The weird logical properties of language might somehow be biologically encoded, and many linguists seem to think they are. I'm just saying that much of language is just a bizarre cluster of formal restrictions that seem to be pretty robust across the world's languages and that you'd never guess just by seeing language as an embodied tool, or something like that. In that way it's a narrow view of the subject. Language has lots of properties that do not seem to care much for the cultural or bodily milieu they inhabit, lots of it is foreign even to its users, but still there and mathematically describable.

Interesting discussion. On the one hand I think it's inevitable that language as used by people has to be grounded bodily somehow, but there's also no doubting that it has emergent formal and mathematical properties that aren't traceable in any straightforward way to them. Language as a formal system is something you can at least in part demonstrably 'teach to a machine,' and formal semantics is empirically successful in being largely algebraic (there is even a logic of indexicals that does not, strictly speaking, need to appeal to embodiment).

It's not time wasting. You're not above it. It's a serious and interesting question and if you don't like it go somewhere else where your valuable time is better spent.

I don't think there are any purely academic issues in philosophy. Questions like this have deep consequences in the way you view language, identity, and the question of realism. It's all connected, and if you have a basic error in reasoning here, it will infect every other issue you tackle, and lead to a lot of useless speculation and literature on a mistaken premise.

↪Metaphysician Undercover Pleasure might be able to be characterized as an attitude we have towards a certain experience, one in which we wish the experience to continue. Certainly all pleasurable experiences are experiences that we wish to continue to experience. The opposite can be said of pain. — darthbarracuda

This falls to the Euthyphro problem as well. I want an experience to continue because it's pleasant, not vice-versa. It also seems that I can have pleasant experiences without having to reflexively want anything about my experiences. The pleasantness just happens to me; I don't need a second-order awareness of that experience, such that the pleasure is brought on by or concomitant with my desires.

The article isn't very clear on how the adverbial position differs from the 'hedonic tone' position described at the beginning of the article, and indeed the analogy with the speed of a dance seems parallel to Kegan's analogy with the loudness of a sound. There's some babble about psychofunctionalism, but I'm not sure what it's about.

Why is "triangles are three-sided shapes" true? Because "triangle" and "three-sided shape" mean the same thing. Why do "triangle" and "three-sided shape" mean the same thing? Because we use "triangle" and "three-sided shape" in the same sort of way. — Michael

Agreed.

Therefore if we used "triangle" and "three-sided shape" in incompatible ways then they would mean different things, and so "triangles are three sides shapes" would be false. — Michael

Correct.

The way we use the word "triangle" influences the truth-value of the sentence "triangles are three-sided shapes". — Michael

Yes.

And so by the same token, the way we use the word "planet" influences the truth-value of the sentence "Pluto is a planet". — Michael

But from this it does not follow that the way we use the word 'planet' influences which individuals are planets. Your conclusion simply does not follow from your premises, which is what I am trying to get you to see. Whether you are ultimately right or not, which I still think you are not, your current position rests on a conflation and a misunderstanding, and your position can't be investigated until you understand that.

I didn't mean that to be rude, I really think this is fascinating, utterly wrong but wrong in a fascinating way.

What the word 'horse' means depends on how the word 'horse' is used. This is not the same as saying that what it is to be a horse depends on how the word 'horse' is used, which is what you're claiming. You seem to think these two are the same, which is a confusion, whether or not you'd still hold the view once you differentiated them properly.

In fact I find your views kind of fascinating, almost to the extent that I would give them to undergraduates as essay prompts as examples of linguistic confusions for them to untangle in the Wittgensteinian mode.

There is actually one reading of that sentence where you are saying that, but it's not the relevant reading. Definite descriptions are subject to de re / de dicto ambiguities, and the de dicto reading is the one you want.

In any case I am not seeing how this relates to what I said above. Yes, counterfactually the word would refer to a different property. But that's just it -- it would relate to the property of being a stove, not of being a planet. Stoves would still be stoves, not planets. If anything, this underscores my point.

Roughly, your confusion is to think that because our linguistic practices can alter which property a word refers to, therefore it must follow that the words themselves reference the language itself in their definition: roughly, that for any noun N, its meaning is 'that which is called 'N''. And this is not so. Kripke has a great bit on this, how we cannot get off the ground assuming that by 'horse,' what we mean is that which people call 'horse.' It would result in all sorts of absurdities: for example, you could not say truly of any animal that it was a horse, unless someone had called it that before (and at some point someone would have had to have said it erroneously!), and so we could never identify new animals as horses.

