Haven't you been able to experience people who are older than yourself? History books or documentaries? Historic sites? Fossils? Explanations and/or demonstrations of how radiocarbon dating works? You've not experienced any of those sorts of things?I have no evidence of a world beyond my experience. I have no evidence of a time when I am not. — Dominic Osborn
But what you experience includes things like other people.I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. — Dominic Osborn
I can also adduce Ockham’s Law of Parsimony (razor) in support of my assertion that there is nothing other than my experience. Why postulate anything other than my experience? My experience is, I concede, unexplained and inexplicable. But so is a physical universe. And so is a self. All of these are utterly mysterious; all of these represent the end of a line of enquiry. Why not choose the simplest ontology––there is my experience, and nothing else––? — Dominic Osborn
But as you say, your experience is a very complex state. — apokrisis
Occam's razor in particular is a principle that could only apply if we believe already in the kind of physical reality in which the complex is grounded in something simpler. — apokrisis
But I don't say experience is a complex state. I say it is not many things, and so not complex. — Dominic Osborn
I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. — Dominic Osborn
I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. — Dominic Osborn
On purely semantic grounds, you can know that there is something other than your experience.
Meanings just ain't in the head
— Putnam — jkop
But that cuts both ways, doesn't it? If you want to make that argument, you're essentially saying that nothing can be said of experience, yet you're apparently saying quite a lot about it. If you think that, when you try to say something about experience, that of which you are talking about isn't experience, you're speaking nonsense. No? — Πετροκότσυφας
I think you answered that above. Experience is divided into bits by reflection and judgement. Or maybe it's something like a system? Interconnected parts forming a whole. — Πετροκότσυφας
Or one has to remain silent, maybe. — Πετροκότσυφας
Putnam’s understanding of meaning assumes dualism: there are internal experiences, and external things that they mean. I reject dualism and so, I suppose, I reject Putnam’s understanding of meaning. — Dominic Osborn
“Experience” is the name I have been giving to Reality. I don’t like the word because it implies something that is experienced and something that experiences, things that I don’t think exist, but I have to have some word for it: “Experience” will have to do for the minute. — Dominic Osborn
The apparent complexity of experience is accounted for by an external world which is complex, which is many things. — Dominic Osborn
That is to say that I only think that there are two things, the experience of the seeing the rock and the experience of having the pain after kicking it, because I mistakenly believe that there is such a thing as the rock (independent of my experience) and such a thing as a foot (independent of my experience), each of which is independent of the other. — Dominic Osborn
Another argument. If experience is complex, then it is many things. If it is many things, where are the gaps in experience? Experience is one unbroken flow. How is it divided into different bits? — Dominic Osborn
Each part of my experience implies all of it. Red implies blue and the whole colour spectrum. Colour implies texture, form, etc., the other components of the Visual. The Visual implies the Aural, the Olfactory, etc.. Each tiniest sensation implies the whole experiential panorama. — Dominic Osborn
You can’t know if this is a dream, and when you are dreaming, you can’t know that it is dreaming. Again — Dominic Osborn
You can’t know if this is a dream, and when you are dreaming, you can’t know that it is dreaming. Again, to merely assert the point again, though in a non-epistemic way: what I dream is just as real as the waking world. — Dominic Osborn
Experience is, in a way, nothingness. But not nothingness in the sense of absence, or in the sense of blackness, or silence, or air, but in the sense of––nothing determined, in the sense of everything piled on top of everything else (a metaphor), in the sense of having no characteristics because having all characteristics, in the sense of being identical to everythingness. I think Experience is like what Anaximander called apeiron. I think Experience is like chaos, what there was before Jehovah started dividing this from that. — Dominic Osborn
Nor do I think Experience is a system. I don’t believe in parts and wholes. It seems to me that either two things are entirely separate, distinct and independent, in which case they do not form a whole. Or two things do form a whole, in which case they are not separate, distinct and independent. I think the notion of “part” is intrinsically contradictory. (Another unsupported, controversial assertion. But I am here just stating my beliefs, for what it's worth.) — Dominic Osborn
I am fairly philosophically uninformed. ––So inform me. You say there are no arguments in my post. Prima facie there are three of them (The epistemological one, Ockham’s Razor, and the one about Number.) Why aren’t they arguments? Inform me. — Dominic Osborn
I have no evidence of a time when I am not. Whatever constitutes evidence (for me) must be within my experience. These truths trump (for me) everything that everyone says to me about the other side of the world, the other side of the wall, the certainty of my death, the time before I was born, etc.. I am solipsistic and idealistic in this way. — Dominic Osborn
If there is something other than experience then there are two things, my experience and that which is not my experience. — Dominic Osborn
I suppose when I experience pain there is still the awareness of pain as an object of experience; ... — Wayfarer
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