What is your experience of?

What is that guides you to the purported need for evidence, which seems to loom large for you?

How did the words you're using come about, and of whom are you asking these questions?

Dominic Osborn, do you not think that there are others beside you, such as me, who have experience as well as you? Doesn't your experience of communicating with others convince you that there are others? And doesn't this experience of communicating convince you that others have experience, similar to you having experience, but not the same as your experience?

Your writing is fluent but it is not philosophically informed, it doesn't make any arguments but simply states provocative ideas as if they amount to arguments, which they don't. So, it's not a theory. (Recall Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: 'That's not writing, that's typing.)

If you believe there is no world beyond your experience then why have I just experienced your post? Unless I am just a figment of your imagination, or maybe you are a figment of mine. :)

Having said that, I am starting to believe we all might be part of one big consciousness. So it's possible our experiences are connected in some way.

I have no evidence of a world beyond my experience. I have no evidence of a time when I am not. — Dominic Osborn

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 was thinking parents but yeah those things work as well! X-)

People asking about solipsism: mcdoodle, Bassplayer, Terrapin Station and Barry Etheridge:

You’ve taken me by surprise: you ask about solipsism as if you had never encountered it before. I thought the arguments for and against solipsism were rehearsed in these fora to the point of tedium. Maybe you ask me just out of politeness. The argument of the solipsist is simply: I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. But I’ll mount a proper defence of solipsism in a couple of days. I need to do a bit of research; I’ve only got as far as Wikipedia so far. In the meantime: I thought the main problems with solipsism were 1. that it was neither verifiable nor falsifiable. I can prove neither that thereis something outside my experience nor that there isn’t: in either case, in order to do I so, I should have to step outside my experience and ascertain whether or not there were anything there, something that of course I cannot do, 2. There is no reason to suppose that my experience has anything to do with a self, 3. Even if what the solipsist believes is true, he can’t proselytise about it. 4. Solipsism and Material Realism somehow coincide. I’ll have to explain what I mean about this later.

Bassplayer:

As to your remark about “one big consciouness”: I certainly believe there is only one consciouness. I don’t think it has anything to do with this body typing now at its computer. That is just a part of it, just as this cup is, this table is, these shapes on the screen in front of me (what you said to me):

“If you believe there is no world beyond your experience then why have I just experienced your post? Unless I am just a figment of your imagination, or maybe you are a figment of mine. :)

Having said that, I am starting to believe we all might be part of one big consciousness. So it's possible our experiences are connected in some way.”

Wuliheron:

I think Materialists and all other philosophers are just as subject to vanity, self-obsession, self-love, etc. as solipsists are.

Look at this (from the Solipsism entry on Wikipedia):

“Solipsists may view their own pro-social behaviors as having a more solid foundation than the incoherent pro-sociality of other philosophies. Indeed, they may be more pro-social because they view other individuals as actually being a part of themselves. Furthermore, the joy and suffering arising from empathy is just as real as the joy and suffering arising from physical sensation. They view their own existence as human beings to be just as speculative as the existence of anyone else as a human being.”

Wayfarer:

You’re right, 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.

Thanks for the compliment on my writing but I am chagrined to be on the receiving end of that good Truman Capote quote.

You ought to like the implications of my thinking (I’ll call it that if it doesn’t merit the title of “theory”). I looked at your profile and saw that Zen is something you like. This is from the Solipsism article on Wikipedia:

"Some solipsists believe that some tenets of eastern philosophies are similar to solipsism. Taoism and several interpretations of Buddhism, especially Zen, teach that the distinction between self and universe is arbitrary, merely a habit of perception and an artifact of language. This view identifies the unity of self and universe as the ultimate reality. Zen holds that each individual has 'Buddha Mind': an all-pervading awareness that fills their entire existence, including the 'external' world."

I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. — Dominic Osborn

But what you experience includes things like other people.

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. It includes mysteries like the fact that kicking rocks hurts and not eating has unwanted consequences.