Sure, and which properties they denote depends on how we use the noun. If we use the noun "planet" to refer to stoves then the noun "planet" would denote those properties that stoves have (and so not those properties that Jupiter has). — Michael

That is correct.

And given that a planet is whatever thing has the properties denoted by the word "planet" — Michael

That is not correct. Extensionally, these two things happen to coincide because of linguistic practice. Intensionally, they come apart. If 'planet' were used to refer to stoves, planets would still be planets, and the property of being a planet would not change. All that would change is that 'planet' would now refer to stoves, and refer to the property of being a stove.

If we call stoves 'planets,' then they are called 'planets.' That is tautological. But they are not planets. They are stoves; planets are celestial bodies, which stoves are not.

What I'm suggesting is that a thing's identity is not (directly) determined by its pre-linguistic properties but by its linguistic categorisation. — Michael

I don't know what you mean by, 'a thing's identity.' Do you mean, whether it is a planet or not? But this is just not so; things were planets before anyone called them anything, and in those cases their physical properties were relevant and not to the extent we talked about them at all. In fact, we can counterfactually say, even if there were no language at all, there would still be planets.

This again seems to commit you, also, to saying that we can make things planets by calling them by a certain word, which is manifestly false (and again, your objection does not work, as I've outlined above).

Consider: suppose that to be water, something only needs to be called 'water,' and must be. Now, suppose I'm an alchemist, trying to transmute wood into water. According to your account, merely changing its physical properties is not enough: I cannot change wood into water, for example, by rearranging its molecular structure. Rather, the fact that I've done this will only be efficacious to the extent I've made something that people then go on to call 'water.' But this is absurd; to complete the transmutation, I only change the wood's physical qualities, to make it water. No one needs to then call it water to make it water. It was already water; we call it water because that's what it is, it is not water because we call it that. Likewise, there are plenty of planets out there that no one ever has, or ever will, call anything. Yet planets they remain, in virtue of their physical qualities, and not because of the tendency of these qualities to make us call them by a certain word. To put it simply, nouns denote properties; they do not denote the property of being called by the very word. A little thought will show you that this is circular and impossible to institute in practice (but we can go over that too if you want).

This is obvious in the case of proper nouns. I was once Yahadreas and now I'm Michael (so not Yahadreas). Muhammad Ali was once Cassius Clay. I'm simply extending this principle to common nouns (a real-life example of this is the pre-op transexual who newly identifies as a different gender; "I was a woman but now I'm a man"). — Michael

Proper nouns are semantically distinct from common nouns. The former are referential expressions that denote individuals; the latter are predicative expressions that denote properties.

There is a way of talking about name-bearing properties and using proper names as common nouns; we can say there are two Michaels, for example, by which we mean there are two people named 'Michael.' And then, yes, I agree, there is nothing to being a Michael other than being called 'Michael.' That is because name-bearing properties are metalinguistic, but other properties, like being a planet, are not. And there are principled reasons for this, I think, but I don't want to get into it (I work on name-bearing and proper names, which is a fascinating subject in its own right). In many languages, proper names used as common nouns are marked differently from ordinary common nouns, showing quotative marking that highlights their metalinguistic character. This is because, I hold, they are derivative of the corresponding referential expression, much as, say, the common noun 'she,' meaning 'feminine individual,' is derivative of the pronoun.

Okay, I deny your starting point, so it looks like we aren't making any progress. I cannot make sense of the idea that something could be a planet, then not be a planet, without changing.

In any case, I still don't know exactly what your position is, and you've ignored my question over and over; but clearly the schema I outlined above is wrong, so I'm guessing that's not what you're saying. And it still makes no sense to say that you can turn a stove into a planet without turning it into a celestial body; that is like saying you can turn a stove into a chipmunk without turning it into an animal.

I think you are deeply confused about the way in which words denote properties, and that your position basically amounts to thinking that all properties denoted through language are themselves meta-linguistic, that the use of language must mean that what the language talks about must itself be linguistic. I think this is wrong, and that I can demonstrate to you the way in which it is wrong, and that possibly after seeing this you'd be willing to abandon your original purported datum. But I can't say anything else unless you clear up your position with regard to the proposed equivalence schema.

