ManM

Don't you materialists know that matter doesn't exist?

hezekiah jones

*kicks stone*

ManM

Both the feel of the rock on your foot and your vision of the rock moving are perceptions of your mind. How do you know that those perceptions are related to a real substance (matter)? According to Berkeley, there is no good reason to do so. The simple answer is that matter doesn't exist.

Bill

Pure solipsism!

{Begins kicking ManM instead of the stone.}

I've always said that the only way to deal with a solipsist is to beat the idea of an external reality into them. While they have no good reason to believe that the beating isn't an illusion, the only way to make the beating stop is to agree that I am an externally real objective truth....

== Bill

ManM

Whoa there! I'm not doubting that you can give me the perception of pain. You have the idea of beating me to a pulp. So God feeds you all the perceptions of the beating. Likewise, God feeds me the perceptions of being beat up. There is no philosphical problem here. Remember, I have only denied the existence of matter. I haven't said anything about other minds.

WJ

M!

A bit solipsism;

As a result of the brain's assessment of electrical stimulations coming from objects to it, we feel different senses pertaining to those objects such as hardness or softness, or heat or cold. We derive all details that help us recognise an object from these stimulations. Concerning this important fact, the thoughts of two famous philosophers, B. Russell and L. Wittgeinstein are as follows;

For instance, whether a lemon truly exists or not and how it came to exist cannot be questioned and investigated. A lemon consists merely of a taste sensed by the tongue, an odor sensed by the nose, a colour and shape sensed by the eye; and only these features of it can be subject to examination and assessment. Science can never know the physical world.201

It is impossible for us to reach the physical world. All objects around us are a collection of perceptions such as seeing, hearing, and touching. By processing the data in the centre of vision and in other sensory centres, our brain, throughout our lives, confronts not the "original" of the matter existing outside us but rather the copy formed inside our brain. It is at this point that we are misled by assuming that these copies are instances of real matter outside us.

-----------end quote

Further, I think [the] materialist/realist/atheist(?) can embrace the notion that existence can be reduced to an electrical essence of some sort [and] should sound appealing to him. Unfortunatly, it also opens the door for the existence of omnipotence (electrical forces).

Walrus
------
Truth is Subjectivity (who said I was a skeptic

Synaesthesia

ManM,

The solipsist is not in an epistemically strong position, they simply assume that everything is the OPPOSITE of what it appears to be, whereas the more powerful and useful theories posit the existence of an external world.

The question is not whether we can access to world aside from perceptual "mediation", clearly not, but how we can develop a coherent notion of what our sense-data means.

Bill Snedden

Good old Berkeley...

I would agree with Bertie Russell here. Anyone who doubts the existence of the external world should simply try driving a car into a brick wall at about 60 mph. The external world will suddenly feel very real indeed.

It also seems to me that the acceptance of our sensory perceptions as deriving from interactions with materially existent objects is simply more parsimonious than the notion that our minds are conjuring up this vast illusion. Of course, Berkeley's speculation was that somehow the contents of god's mind were more "real" than ours, but that's even less parsimonious still.

Finally, while solipsism cannot be definitively refuted, it is certainly futile and self-contradictory to believe it to be true or to argue in favor of it.

Regards,

Bill Snedden

WJ

Indeed. There is much contradiction in life when it comes to self-reference-liars paradox. Until human's can actually create a complete human consciousness, solopsism will always find its appeal during [an] epistemological justification for the non-existence of an absolute universal truth.

Pretty simple really. Just ask the physicist, engineer, astrobiologist, and any other creator/investigator of natural science. We canot perfectly know the absolute truth to our part-mental, part-physical existence.

Walrus

tronvillain

ManM
You don't know that those perceptions are related to a real substance, but it is a perfectly reasonable hypothesis. Even if it is not correct, we will have to act as if it is.

[ March 26, 2002: Message edited by: tronvillain ]</p>