So Occam's razor would say the simplest thesis to explain such extravagantly elaborate illusions is that they are instead a mental model of real non-mental constraints.

Note that I accept when it comes to an inquiry after the true nature of this reality, we are indeed epistemically stuck on the solipsistic side of the fence. But then, 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.

So in invoking Occam's razor, you have already abandoned solipsism proper for some variant of pragmatism at least.

But as you say, your experience is a very complex state. — apokrisis

The point you make is a good one, and one I hadn't thought of. But I don't say experience is a complex state. I say it is not many things, and so not complex. (I don't say it is simple either, that is to say one thing.) These assertions of course require their own defence, which I shan't do now, but if I say that experience is not complex, am I then entitled to invoke Ockham (or Occam)?

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

Why only if we believe already in a physical reality? Why can't it apply if we believe already in any kind of reality in which the complex is grounded in something simpler?

But I don't say experience is a complex state. I say it is not many things, and so not complex. — Dominic Osborn

It seems complex to me that I would have both the illusion of the rock and the further experience of the pain of kicking it. It would be simpler to have just the one and still simpler to have neither.

So you may claim that there is just "one state" - experiencing. But it has a structure that is robustly divided between "self" and "world".

There is the experience that seems constrained by "reality" in a reliable fashion, and yet then also another set of experiences which are not (like dreams, imaginings, hallucinations). So you are positing a state of experiencing which is intrinsically complex. And that sets up the question of what is the simplest way to account for that particular experiential structure. The simplest answer must be that there is a world that accounts for those constraints on experience.

I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. — Dominic Osborn

Right here seems to be where you start to go wrong. Firstly "know" is just defined in such a way that it's impossible no doubt. Quite useful I bet, that notion of "know", at least to the argument. Secondly, "all you ever encounter is your experience" is hardly apodictic. Descartes had it backwards, it's not the mind that can't be doubted, it's embodiment that can't be doubted.

I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. — Dominic Osborn

Even if that weren't patently and trivially false (by what experience do you know that you can't know if there is anything other than your experience and who is this I person that's doing all this experiencing and therefore cannot be itself an experience?) it implies that all experiences must in fact be total illusions or fantasies since all experiences are by definition of something other than the experience itself. But if that is so then they are not experiences at all!

Solipsism is an extreme philosophical position. It is as far removed from everyone’s everyday working picture of existence as a philosophical position can be. Any understanding that we have of how things are, whether it is expressed in the sciences, in literature, in religion––in language itself––is in direct contradiction with solipsism. There are thus those who seem to think (quite understandably) that the solipsist position is simply completely insane. Terrapin Station and Barry Etheridge, in their first posts, seem to be two of these. Most non-philosophers, of course, come into this category too.

I don’t know whether Terrapin Station and Barrye Etheridge really don’t (as it were) instinctively feel the force of solipsism, or whether they are just testing me, but I’ll assume the former. For want of something better, I’ll try an argument from authority. Think of those big names of the past, who, although not lost into the black hole of solipsism, nevertheless felt themselves sucked towards it, who at least expressed some distrust in the certainty of the existence of the external world, who expressed some version of the thought: What seems to be independent of me, a given, a fact turns out to have a great deal of me in it. Think of Descartes’ brain in a vat, Berkeley, Hume (all I know are my sensations), Kant (everything I experience is stamped with my mode of understanding), Schopenhauer (“‘The world is my representation’: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him.” Early Wittgenstein (“What the solipsist means is quite correct, only he cannot say it.”). Feeling dubious about the existence of a world independent of the subject, feeling that you are trapped within your own mode of understanding is not the same as solipsism. But if you can understand something of what these philosophers were saying, it is perhaps not such a great leap to understand what the solipsist is saying.