I've repeatedly told you that I'm not claiming that we can turn a stove into a celestial body by naming it a planet. So I don't know why you keep bringing it up. — Michael

But, since a planet is a celestial body, you can't change something into a planet without changing it into a celestial body. But you seem to be claiming that if everyone calls a stove a planet, then it will become a planet; but since it will not become a celestial body, this is wrong. Hence your position is incoherent, and merely protesting against the fact that I'm pointing this incoherence out will not help you, since the problem lies in your position and not any misunderstanding I have of it.

What I'm drawing attention to is the fact that Pluto was a planet but now isn't — Michael

Nonsense. According to my idiolect, Pluto was a planet and still is; according to the scientists, it isn't and never was. If it was the case that they determined whether Pluto was a planet based on the use of the word 'planet,' then they would have appealed to linguistic data in their decision, not data about Pluto's physical qualities.

I reject your datum; it's not the case that Pluto's planethood changed recently.

Again, do you accept the above schema, or are you proposing it? It's difficult to criticize your position if it can't be pinned down.

To be a planet is not to be a stove, regardless of what word we use to refer to stoves. If we refer to stoves using 'planet,' they're simply stoves we use the word 'planet' to refer to, not planets.

After all, a planet is a celestial body; since as you admit stoves would not become celestial bodies by virtue of being called 'planets,' it follows that they would not thereby becomes planets.

Suppose it was my goal to turn a stove into a planet. Would a reasonable way of going about this be to ask everyone to call it a planet?

Are you proposing the above formula?

But you are saying it can become a planet if everyone uses the word 'planet' to refer to it?

But wait, didn't you just describe a planet? Something doesn't add up here. If it can't become a celestial body...then it can't become a planet. That's what a planet is, after all.

So tell me whether you assent to the above schema or are taking it seriously as an option; otherwise, I don't see how we can move forward.

Do you assent to, or are you proposing, the following?

For all x, x is a planet iff x is called a planet

I agree. But the question is; is to be a planet to have this property? — Michael

Yes. To be a planet is to be a planet; not to be called a planet.

If to be a planet is to have this property, and if Pluto has never had this property, then Pluto has never been a planet. But if Pluto has been a planet, and if Pluto has never had this property, then to be a planet is not to have this property. — Michael

I do not think that at any point in human history Pluto became, or ceased being, a planet. Part of the confusion here I think is we're trying to treat linguistic practice as if it rested on decisions made by experts, which it doesn't. The Pluto decision is interesting in that a lot of people heard about it via the media and at least nominally in some cases defer to it. I think if you pressed people enough they'd say that the notion that Pluto stopped being a planet at some point doesn't make sense. What happened was that a group of scientists decided that Pluto wasn't a planet; since they did this by appealing to physical aspects of Pluto, not what Pluto was called (which would make no sense), their position is that Pluto was never a planet, so if the authority is deferred to, one would have to agree with it on this score. I think you might be treating your initial purported data a little too seriously, and that when pressed it falls apart. As I said above, I personally would still say Pluto is a planet, since my idiolect isn't governed by the decisions of scientists.

It's not that a stove is a planet if I call it a planet; it's that a stove is a planet if the wider linguistic community uses the word "planet" to refer to stoves. — Michael

So you think that a stove can become a planet if everyone uses the word 'planet' to refer to it?

Doesn't that strike you as an absurd position? If not, we may have to dig a little deeper into why you think this. It strikes me as completely insane. I'd say myself it's still just a stove, and obviously not a planet; but now the word 'planet' can be used to refer to stoves, is all.

Whether or not calling something a planet makes it so is the very question I'm asking. — Michael

But this is obviously false. If I call a stove a planet, it is not therefore a planet; it's just a stove, that I'm calling a planet. So I'm a little confused as to how this is even a question for you.

Are you proposing that this is a realistic definition of 'planet'?

For all x, x is a planet iff x is called a planet

I want to get this clear, because this the above definition has some pretty obvious flaws. I think it's self-evidently wrong, but if you aren't convinced, we can hash it out.

