|
Enneagram Type 5 Board Archive allow 10-15 seconds to read mine =o)Posted by Cory on September 14, 2000 at 01:43:42: In Reply to: Solipsism (spinoff of "personhood") posted by isaacthe54 on September 13, 2000 at 22:30:06: I'm so tired, brain running at 50% so what the hell... : : 1.) Excuse my ignorance, sorry. I don't read much philosophy, I just think it. What is "solipsism"? From what you've been saying, it seems to be the consideration of reality as without real stuff in it. You'd never know it from my posts no far, but I DON'T think this, although I used to. I consider our world solely perceptions, unadulterated perceptions. They are truly real; the basic tenet of this part of my thinking is that information (perceptions) verify their own existence. : that's actually pretty close to what solipsism starts from. let's talk about what we know. i am certain, 100% positive, that there is the awareness of sense data. i'm also 100% positive that there is the awareness of thinking (processing teh sense data and memory in order to affect and predict the future and organize teh massive amount of data.) i lump these two awarenesses into the term "experience". i can say, with 100% certainty, that experience is happening. (and, since i'm saying that, i can say that teh awareness of experience is happening, and since im' saying THAT, i can say that the awareness of the awareness of experience is happening, and son on.) : (i should take a moment to clarify "awareness". i mean to say the recognition by the "thinking thing" of a certain bit of information.) : now, as descartes put it, cogito ergo sum. that is, since there is thinking, we can conclude that there is a thinknig thing. that thing labels itself "i." "i" think, therefor, "i" exist. it's all very semantic and straightforward, really. : you see, you can really admit more than just that there is information being recieved. you are also THINKING ABOUT the information. (or "acting in response to it", if thought is another sort of action or vice versa.) : so, experience exists, and it is being processed by a thinking thing. in shorter words, i'm experiencing. : descartes wrote this when he woke up one day and said, "wow, there's a tremendous amount of bullshit flying about. i wonder how many things i can actually believe? well, let's throw it all out and start over." i don't pretend to be a descartes scholar, but it's a valuable philosophy of mind discussion. : so, there are a number of possible theories to explain the phenomenon of experience. one of them is solipsism. (literally, "myself alone"-ism) basically it's the minimalist approach. there is a thinking thing, and a source of information. (quite possibly they are the same entity split into 2 or more parts.) just for the sake of convention, i'm gonna label the source of information "god." (don't get confused, it's not a magical super-person ghost in the sky, just a useful object in the theory.) basically, god is the rest of the universe which is not the thinking thing. god supplies "me" with information. "i" supply "god" with my choices (tho it's likely god already saw them coming.) god then supplies the thinknig thing with more information. and so on. when the thinking thing isn't experiencing something, god doesn't send the information TO the thinking thing, so, in a sense, it doesn't exist at all. all that exists here is information, the dream and the dreamer without physical stuff. : now, just cause there's no hard meat (only the information that makes the thinking thing THINK there is) doesn't mean that the dream is pleny orderly and that a rational being cant' navigate quite well within it. god's just nice like that, so it made a dream that's a big predictable puzzle. : some people feel that solipsism is too lonely, so invent other ideas. thatis, what if there's plenty of thinking things, and one god supplying information to all of them. unfortunately, this multiplies the amount of entities in the explanation greatly. (plus, it brings up the problem with dogs and antelopes, do THEY experience? so is there a thinking thing corresponding to all of them, in some sense? it gets sticky.) : now, another theory is that there IS no god, and the "thinking thing" is just a really cool computing automaton recieving information from a noumenal world. other persons are just other self-centered computing automatons. in this paradigm, there are exactly the same number of objects as in solipsism (it's a lengthy discussion i would not like to go into, cause it's also boring. several writers have written about this topic.) so, therefor, pure solipsism and pure realism are the two most likely theories. (neither is NECESSARILY true, of course. it's just that they are more LIKELY true than any other possible explanation.) Saying something is LIKELY is a blind assumption based on what feels most right to you personally. We cannot judge complete automated realism more likely than half-automated, half-conscious realism because we have only experienced ONE universe! This makes as much sense as rolling one die and having the number come up 5 and saying "There is a more likely chance that 5 will come up more than any other number". You can only say something is LIKELY based on STATISTICS. What, do 9 out of 10 universes prefer cold automated realism or something? ;) Well, aside from the sarcasm, I hope you see my point. I myself am a skeptic and hold that everything is essentially equal and everything is part of an essential "isness" or Being. For me, everything goes. Nothing is more likely than the next. The world is unable to be understood and we go into the future not knowing why we do what we do, we just know we are being carried along by a river... I'm an existentialist by the way. =o) -Cory
|
|