crispybits wrote:Where did I say anything about materialism? I trust that the reality I have consistently experienced for my entire life (barring the bits where I know I was dreaming or tripping) is real. I don't claim that I have experienced the sum total of reality and disproved anything beyond what we can experience (directly or indirectly). I'm simply saying that given a subjective reality in which there appears to be an outer world and other minds, that has held consistent for my entire waking sober life, I'll trust that given the vast amount of evidence I've personally experienced that the reality I perceive is objectively real until something comes along that in some way effectively shows that this reality is not objectively real. That argument allows for the gap, it allows for the possibility that I'm mistaken and I readily admit that I'm making a kind of leap of faith to bridge the gap between subjective experience and objective reality that I can't actually justify beyond simply claiming pragmatism.
But to defeat the pragmatic assumption it's not enough to say "you might be wrong". If you make a claim about something, including the solipsistic claim that the gap exists and we can't really be sure of anything, then it should be analysed in the same way as we analyse every other claim. Using argument and evidence. The argument exists and is very difficult to either prove or disprove because it rules out all of the known types of evidence. So the sensible thing to do is what we do for every other claim where the argument is valid but for which there is no evidence either way. I could argue that there is a vast civilisation on one of the planets in the Andromeda galaxy that is technologically superior to us. The way we use that claim is to say "well we have no evidence it's there, but we also cannot say with certainty it's false, so lets not bother even talking about it until we're actually in a position to verify or disprove it". The same goes for solipsism, we admit it could be true, but until something comes along that either verifies it or disproves it we ignore it and live based on the reality that we do all seem to experience as objectively real.
Good point. And I will have to think about it but what comes to my mind right now is that by agreeing on solipsism we are giving a highest value to that which are directly experiencing, that is our thoughts, our minds.
But we could be having an altered state of consciousness which might be tricking us into the idea that there is a gap. But what makes that an invalid or wrong idea? We are still experiencing it so at that point it was the reality. Which is it then real? One or the other? Can both be? Or does this simply helps score points to the solipsism idea?
Perhaps our first mistake is to think there's only one truth.
And when I brought up materialism i was indeed making a claim without proof, here we enter to a place where I make what seem to be wild assumptions, difficult for me to prove aince i do not know philisophical terminology for it. It seems to me that the "software" we are running nowadays in our minds is highly materialistic, and we color with it everything we perceive and how we think about it. For example, it's clear that a greek 3000 years ago thought very differently than we do, we can infer that from the plays that remain, we can see how they talked to gods and all that. Also, the language contains wisdom we have forgotten only to rediscover it when someone does a lab experiment.
We might be more advanced that they were in some things, but we cannot say we are the most advanced we will ever be or if we ever gonna be as advanced as possible. So, to claim the way we think is the best way is wrong. So we have to figure out more about the way we think about stuff, and the matetialistic point of view, that i claim is too prevalent these days, might be impeding us from understanding or knowing things better.
Dust in the wind. That beautiful electric violin... one doesn't get enough of it.