So if you reject the conclusion then you must reject one of the premises. You seem to accept b) and c), so do you not accept a)? Was Pluto not a planet 20 years ago? — Michael

Using my own English idiolect, I would still call Pluto a planet. A technical community has deemed that it isn't, by some standard. By that standard, it never was a planet. According to the ordinary use of the word, at least as I use it, Pluto always was, and still is, a planet, and the decisions of a technical community don't change that. (Words, generally, do not have their extensions based on council decisions).

And what has to change for a thing that once fell within the tolerated distance to fall out of it (or vice versa)? Presumably a change in material characteristics is one. But that's not what happened to Pluto. What changed was our use of the word "planet". So our use of the word "planet" influences whether or not a thing falls within this tolerated distance, and so influences whether or not this thing is a planet. — Michael

As I said, nouns are sensitive both to a cluster of properties instantiated by the prototype (for a planet, plausibly material properties), and a tolerance allowed in the consideration of at which distance from that prototype the property ends, based on a fuzzy tolerance principle. 'Planet' is sensitive to both simultaneously, and different attitude verbs pick this out. Thus, if I say, 'I believe Pluto is a planet,' I plausibly mean that Pluto has some physical characteristic that falls near enough to the prototype. But if I say, 'I consider Pluto a planet,' I do not mean that Pluto has any material qualities but that given the material qualities it actually has, the tolerance principle of the property of being a planet admits Pluto within it.

Our use of the word 'planet' governs which property the word 'planet' refers to. It does not govern the property itself, nor whether any individual bears that property. To think otherwise is a deep confusion.

That depends on what it means to be a planet. If to be a planet is to have certain material characteristics then the claim that naming Pluto a planet makes it a planet is the claim that naming Pluto a planet makes it have certain material characteristics, which of course is absurd. But if to be a planet is to be named a planet then the claim that naming Pluto a planet makes it a planet is the claim that naming Pluto a planet makes it named a planet, which of course is a tautology. — Michael

But calling something a planet doesn't make it so; therefore it can't be that to be called a planet is to be a planet.

So to be a planet is to fall within the tolerated extension of the word "planet"? Wouldn't we then say that in naming Pluto a planet we are making it the case that Pluto falls within the tolerated extension of the word "planet"? And so that in naming Pluto a planet we are making it the case that Pluto is a planet? — Michael

To be a planet is to fall within a tolerated distance from a fuzzy prototype whose conglomeration of qualities is that which is currently referred to by the word 'planet.' Being a planet has nothing to do with being called by a certain word. The fact that the right prototype or selection of qualities happens to be referred to by that word is purely accidental. In naming Pluto a planet, we are making the case that it is a planet, but not that it is called a planet or that it falls within the extension of a certain word, which is absurd (although the two will extensionally, not intensionally, overlap in worlds in which 'planet' refers to the property of being a planet, which it need not).

The second horn's conclusion doesn't follow – if Pluto is no longer a planet even though none of its relevant qualities changed, this doesn't mean to be a planet is to be named a planet.

Nouns seem to cluster around a family resemblance of canonical qualities, with a prototype and a fuzzy tolerance principle for how distant from that prototype an individual is willing to be before it no longer falls in the extension of the predicate. Language is sensitive to both the qualities required of the prototypical case and the level of tolerance allowed – as has already been adumbrated, the attitude verb consider is sensitive to this latter dimension without being sensitive to the former.

My answer would be, therefore, that what was changed was the tolerance allowed from the prototypical planet, which became more restrictive in such a way that Pluto now falls outside of the extension (though only for a technical community – I'm sure many people still consider Pluto a planet and there seems to be no scientistic reason to say they're wrong, after all the language has the say, not the scientists; the effect only happens to the extent the language puts up with the scientists and decides to obey them). This does not mean that the naming of Pluto as a planet or not has some power to make it a planet or not (which is obviously absurd), nor does it mean that Pluto, or the core characteristics of a planet, have changed in some appreciable way (with e.g. Jupiter remaining a canonical example as it ever was).

And the solution is to exist in a beer commercial? :S

Nah, close friends have so much disgusting baggage, they've always all fucked each other and are sick of their personal ticks and so on. In-politics are unbearable.

This was written by a man but it captures the voice well...

"It is 1943—the height of the Second World War. With the men away at the front, Berlin has become a city of women.

On the surface, Sigrid Schröder is the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime.

But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman of passion who dreams of her former Jewish lover, now lost in the chaos of the war. But Sigrid is not the only one with secrets—she soon finds herself caught between what is right and what is wrong, and what falls somewhere in the shadows between the two . . ."

