Griff wrote:
marshall wrote:
I'm not saying I'm a solipsist. Only that solipsism can't be empirically disproved.
No more than you can disprove the validity of your observations. In fact, you can as easily disbelieve in your own subjective experience, believing only that you are a puppet of your environment. It's called fatalism. You too can believe that you are a robot, driven in your every action by environmental stimuli, feeling nothing and thinking nothing that wasn't put there by your surroundings. Conservative thinkers LOVE this kind of thinking, by the way. It's quite flawed, to be sure, but it has formed the basis for conservative thought in the US for several years. It draws sociopaths and narcissists like moths to a flame.
I think you’ve misunderstood some of the things I said. I can easily doubt the notion that my mind is some “ghost in the machine”, able to make choices independent from the control of my environment.
To me this isn’t the same as doubting the self. I could very well be a robot in the sense that I am programmed only to respond to environmental stimuli... yet I could still have the
experience of having thoughts, sensations, emotions, making choices, etc. The experience itself would still be real to me regardless of what brought it about.
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How sure are you of your subjective thoughts, though? Are they as firmly rooted in being as you have always thought them to be? Or are your subjective thoughts no more indicative of a "self" than the moaning of wind about its obstacles constitutes a horde of brain-eating zombies? How deeply have you really explored your sense of self? Does the process of investigation come to a close merely because you have chosen to favor a belief?
To me the self is the thing that feels. I wouldn’t be able to tell myself that I’m not actually feeling pain when I’m in agony. Even an illusory pain is real in the sense that I experience it.
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I think the true dogmatism is the notion of a universal objective reality outside of epistemological context.
Ah, but you have commited dogmatism, yourself, in saying with such certainty what you believe the "true dogmatism" is. Tut-tut. A fun way of avoiding dogmatism is to exercise favor for words like "suggests" or "supports." This is how the pros do it, you know.
It seems pointless to have to hedge every single word in order to avoid being accused of dogmatism. After all, I did use the qualifier “I think”. I didn’t make a strong statement like “universal truth is BS”.
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Our brains like to think in terms of a single universal truth while it may be that reality consists of independent truths that only exist relative to the method employed in deriving them.
Perhaps, but I am unsure as to how well supported this idea is. If you would, please, expand upon this, so we can further investigate its ramifications.
I’ll give an example. People tend to treat statements like “5 + 5 = 10” and “the computer monitor in front of me is turned on” or “my knee hurts” as if they all pertain to a single unified essence of “truth”. I don’t know if it makes sense to do this. It also doesn’t make sense to me when people claim that “5 + 5 = 10” is somehow a truer statement than “my knee hurts”. It’s like comparing apples to oranges.
15 Apr 2008, 7:36 pm
