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 7.
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What do you think? What new idea have you accepted or rejected recently and why did you do so?

What an excellent thought experiment this week to play around with the mind-body problem and Descartes' dualism. As a quick reminder, here's the text of it:

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     For Stelios, the teletransporter is the only way to travel. Previously it took months to get from Earth to Mars, confined to a cramped spacecraft with a far from perfect safety record. Stelios's TeletransportExpress changed all that. Now the trip takes just minutes, and so far it has been 100 percent safe.
     However, now he is facing a lawsuit from a disgruntled customer who is claiming the company actually killed him. His argument is simple: the teletransporter works by scanning your brain and body cell by cell, destroying them, beaming the information to Mars and reconstructing you there. Although the person on Mars looks, feels, and thinks just like the person who has been sent to sleep and zapped across space, the claimant argues that what actually happens is that you are murdered and replaced by a clone.
     To Stelios, this sounds absurd. After all, he has taken the teletransporter trip dozens of times, and he doesn't feel dead. Indeed, how can the claimant seriously believe that he has been killed by the process when he is clearly able to take the case to court?
     Still, as Stelios entered the teletransporter booth once again and prepared to press the button that would begin to dismantle him, he did, for a second, wonder whether he was about to commit suicide...

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 4.
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Star Trek has already explored many, many transporter issues that might arise from the use of this imagined technology: mental or physical trauma, unintended combinations with foreign objects, using it to fix abnormalities, getting "lost" or purposefully suspended in the data transfer, shielding people from unwanted transports, storing copies of previously transported persons for emergency reconstructions, fetal transportations extracting babies from the wombs of mothers, splitting one person into two (one good, one bad), accidentally making a complete copy of one person, inadvertently combining two people into one, transporting persons through time, and even transporting to alternate universes. It's quite a rich source of material for discussion!

When considering any of these issues though, it's important philosophically to start by pointing out that the question of a soul or some other immaterial part of a person is entirely discounted. The transporters simply scan all the material in our bodies and reconstruct that. I firmly believe this is the correct view of the self though as there is no evidence to the contrary, so I'm happy to skip over that concern.

Fine, we're material beings. But I still like this transporter issue because it raises interesting questions about our attachment to *this* material. In the imagined scenario, *this* me will die, but another person just like me will go on walking through the world, reacting to it, and being observed by others exactly the way that I would. *I* would cease to exist once the transporter process began, but the new *I* would wake up in Mars remembering everything about me, including the moments up to and immediately after the transporter process. Is this enough for the present me? Weirdly, it probably is. Even though we seem to be entirely material in nature, we're strangely unattached to the precise material. Don't believe me? Well the fact that most of our cells are entirely replaced on a regular basis shows we already deal fairly well with this issue. Our brain cells do typically last a lifetime though, so I would understand philosophical objections to being teleported based on that scientific fact.

Those objections appear to me to be selfish though. Given the possibility, would the world be better off with individuals remaining materially intact but spatially restricted, or with individuals with much richer spatial experiences whose material was regularly replaced? Would I want my same wife to stay on Earth with me, or would I prefer a materially replaced wife who was exactly the same only she had been to Mars and back and could tell me about it? I think I could handle preferring the latter, using a metaphor for identity to explain the situation.

In my essay on John Locke, I noted that "Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self. He was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. Locke defines the self as "that conscious thinking thing, (whatever substance, made up of whether spiritual, or material, simple, or compounded, it matters not) which is sensible, or conscious of pleasure and pain, capable of happiness or misery, and so is concerned for itself, as far as that consciousness extends.” He does not, however, ignore "substance," writing that "the body too goes to the making of the man.” The Lockean self is therefore a self-aware and self-reflective consciousness that is fixed in a body. Destruction of the body in the form of Alzheimer’s, amnesia, or stroke, leads one to lose that continuity of consciousness by the self. That doesn’t change the identity of the individual. Identity is therefore independent from consciousness. Identity lies at the Mind x Body intersection. One helpful analogy is to say identity is like a river. Not the water that flows through it, but the channel that actually forms the river. When storms occur and water is high, the river is deepened. When drought occurs, the river slows and silts up. When earthquakes or glaciers reshape the landscape, the riverbed may hold no water at all. If we know the events that carved the river, we can recognize its identity no matter what state it is in. Likewise, we can recognize identity when we know the events that shaped it. If you know the river and are told the volume of water that will flow its way, you know what the river will look like. If you know a person and are told the events that will occur to them, you will recognize how they handle it. This is how we know people after long absences, and this is how changes during brief separations can surprise us."

So even though my transported wife would be made from different atoms of material, I would still recognise her and love her because I would understand the changes that she has gone through—just like every other change she has gone through already. I'd probably even love her more for all the cool stories she could tell me about Mars. How could I decide that was wrong for her? Or that it would be wrong for me to deny others of that kind of extra experience from "me"? Sure, technically, one "me" is dying for the benefit of an "other". It just so happens the "other" is also "me".

I would dismiss the case against Stelios if I was the judge. I would set the precedent that this was a morally beneficial change to the physical processes that humans can go through. No one should be forced through a transporter if they object to it, but once through, they have no justification for claiming a harm had been done to them. What about you though? How would you judge this hypothetical situation?

On to the next thought experiment! This one is timely with the recent passing of Leonard Nimoy. Makes you think of Star Trek in a new light...