Actually I said that because I saw a one act play about it recently. The prototype for the novel is The Awakening, but there's a sense in which I think a lot of literature written by middle aged white women basically approximates The Awakening as a Platonic archetype. It's a book that had a profound effect on me, I'm just oversaturated now. It's like, I get it, but surely you have other emotions and thoughts as well? My mother is also a writer, and at her worst she veers into this territory, not quite, but the ethos is there. It's just an example, I could also have said: the rootless disaffected young white man who does a lot of drugs and has jumbled psychological crises of various sorts and meditates on how hard it is to relate to anyone.

I think the more pressing point about the post-irony is that on the internet it isn't affected or academic or literary or part of an experiment, but actually comes quite naturally as a mode of casual discourse, and as something superior its lesser cousins, like (God help us) 'snark'

I really like this. Although I think this hysterical tone, where every complaint is one of (sanctimonious) reaction to injustice is becoming universal in political discourse. To be powerful or to be smart is to see some horrible systemic wrong and be enraged by it.

Reading it as a novel, I can't say I like it, exactly. For a start, I'm much too unfamiliar with those communities. And it reads a bit like any old just-for-fun collaborative novel, only with the 4chan and PoMo references specific to their subculture. Plus I found it hard to wade through all the ropey tendrils of spooge. — jamalrob

I think it's good, and I'd read it over just about anything non-classical in a Barnes and Noble. But I'm in the target audience. It has a coherency to it and a genuine esotericism, despite being funny, and in a way, it does ruin some forms of literature with its quality. I can't read about a middle aged white woman trapped in a failing marriage who spiritualizes the prospect of having an affair anymore. I just can't do it.

Just as you're unsympathetic to the appeal to a return to real-world interaction, I'm equally suspicious of the idea that online interaction is a liberation of the true potential of personal relationships, free of the artifice of politeness etc. I know you're not quite espousing that idea yourself, but I imagine there are those more optimistic than you who see it that way, who see a bright authentic cyberfuture rather than disillusionment. — jamalrob

Honestly, I'm not really sympathetic to the virtues of human interaction generally. People are disappointing, and I don't think interpersonal interaction is as important or enriching or even as interesting as it's made out to be. I'd prefer a future in which people can mutually support each other without having to get in each other's way, unless they want to. We need each other materially, but not spiritually.

I don't see a future in the internet, only a distraction from present pains. The internet will probably merge with real life in the future, making the anonymity it offers now disappear, as it gets tamed by corporations and the government. At which point real life will be even more intolerable because it will meticulously log everything you do and flood you with advertisements.

This is a good example of it:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikisource/en/4/42/The_Legacy_of_Totalitarianism_in_a_Tundra.pdf

Novel written collaboratively and anonymously over the internet.

Real things are a bit flatter than they used to be. (I suspect this is partly an age thing though.) — jamalrob

Probably, yeah. Age flattens everything.

What exactly do you mean by this TG? I ask because I'm instinctively one of those who agrees with statements like this from BC: — jamalrob

After getting a taste of the way people interact in certain environments, it gets harder to care about the way they interact in others. I know people generally understand that certain phatic or 'cocktail' forms of small talk are supposed to be banal, either because the content of the speech isn't its main purpose, or because it's just an unfortunate facet of life you have to accept since not everyone can be close to everyone else, or share their interests and specialized modes of emoting.

The internet, for whatever reason, lends itself to a certain kind of irony that then collapses in on itself and becomes again, not sincere, but for lack of a better term, post-ironic, made with self-conscious irony that hits on truths without committing to them straightforwardly, and has a casual contempt for the sincerities of the real world that reveal, rather than mere contrarianness, a kind of deeper sincerity, or I shouldn't even really call it that, but a new way of thinking that is past being sincere. After tasting the kind of expression that's possible in that mode of interaction, it's just hard to be surprised by or interested in what passes for even 'real' conversation in the real world. It feels like a kind of irreversible disillusionment, I don't know. And certain places on the internet of course are better at it than others, and many don't partake in it at all, treating the internet as just an extension or proxy for real life.

I'm unsympathetic to the appeal to a return to real-world interaction because I think disillusionment of this kind is a one-way street and that once human interaction is seen as trivial you can't reverse seeing that. There is nothing 'real' about what goes on in the real world.