Then there are those (sometimes the same people) who pick up on the contradiction inherent in the solipsist communicating his position. In order that there be communication, there must be something that speaks, something that is spoken and something that is heard. Mcdoodle, Metaphysician Undercover and bassplayer come into this category. They ask questions like, “How did I just get this post of yours then?” “Who are you talking to?”

Others pick up on the impossibility of solipsistic statements conveying information. They notice that all statements of the solipsistic position seem to be ultimately revealed either as tautologies or contradictions. Wosret picks up on a tautology. Barry Etheridge picks up on two contradictions.

I really don’t know how to answer these objections. I’ll try the following. (If Wayfarer and others thought my first post just stated provocative ideas as if they amounted to arguments, they’re not going to like it.) A world beyond, other than and independent of my experience is inconceivable, practically inconceivable, just as a round square is inconceivable. The notions of Ignorance and Knowledge are just other terms for a dualistic existence of––my experience––and what is not my experience. The idea that there are two kinds of inconceivability, practical inconceivability (like experiencing something outside my experience) and inconceivable because internally contradictory (like a round square). The subject of Epistemology assumes Dualism.

There are also those who think whilst it might be possible to not believe in things, it would be harder to not believe in people or experiences other than your own. Terrapin Station says, “But what you experience includes things like other people.” Metaphysician Undercover says “…do you not think that there are others beside you, such as me, who have experience as well as you? Doesn't your experience of communicating with others convince you that there are others? And doesn't this experience of communicating convince you that others have experience, similar to you having experience, but not the same as your experience?” I think I understand where you are coming from here. You are saying “Whilst I do not agree with you that there is nothing other than your experience, I concede that it might be difficult for you to believe in something utterly distinct from experience, such as a physical body, but it is surely less difficult for you to believe in another experience (another mind): something that is the same kind of stuff as your experience.” Of course I, as a ordinary person (not a philosopher) can’t help believing that there are other minds. The solipsist position however is rigorously sceptical: there is nothing other than my experience, of any kind, not even something that is like my experience.

But now to Apokrisis. Apokrisis (I think) feels the force of solipsism, as I do. He (or she?) says: “Note that I accept when it comes to an inquiry after the true nature of this reality, we are indeed epistemically stuck on the solipsistic side of the fence.”

Since he (or she?) is giving me the time of day, I shall expand a little on this stuff I am talking about: Experience.

“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.

You take it as a given that Experience is complex. And why shouldn’t you? It certainly seems that way. And yet I don’t believe that it is complex.

To begin with, an epistemological argument. How do I know that there is any experience other than the experience I am having? What’s the way out of this extreme version of solipsism?

A second argument is the following. The apparent complexity of experience is accounted for by an external world which is complex, which is many things. That is to say that it is my mistaken belief in an external world (of many things) and my mistaken belief that my experience is of that external world, that makes me think that my experience is many things too. 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. I interpret my experience as many things on the back of my belief that there is a world of many things.

A related argument. I think (mistakenly) my experience is many things because I mistake an external world for my experience. My experience is not something that I can look at, that I can stand back from and assess, something bits of which I stand back from and compare with one another. My experience is not something I can leaf through, like the pages of a book, or something I can hold up to the light, like a film, and look up and down, at the various frames. As soon as I have that sort of relationship to something, that something is not experience, it is the external world. To put it metaphorically: the self that might assess the nature of an experience, as it is having the experience, is swallowed up in that experience, and is unable to characterise it. It’s only a moment later that the self can make some judgement of what that experience was like, but then that which is being judged is now in the past, and is no longer Experience: the mantle of what is actually experience has passed on to that act of judging. That which I might think to be my experience is actually something my experience is of.

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?

Another, which I shan’t flesh out. (You might find the presentation of this argument too perfunctory to bother with.) 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.

You also say this: “There is the experience that seems constrained by "reality" in a reliable fashion, and yet then also another set of experiences which are not (like dreams, imaginings, hallucinations). So you are positing a state of experiencing which is intrinsically complex.”

