Reality and Belief
Work out what you can actually claim to know: scepticism and the simulation argument, what exists, the arguments for and against God, and whether we are typical or alone.
What counts as knowing
Knowledge, true belief and certainty are three different things, and nearly every argument in this course turns on keeping them apart.
The sceptical arguments
The dream, the demon and the vat are three different arguments, each valid, and the work of answering them is choosing which premise to deny.
The simulation argument
Bostrom's argument concludes a disjunction rather than a probability, and almost every popular version of it states the wrong thing.
Answering the sceptic
Four serious replies to the vat argument, each of which works and each of which costs something you may not want to pay.
How evidence moves belief
Belief comes in degrees, evidence is what discriminates between hypotheses, and a claim that predicts everything is supported by nothing.
The biases in the way
The errors in the rest of this course are mostly not errors of logic, they are the predictable distortions of an animal reasoning about its own importance.
What there is
Whether the physical world exists independently of minds is not settled by pointing at a table, and Berkeley's argument for the negative is far better than its reputation.
Minds and the physical world
The hard problem is the one place where a purely physical account of the world still has a visible gap, and three arguments try to show the gap cannot be closed.
Judging a picture of reality
Parsimony, explanatory power and the cost of being unrefutable, worked out precisely enough to use on a hypothesis nobody can test.
The arguments for God
Kalam, contingency, design, fine-tuning and the ontological argument, each stated at its strongest with the premise that carries the weight named.
The arguments against God
The problem of evil in its two forms, the free will defence and what it costs, divine hiddenness, and why incoherence objections are weaker than they look.
Atheism and agnosticism
Believing there is no God and not believing there is one are different positions, and most public argument about atheism is confusion between them.
Are we typical?
The Copernican principle is an assumption rather than a piece of modesty, anthropic selection removes some coincidences that look like they need explaining, and the Doomsday argument shows how badly this reasoning can go.
Are we alone?
Drake organises ignorance rather than calculating anything, Fermi's question is sharper than the equation, and the silence supports less than either side claims.
Taking a position
Three valid arguments with deniable premises, how to state where you stand on each, and what would count as being shown wrong.
The whole subject