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. — Dominic Osborn
However reasonable the explanations sound, however habituated we are to accepting them, how do we in fact justify our faith in an elaborate structure very different in nature from the play of shapes and sounds that make up our experience? — Dominic Osborn
I am asserting that the “play of symbols” is Reality itself. That it is not about anything, that it is not in fact a play of symbols at all, that it is an illusion that it is about anything, and an illusion that there is something that it is about.
This assertion is a rejection of the noumenon. It is a rejection of the material world. It is a rejection of anything outside my mind. — Dominic Osborn
1. “There’s no getting outside my own mental creations”. — Dominic Osborn
In the end, that doesn't sound like sound reasoning does it? The proper use of scepticism surely is just to discover unexplored alternatives - gaps in our current explanatory beliefs - and not to simply disbelieve our beliefs. — apokrisis
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. — Wayfarer
So why is everyone so deluded? Why do people think that there is a world beyond their experience?
Likely it’s so everyone can use the experiences of others to predict personal consequences, without getting nose to nose with a rattlesnake, a rabid racoon or personally view the results of philosophers leaping off mountaintops to "prove" there is no world beyond their own experiences. — JayAre
If you have nothing but your own experiences to predict the consequences of your encounters with reality than how did you survive your encounters with such things as traffic, poisonous plants, snakes, rabid animals, disease, cold weather, deep water, etc., to write this question. You must be an amazingly lucky person. — JayAre
I have been trying in vain to explain this but people don't realize that they are being inconsistent and contradictory. — m-theory
You are reverting to a demand for absolute knowledge — apokrisis
Even "stuck inside experience", we can divide our experience into the ideas we hold and the impressions that result. — apokrisis
You see the self-defeating paradox in what you argue? The noumenon is required to get you to the point that it is sufficiently established that you can then "meaningfully" reject it. — apokrisis
So I think the issue with your post is that you are attempting to articulate that transpersonal perspective, as a philosophical argument, but it's not really conveying the point, possibly because you have not yet realised it yourself, in that you're not really seeing it from such a perspective. — Wayfarer
Incidentally I do––yes––“demand absolute knowledge” though to put in this way makes me sound hysterically unreasonable (!) — Dominic Osborn
The debate between pragmatism and skepticism seems to presuppose:
1. The sceptical position is a kind of hellish prison which must be found a way out of.
2. We know that the sceptical position is false, in advance of the discussion of it; it is just that we can’t quite find the conclusive argument with which to dispatch it. — Dominic Osborn
This thinking presupposes something that you know (your experience) and something that you don’t (what is outside it). — Dominic Osborn
Pragmatism belongs to that perennial strain in philosophy: the back to common sense strain. — Dominic Osborn
There is, Maritain writes, an intuition that is awakened in persons when they are engaged in thought — that is, that it seems impossible that they, as thinking beings, should at some time have not been. As a thinking being, one seems to be free from the vicissitudes of time and space; there is no coming to be or ceasing to be — I cannot think what it is "not to be". Nevertheless, we all know very well that we were born — we came into existence. We are confronted, then, with a contradiction — not a logical contradiction, but a lived contradiction. The only solution to this is that one has always existed, but not through oneself, but within "a Being of transcendent personality" and from whom "the self which is thinking now proceeded into temporal existence" (Approches de Dieu, in Oeuvres complètes, p. 64). This being "must contain all things in itself in an eminent mode and be itself — in an absolutely transcendent way — being, thought and personality. This implies that the first existence is the infinite plenitude of being, separate by essence from all diversity of existents." (p. 66).
That is, it is now logically entailed that there is something which experiencing is not. And how can we be sure that absolutely is the case - except pragmatically, as a belief supported by adequate doubting and testing? — apokrisis
Well really it supposes three things. It is not dualistic but triadic. So there is "you", your "experiences" and "the world". — apokrisis
[of the debate between pragmatism and skepticism].I don't accept that characterisation. — apokrisis
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