Of course Experience seems divided into inner stuff and outer stuff, between dreams, hallucinations, thoughts, etc., and perceptions and physical sensations, etc.. But really there is no division between the two. 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. When I am awake it is just as much a dream as when I am asleep. This belief in an inner and outer world is completely at odds with the monistically neutral ontology expressed in the OP.

“It would be simpler to have just the one and still simpler to have neither.”

I don’t think “neither” is more simple than one. More about my notion of Experience (and Reality): I think 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.

A last thing about Experience: As I say, people think a major problem for solipsism (and it is certainly a defining feature of it) is its incommunicability. I don’t think that is an argument against it. Indeed, it persuades me of its truthfulness. The truth, the ultimate nature of Reality, as has been said, from Taoism to Wittgenstein––is indescribable, unknowable (in the ordinary sense, and so not even a candidate for communication), ineffable, etc..

So why are you posting this if there's nobody out here to read and reply to it? And why would you even address the issue of communicability? Who would there be to communicate with?

Just to be Clear:

People’s responses have prompted me to try to defend solipsism. I am not however a solipsist. A solipsist is someone who believes only in himself (or herself) (sol: only + ipse: self). My philosophical position, as outlined in the OP, was that there was nothing other than experience, neither an external world nor a self, nor, indeed, in any selves. We usually picture experience (in a prephilosophical way) as something between a world and a self: there is me on the near side of it, practically a point, and a world on the far side of. My contention is that there is nothing that is experienced and nothing that experiences: there is only experience. (Of course the word “experience” suggests both a self and a world, but that is a trivial objection: it could be obviated by another choice of word.)

Nor do I contend that there is only my experience for the reason that I cannot experience anything other than my experience. I contend only (following others) that solipsism is not falsifiable: I cannot know that there is something other than my experience.

Barry Etheridge: I don’t know whether I have made this sufficiently clear. There is me, the ordinary person, who cannot help believing in a world outside himself, other minds, his own mind, etc.. He is the one who writes these posts and who seeks the approbation of others. Quite another thing is my philosophical stance. I wish I could believe, with my heart, and with everything I did, in the truth of the philosophical stance that I here lay out, but try as I might, I can’t. Don’t physicalists have the same problem? Don’t they, in spite of their philosophical beliefs, find themselves talking and acting as if there were such things as mental things?

I think solipsism is something that you have to come upon yourself. If you were a solipsist, you would look at these lines in front of you and think, “These lines have no authorship; they just appeared in front of me, causelessly.” (The “in front of me” bit of that is just a figure of speech.)

I cannot know that there is something other than 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

Or one has to remain silent, maybe. — Πετροκότσυφας

Right, a solipsist doesn't publish.

On purely semantic grounds, you can know that there is something other than your experience.
Meanings just ain't in the head
— Putnam — jkop

Not quite sure of the connection between your remark and your quote. To take them separately:

Do you mean that because I use the word “experience” and because the word “experience” presupposes that there is something that it is of, I acquiesce in the proposition that there is an external world? As I say, the incommunicability of solipsism is a central and defining feature of it.

Putnam’s remark is (obviously) to do with the philosophical subject of meaning. This thread really isn’t (though there is no reason why it should not change its subject matter.) 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.

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

This remark is very much to the point.

You might think that I’m trying to have it both ways: I am saying both that you can’t say anything about experience and that you can.

Yes I do believe experience, or Reality, or the Truth––is unfathomable and unspeakable and indescribable. And that indeed there is a sense in which there is nothing you can say about it. But the position is not entirely hopeless: you can say what it is not. So I say, for example, that Experience is not divided, that it is not many things. Note that this does not say that Experience is one thing. (I also say that Experience is not one thing; it is not unified.)

All anyone who understands Reality as I understand it can do (in philosophy) to point people (including myself) towards the truth of things is to identify the self-contradictory natures of other conceptions of Reality.

