Deme

The wording is a meme, but yeah, somewhat detached from reality nowadays.

"Apex predator" my ass, I will hug the teddy bear.

And that fresh new video generator by Google is scary good

Our senses and measurements (or are those the same thing, with one merely augmenting the other?) tell us that we live in a purely material universe. I'm not claiming that our senses are perfect or that science is over with every secret revealed, but questioning the validity of our observations on such a foundational level invokes questioning the validity of the worldview (metaphysical materialism) built on top of them. That's what I interpreted Mickey was on about in the meme.

Donald is despairing about the inherent meaninglessness of a purely material universe, so I assume that Mickey, with his radical rejection of all that Donald says, represents at least some sort of metaphysical dualism or idealism which would allow for inherent cosmic meaning.

I know. The matrix (or any other metaphysical idealism for that matter) is an example of a situation where we cannot trust our perception for knowledge about the true nature of the universe (much like the allegory of the cave), although taken to the extreme. The epistemological and metaphysical aspects of Plato's cave are very much intertwined.

Eliminative materialism isn't my thing no. Emergent materialism is what I roll with. So the human mind and culture and numbers are things that exist as emergent properties of other things.

Sure it could all be a lie with us living in the matrix or so on, and it's fun to entertain such thoughts every now and then. But I won't accept it as truth without a better reason than "but technically it's possible".

Yes, and my response to what Mickey said was that why would we think that we're in the cave looking at shadows? Why should I complicate my view of the world with the added baggage of metaphysical idealism when materialism works just fine to explain everything I see? Sure our perception of the world is limited to our senses and measurement techniques, but the scientific framework we've built onto that base appears very consistent and functional with its predictive power. It's definitely not omniscience, but it works.

I only brought up the Cogito argument to point out that Mickey is incorrect in saying that no certain knowledge exists.

An interesting take, but surely there would still have to be some substrate to facilitate the thinking (a thinker)? A brain in a jar might not be what you think of yourself, but whatever is thinking the thoughts which you consider your own, definitely has to exist.

I think the usage of the word absurd in this context entails the third definition of the word here:

Occam's razor defeats Plato's cave. There's no reason to think that the world we experience would be just metaphysical shadows on the wall. The burden of proof is on Mickey's shoulders.

Oh yeah and Cogito Ergo Sum. So there is one bit of definitely provable knowledge.

All of them will be very rude to you

Rammstein disagrees