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Comment by notheguyouthink | Hacker News Reader

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Leaving aside my general scepticism of basically everything, including the knowability of the truth of a statement, including the statement: "At least one mind exists."

The answer is pretty simple. Gold was predicted to be whitish looking, like Platinium, based on the physics of the time. But due to a phenomenon unknown at the time (relativity) it was gold. That is how we know our minds don't create reality. We seem to live in a universe of consequence, not a dream. There are things we don't understand that we come to figure out, not the other way around.

On the other hand, if by "how would we know?" you mean the fundamental unknowability of everything, yes I agree with you. But as Russel said, "it's boring to stop there" so let's just park that observation and continue on. In this way, philosophy mirrors theology. You take some things by faith and you get on with your life.

> Gold was predicted to be whitish looking, like Platinium, based on the physics of the time. But due to a phenomenon unknown at the time (relativity) it was gold

I'm pretty sure gold was well known long before predicting the colors of as-yet-unobserved metals based on any kind of physics.

I'm pretty sure he's talking about the testability of science; when you have a theory, it's not science until it becomes a testable observation. At one point, presumably, the early model of physics allows "naturalists" to make predictions on the color of gold based on the information of chemical elements. And the color was supposed to be platinum.

Therefore, the theory was not quite right, and naturalists of the time could conclude that their model was incomplete. I don't think anyone was ever doubting the true color of gold.

Here is an example of what the world might look like if reality _was_ effected by our beliefs:

http://art.yale.edu/file_columns/0000/0066/borges.pdf

(It's the short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius by Borges.)

Yay, an actual correct usage of the word "effected". You don't see that very often.

I prefer to think of it as just the one impossible question, and the many efforts to try and shape it in such a way that its answer becomes apparent. Or, at the very least, that the incorrectness of other proposed answers becomes apparent (the more typical result).

Depends on what you mean by "know".

We know it by the times when reality doesn't correspond to our ideas and/or questions.

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