You can also make tautological remarks about Experience. You can say things like, Experience is infinite. Experience is Reality. These remarks, though ultimately revealed as tautological, somehow have some explanatory value.

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

I don’t think there are two things, an internal world, experience, and an external world. Nor do I think there are two things, an internal world and a self, something that “reflects” and “judges”. As soon as you posit a self, as it were further inside experience, you simultaneously (as it were to make room for it) push experience further out, making it external to the self, making it the world. (Forgive me if this paragraph is too metaphorical or too cryptic: I can try to elucidate it a bit if you want.)

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.)

Or one has to remain silent, maybe. — Πετροκότσυφας

A solipsist’s conception of Reality is indeed incommunicable, but so is a (true) non-solipsist conception of Reality. It is not just the solipsist that has this problem, but everyone.

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

Dualism? Putnam's argument for semantic externalism has little to do with dualism. Its conclusion is that the meanings of words (or thoughts) are causally constrained by speakers' encounters and interaction with the things that they speak or think of, and a division of their meanings by speech. An alleged solipsist has no sufficient reason to think of anything, for nothing comes from nothing.

“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

So two points on that.

First, I accept the full force of solipsism on a non-solipsistic basis. So it is because I believe - after Peirce - that our mentality is "pure symbolism", that this then is a justification of the Kantian impossibility of knowing the "material" thing-in-itself.

I "know" - as a reasonable belief derived from scientific investigation - that even when I see colours, or shapes, or motions, such perceptions are indirect constructions. It is modelling. And that leaves me "trapped" on the side that is the play of symbols. There is no getting outside my own mental creations. It is a categorical difference.

And yet of course, the very idea of a modelling relation only makes sense if there is indeed a world, a thing-in-itself, that causally constrains the impressions I might have. So to believe in this epistemic "full force" solipsism - the one due to being trapped in my own play of symbols - requires also the ontic commitment that there is something the other side, a material world. It would be the biggest surprise possible, the most impossible conceivable thing, for it not to be true that my impression of there being a world is not sustained by there being a world.

But then beyond that, this semiotic argument also pretty much mandates that the world I think I see is such a selective and self-interested impression that I'm not really seeing that world at all. This is especially obvious when it comes to talking about colours or odours. But rigour would demand it applies to primary qualities as well as secondary qualities.

Anyway, you can pursue that semiotic argument still further (winding up in pansemiotic metaphysics). But the key point is the strength of my epistemic solipsism is due to a positive belief in the world - a belief that the world exists, therefore I must be symbolically modelling, and therefore I am trapped due to the necessary indirectness of this modelling relation. If I stopped believing in the world in this fashion, my reasons for accepting the force of solipsism (which is usually due to the weakly defined notion of "mind" rather than the strongly defined notion of "symbol") would collapse. I would lack an evidential basis for making that very claim.

Second, or continuing on from that really, you are in the same boat as you can't talk about "experience" as "just whatever everything is" in some uncontextual fashion and claim that to be meaningful speech. For any statement to be intelligible, it has to be so by virtue of a claimed contrast.

To speak of "experience", it must have a definition in terms of what is its "other". And you are claiming to be talking about "a state" which has no other. In logic, the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply and so technically your claim is simply vague. It may sound as though you are making a definite reference to something, but you really aren't.

Now you try to sidestep this difficulty by starting with a crisp dichotomy - the usual one of self and world. Then by virtue of their metaphysical intelligibility - it makes dialectical sense that such a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive pair such as self and world could exist - you can claim dissolve each into the other to arrive at a third thing. Let's call it dasein. Let's call it "experience". Let's call it whatever. You only have to point to the fact that starting with the fact of a strong separation, that gives you the grounds to reverse the separation and arrive back as at some logically unseparated state.

That's fine. It's good logic. But we need to call it what it really is - and that's vagueness (or Firstness for Peirce). And it is as far away from actual experiencing of any phenomenological kind as it is from the noumenal world.

