Existentialism, part 3

Still on vacation, but I am back for a bit today.

What was wrong with that easy dismissal of a problem that has plagued me for years? Let me start off first with an easy dismissal of his argument: humans not only react to humans that way, they also react to inanimate objects as if they were alive. There are ongoing projects to create androids - robots that look and act human. They have some pretty convincing looking ones right now - they can do amazing things with rubber! The thing that researches noticed is that humans interact with these robots as if they were human, if the robot's faces kind of look human. In the example I saw, they have only a very good animatronic face, and people will vary the eye contact as if that face was human. People will blush or be embarrassed by that face as they would in situations with a real human. By Sartre's argument, does this mean that these animatronic faces should be considered real or proof that we are not just brains in a jar? I would think not.

A second argument is: If there was only one real person in the world and the rest in his or her mind, how would that person know how real people interact? This one person would be trained from birth to believe that all around him or her are just as real, so would therefore treat those others as one as learned. Unless there is some sort of psychic link to which I am not privileged, I can not tell that another person is really thinking or if that person is animatronic or something else. How could I know? That was the question that Sartre was to answer, but his answer was just a restating of the question. Utter crap!

I hope there was more to the Existentialist movement, but after listening to almost 12 hours of a college lecture, I have to doubt that there is much to philosophy at all. Such weak logic... I hope it is not pervasive!

The Edward

PS The physics department was way over budget with large expensive equipment purchases to test the theories of reality. So the President of the University asks the physics department head: "Why can you not be more like the math department whose only expenses are paper, pens, and a trash can. Or better still like the philosophy department who does even have a trash can."