Living in a human body, is everyone else oblivious?

i don't think external reality can be proven, but i'm also unsure what difference it makes whether or not there's an external, objective reality.

Of course most of us grasped it long ago....and there is no absolute evidence.


Descartes' answer was "God would not so deceive us".


The more modern answer is "so what"?


What difference is this "knowledge" going to make to you?

To me, it would mean a lot. I am a very curious person, always wanting to know how things work. One thing, though, that I cannot grasp is life. I would LOVE to be able to know how it works, and what reality in itself that I live in, let around everything around me.

Good luck in your search!

Thanks, I am going to need it

I think that you have to believe that other people are really there unless you really do have a valid, substantial proof to say otherwise, and even that depends to some degree, on the information that you've been experiencing.

Even if you do discover that everything around you is some computer program, this is the reality you are stuck in, and the concepts are still there, so you have to respond to others as if they are real or else risk the deprivation of your virtues.

There's also the doubt that will still exist. If you found that others may likely be "virtual images," you would have to doubt the validity of that knowledge, etc.

That's my take on it...

Drowned By Darkness

Investigate the concept of "evidence", and note that your "communications" on this thread and elseswhere are part of the answer to that. Communication is a de facto rejection of solipsism.

Re: Living in a human body, is everyone else oblivious?


This also drove me crazy when I was younger. But I came up with a basic argument that what is "out there" is, in fact, real.

1. I am. In other words I believe that I am alive and aware of myself.

2. I exist over time. In other words, I am sustained for as long as I am.

3. I cannot sustain myself over time. To survive, I draw on resources outside of my own self awareness and existence.

4. The things I need to survive exist outside of my horizon and they do not need me to be real. I need them.

5. If this is true of me, then it is true for any "me" or individual that is sustained over time. And if "their" time is congruent to my time, then they are also real, they do not need me to exist, and I observe them as people that I am aware of in my reality.

Does this follow the nature of your quandry DBD?

Re: Living in a human body, is everyone else oblivious?


It's not absolute evidence, but the bruise I gave myself when I smashed my thumb with a hammer was compelling enough to make me believe that things exist outside my body.

Incidentally, this has to be the single most frequently asked question on A2K. Why is that?

it may not be that simple. dreams are generally considered figments of the mind, yet with the exception of so-called lucid dreams, the dreamer is unaware that the experience is purely virtual. in principle, there's no reason why waking life couldn't be some sort of dream. as the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu wondered after dreaming he was a butterfly, was he a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu?

yitwail,

The "logical argment" against that is that we have a concept of two distinct states, "dreaming" and "consciousness". Whereas I may not be able to "prove" which state I am in "now", I cannot argue for "only dreaming" except by evoking an infinite regress of dreams within dreams.

precisely, fresco, it *could* be an infinite regress, unless you can disprove it. no more impossible than the so-called Omphalos hypothesis, which implies that God recently created heaven & earth while giving them the impression great antiquity.

that reminds me, fresco, do you agree with Shapeless that this is the most common question on A2K? i'm thinking there must be something in spirituality & religion that's at least as common, but i'm drawing blanks. i do think that how do you say such & such in Latin is the most common category of question.

yitwail,

I think that this question is a variation on the theme "what is the nature of reality" and this is of course a central issue not only here but in philosophy in general. Popular offshoots from that central question have the form "does X exist ?" where X could be "God", "Truth", "Life after death", "An objective world" etc.

ah, Truth! i may have participated in a discussion or two on that topic here. that seems deeper to me than a question on the nature of reality, because if there's no objective truth, then questions about the "true nature" of anything are meaningless.

yitwail,

If you go with Wittgensteins dictum "meaning is usage" then the meaning of "truth" is context specific. I tend to argue that all context is "social" andthat "truth" is about "agreement".

sounds like you & LW are talking about the word "truth". i'm interested in the concept of "Truth" (with a capital T). have we derailed/hijacked the thread yet?

yitwail.

"Truth" or "absolute truth" implies a transcendent postion befond the boundaries of this thread in which neither solipsism nor naive realism is "the answer". Mystics claim to have glimpsed such "Truth" and say that it is ineffable. I do not think such a consideration constitutes a "hijack" but there again I might be wearing my "mystic's hat" !

Post-matrix syndrome?