Being that, it is unlike anything an actual traditional solipsist - as an end game idealist - is conceiving of. We are not reducing everything to some kind of mental stuff, some play of ideas. We are reducing everything to vagueness. We have gone way beyond the kind of definite being that an idealist is imagining as the basis of all existence.

So strong epistemic solipsism is warranted in the sense that we "know" that ourselves and our impressions can only be a play of symbols. We are trapped on one side of the modelling relation we have with the world (but we can only "know" that by believing the world to be there on the other side).

And then strong ontic solipsism is not warranted. If you try to reduce our state of mental representation, our embodied state of being, to its greatest state of simplicity, you find that the only way that this can be done rationally is by beginning with the definitely separated and - from there - argue towards their foundational unity. And that unity can only be a state of vagueness or utter indeterminacy.

And indeed, we can do that, even using weaker ontic notions such as self vs world rather than my preferred symbol vs matter.

But we then arrive at a "state" that resembles no state of mind. We arrive at a "vagueness" that could hardly satisfy any traditional notion of idealism and thus of solipsistic being.

So idealism/solipsism fails as we track back towards the very origins of ontic possibility. But that then becomes why I say there is this other ontic expedition of pan-semiosis. Instead of being a bug, the fundamentality of vagueness is now the metaphysical feature.

The apparent complexity of experience is accounted for by an external world which is complex, which is many things. — Dominic Osborn

Remember that my original argument to you was that you were having to assume at least two simples - the self and world. So my argument did not rely on the world being complex (even if it surely is).

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

But what warrants you treating the pain as real, the rock as illusion? This shows you have already assumed that existence has the character of being "mental". And as I argue, you can only claim that intelligibly by virtue of already believing that "mental" stands in meaningful contrast to something "other", such as physical reality. Thus we are starting at an irreducible complexity that contradicts anything further you might claim about there be a monistic simplicity when it comes to this thing called "experience".

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

But we know that if you run the frames of a strip of film through a projector then - at the right rate - you experience an unbroken flow of imagery. Or if we introspect on dreams with accuracy, we discover each is in fact a "still", just a still with a psychological sense of swirling, camera-tracking, motion in which nothing actually changes in the momentary snapshot "view".

So there is abundant evidence - both empirical and even phenomenological - that we can be fooled by the general assumption experience has no composite structure, no "bitty" complexity.

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

That makes no sense to me. If I am deaf and blind, how would my remaining kinesthetic knowledge imply anything about those other sensory modalities?

And if we imagine removing every modality, what are we going to be left with. No state of sensation surely.

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

Again, you can't argue positively for ontic solipsism on this basis because you are trying to employ terms like "dreaming" and "awake" in ways that presume the knowable difference you are seeking to deny.

Epistemic solipsism on this score is fair enough because now you are disposing of the "knowing" with all its absolutism. You are instead beginning with the structure of your beliefs and agreeing that's as good as it gets.

But then those beliefs are the ontic commitments. And so to talk about dreams and awakeness is intelligible speech - something we could actually argue about meaningfully, with ourselves even - because we accept they are terms representing different categories of experience. That level of complexity is already being taken for granted. Thus destroying the undividable simplicity you require to make ontic solipsism fly.

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

Or as I've argued, not nothingness but vagueness, firstness, indeterminacy, potential - and yes, apeiron.

So the contrast becomes not that of something vs nothing, light vs blackness, but indeed more like an everythingness that is thus equally a nothingness in that all possible distinctions are overwhelmed by their own lack of proper contrast.

So it seems you do want to arrive at the same fundamental state as I do. But as I have said, I don't see this as a species of idealism or solipsism. It is a metaphysics that goes beyond all that. It undermines both realist and idealist ontologies in radical fashion.

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 think we are on the same page. But the way out of this particular bind is the logic of the dichotomy.

Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce all wound up with a triadic, developmental, ontology as the way to resolve the dilemma. If you start with pure unformed potential - the unspeakable ur-stuff that is an ontic vagueness - then that can then get organised, structured, via a process of differentiation and integration. You have the division. And that division allows the mixing. And the division is never a real separation as such as it is just the same thing moving apart from itself with ever increasing definiteness.

So this was Anaximander's gift at the dawn of metaphysics. You have the apeiron. And it divides in logical fashion. Part of it, by concentrating the possibility of warmness, leaves another part that is subsequently a concentration of the cooler. And if such a separation is possible, what is to stop it proceeding to its limits. Coupled to a further consequent separation - the dry and the damp - you then get all four basic elemental categories, fire, air, water and earth. Or in modern physical parlance, plasma, gas, liquid and solid.

Thus systems thinking supports an ontology that is triadically developmental. You start with an unformed potential (that is no kind of substantial state - mental or material). And then all you need is the rational possibility of some "this" which then, in its very becoming, must produce its matching "that". You just need a symmetry that can be broken. From there, complexity can follow as the differentiation that then gets integrated, the brokenness that can mix and interact.

'Experience' is a transitive verb.

How could, for example, 'having a headache' be transitive? Some experiences are not about anything.

Interesting question. I suupose first-person experience is a different matter, but generally speaking 'experience' implies a subject of experience. I suppose when I experience pain there is still the awareness of pain as an object of experience; I could be free of pain, but pain couldn't exist without a subject who experiences it.

its about your head surely?

I have just gone back and read the OP again, about which I made some dismissive comments some days back, but anyway I shall reply now.

I was asked in response to my comments:

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

The passage that I was referring to as 'not being an argument but an assertion' was this one:

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

The reason I say it's not an argument, but an assertion, is because it doesn't strike me at all as being self-evident or even arguable, that there are not many things that exist, that are of much greater age than oneself. Anything which you know existed before you were born - your parents would constitute an excellent example - certainly constitutes 'evidence'. If you say 'that's not evidence', then first you have to make the case for why it doesn't, or what would constitute 'evidence', or what, in fact, you are trying to say.

Now, granted, when you come to know of things external to yourself, then in some sense you 'assimilate them into consciousness' - that is what knowledge means, in some sense - but I think that the bald assertion that 'the universe exists within my experience of it', amounts to an assertion that when the writer of that sentence dies, then the world will no longer exist, that the Universe is wholly dependent upon an individual's experience of it.

So speaking of that person, if they were to die, you can say 'well, it no longer exists for him', but that is not really saying anything of significance.

If you look at the Dialogues of Berkeley, for example, he goes to great pains to argue his case, as do other idealist philosophers.

If there is something other than experience then there are two things, my experience and that which is not my experience. — Dominic Osborn

That doesn't seem problematical to me - I know there is a vast universe of stuff I have never experienced. And I learn things every day.

As for there being 'only experience', as i have said, 'experience' is a transitive verb, i.e. 'I experience it'. It presupposes a subject of experience in a domain of objects. That is, if you like, the plight of existence! I think the way that non-dualist philosophies transcend that is indeed by de-constructing that sense of self-and-other, or self-and-world as separate realities; hence their emphasis on meditative absorption, states in which that instinctive sense of separateness is overcome.

Again, well written, but I think there is something pretty fundamental that you're not getting yet. But kudos for being up for debating it.

Thrilled to be examined in this way, but it's going to take me a week or so to respond.

I suppose when I experience pain there is still the awareness of pain as an object of experience; ... — Wayfarer

I don't think one's awareness could appear as an object in any experience.

Being aware of having pain is not identical to having pain although in both cases there is awareness of pain. The former is a belif about the state you're in (and as such possibly true or false) while the latter is the state you're in: the fact.

I had unintentionally ommited a qualifier in my above post, which I have subsequently added in bold, which changes the meaning of the paragraph in which it appears.

'There is an awareness of pain' means that the pain is the 'object of awareness'.
And how could you believe you had a pain, when you didn't?