I grew up on the internet. For me it wasn't an appendage or a tool but a fact of life, so I can't judge myself apart from it. I largely agree that most of its promises have disappointed in the way most of life's promises do. But what it offers is the possibility, open to those who look for it, to get what you wouldn't have access to before.

For those willing to listen to the mainstream media to begin with, the internet is not going to ameliorate that defect. But for those who had no inclination to begin with, it offers new and exquisite pleasures: fringe thinkers, social outcasts, dispirited academics and reconstructionist cults (along with storage of mainstream intellectual life, of the kind published in Mind). There are places on the internet that have taught me things about people that I just couldn't have learned otherwise. No one who learns of the existence of a Christian Weston Chandler or Henry Darger, and absorbed what they've done, rather than dismissing it, can look at the world in the same way. It's given me an appreciation for how broad and bizarre human experience is. There is also a post-ironic kind of discourse that only occurs on the internet, and that can really become your bread and butter once you get the hang of it, and make every other mode of human interaction look like socially retarded trash, or culturally dated.

I agree about pornography, though. I consumed a large amount of it as a teenager, much of it not at all socially appropriate, and I hit a backlash at some point in the last few years. I can only speak for myself, but on me it was a bad influence, a bad experience, and helped devalue sex and life.

I think the two have incompatible ends, with the most important difference being that Epicureans treat pleasure as intrinsically good and virtue as instrumental, while the Stoics hold precisely the reverse (with pleasure being 'choiceworthy' but not an end in itself).

As for Kant himself, it's true that he did in fact keep up the notion that an object is an object for a subject, but his novelty was perhaps to introduce the notion of the 'Thing-In-Itself', which pretty much gets completely overlooked or rather intentionally erased in the post-Kantian tradition that followed him up (Fichte, Schelling, Hegel...). — StreetlightX

I won't harp on this because I generally think Kant is vastly overrated in terms of his importance to the history of philosophy, but I'm almost certain the thing-in-itself is not his invention, but the technical articulation of an idealized end of knowledge that is probably prehistorical, but is certainly at least Socratic-Platonic. Various schools beginning at least with the Sophists, Skeptics and Cyrenaics denied the existence or the importance of this thing-in-itself to various degrees (a denial which would make no sense if the concept were a modern one), and all of modern epistemology held it in some sort of abeyance, with arguments directly traceable through Descartes to these ancient schools.

I'm more liable to trace the subjectivity-objectivity switcheroos and confusion not from recent historical developments but rather from the goals and practices of industrialized science and abstract philosophy not having much to do with life as we live it otherwise (hence their importance and meaning get swapped around depending on what mode we're inhabiting). My dime-store philosophy of science in this regard would just be that sciences circularly set up instrumental criteria of success, some of which have more effect on the world than others (physics has consequences that literary theory really doesn't), and which effect can't be comprehended by the science itself, which has blinders on and only sets about twiddling its models to fit its own criteria of success yet further. When we live our lives ordinarily, using standards that stem from our own lived experiences, we find that what was important in the science was not important to us in life, and the object and subject play games.

You're not understanding me.

For most people who like 'dong a lot,' I can't help but think that they ought to do even more and put a bullet through their head. Je je

You're not following the conversation.

To reiterate, I am asking you to support the claim made here:

And yet it follows that if the world is truly generated from a personal viewpoint, then there has to be some reasonable account of why that isn't the case. — apokrisis

You made this statement unsupported. So why is it, then, that an idealist position commits one to needing an explanation as to why the world does not do whatever one wants it to? Even with things ontic realists readily admit are mind dependent, like dreams, no one thinks this is the case. So there seems to be no reason for this position, without another premise you're relying on.

I don't know how old it is. But it makes use of the notion of an object in the older sense.

I don't think there was really any reversal with Kant, either, at least transcendental idealists after him used it in the old way -- 'no object except for a subject.'

It's your proposed argument, so I can't do that for you. You have to tell me -- clearly there is no validly drawn conclusion as it stands, and I have no idea what's going on in your head that makes you think there is.

And yet it follows that if the world is truly generated from a personal viewpoint, then there has to be some reasonable account of why that isn't the case. — apokrisis

Why does that follow?

There's clearly a massive missing premise in this argument, which once you spell out I suspect you'll see is false.