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     For Stelios, the teletransporter is the only way to travel. Previously it took months to get from Earth to Mars, confined to a cramped spacecraft with a far from perfect safety record. Stelios's TeletransportExpress changed all that. Now the trip takes just minutes, and so far it has been 100 percent safe.
     However, now he is facing a lawsuit from a disgruntled customer who is claiming the company actually killed him. His argument is simple: the teletransporter works by scanning your brain and body cell by cell, destroying them, beaming the information to Mars and reconstructing you there. Although the person on Mars looks, feels, and thinks just like the person who has been sent to sleep and zapped across space, the claimant argues that what actually happens is that you are murdered and replaced by a clone.
     To Stelios, this sounds absurd. After all, he has taken the teletransporter trip dozens of times, and he doesn't feel dead. Indeed, how can the claimant seriously believe that he has been killed by the process when he is clearly able to take the case to court?
     Still, as Stelios entered the teletransporter booth once again and prepared to press the button that would begin to dismantle him, he did, for a second, wonder whether he was about to commit suicide...

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 4.
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Have you been thinking about this week's thought experiment? Time's up! As a reminder, here is the problem I posted for consideration:

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     Is anything so self-evident that it cannot be doubted? Is it not possible that our lives are no more than dreams, or that the world is just a figment of our imaginations? Outlandish though these notions are, the mere fact that they are conceivable shows that the reality of the physical world can be doubted.
     There are other ideas, however, which seemed to be so clear and self-evident that they must be true. For instance, whether you are awake or asleep, two plus two makes four. A triangle must have three sides whether the world, real or imaginary, contains triangles or not.
     But what if God, or some powerful, malicious demon, is tricking you? Couldn't such an evil spirit fool you into believing that the false is obviously true? Haven't we seen hypnotists make people count to ten, unaware that they have missed out the number seven? And what of a man who, in a dream, hears four strikes of the clock tower bell and finds himself thinking, "How odd. The clock has struck one four times!"
     If the evil Demon is a possibility, is there anything which is beyond doubt?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 1.
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So we start with an exercise intended to cast doubt on everything you think you know. This is an old trick of philosophy to shake you out of your routine and put you in a place where you are open to reexamining issues you thought were settled. That's a useful mindset to have, but this method of getting there often backfires since it just means all the reexaminations cannot be trusted either. How many annoying freshman philosophy majors have thrown up that roadblock to conversations everywhere?

Sure, the evil demon is a possibility. And so is a universe run by a Judeo-Christian god, or by a host of gods on Mount Olympus, or in an advanced civilisation's computer simulation, or in an infinite number of other imagined scenarios. But we see no evidence of this. The laws of nature don't suddenly change from one day to the next at the whim of these puppet masters. If anything is up there pulling the strings...so what? Does that mean we should do anything differently? No, it does not.

Nothing is beyond doubt, and nothing is certain. As I said in my tenet #2, our knowledge is probabilistic. "Does being only 99.99...% sure that the sun will rise tomorrow mean that all knowledge is fatally flawed and we should abandon all efforts of planning and learning? Of course not! It is merely a reminder that we are not perfected creations and should not be surprised to see our knowledge grow and change as our observations and logical reasoning grow and change. It is a reminder that we will always have work to do in this endeavor to understand the universe and our survival within it. And it is a caution that we must be careful about going too far down an uncertain path (with, for example, climate change, genetic modifications, geoengineering, or agricultural monocultures) without hedging our bets against our uncertainties. We must find the balance between our ignorance and our hubris. We must find confidence: not meek under-confidence, not rash over-confidence. We must have a proud humility about what we have learned and what we still need to know."

What do you think? Do you doubt my answer? A small part of you should, but hopefully you'll say I'm probably right.

Hello! I'm back and with a new format. For the next little while, I'm planning to share some famous thought experiments in philosophy and give my own thoughts about them. I'm hoping this will further clarify the evolutionary philosophy I've been working to build, and require me to rethink things where any inconsistencies or difficulties arise. I want this to be interactive though, so on Mondays I'll post the thought experiment, and on Fridays I'll post my thoughts about them. That means you'll have all week to think about the issues, and share your own thoughts about them if you like. I hope you do! On to the first experiment.

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     Is anything so self-evident that it cannot be doubted? Is it not possible that our lives are no more than dreams, or that the world is just a figment of our imaginations? Outlandish though these notions are, the mere fact that they are conceivable shows that the reality of the physical world can be doubted.
     There are other ideas, however, which seemed to be so clear and self-evident that they must be true. For instance, whether you are awake or asleep, two plus two makes four. A triangle must have three sides whether the world, real or imaginary, contains triangles or not.
     But what if God, or some powerful, malicious demon, is tricking you? Couldn't such an evil spirit fool you into believing that the false is obviously true? Haven't we seen hypnotists make people count to ten, unaware that they have missed out the number seven? And what of a man who, in a dream, hears four strikes of the clock tower bell and finds himself thinking, "How odd. The clock has struck one four times!"
     If the evil Demon is a possibility, is there anything which is beyond doubt?

Baggini, J., The Pig That Wants to Be Eaten, 2005, p. 1.
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What do you think? Leave your comments below, send me an email, or chime in on Facebook. I'll be back with more on Friday!