He implied it.

Those 'well established scientific facts' were arrived at by both assuming and concluding that perceptions are indicative of an outside reality. The scientific method is circular reasoning. It assumes perception is reliable and then uses perception to 'prove' that perception is reliable. Any statements of 'fact' arrived at by the scientific method are thus ultimately fallacious, including but not limited to "the sun is x diameter and far too large to fit in my head."

As we know from the first 7 pages of this thread, perception is part of reality itself. You cannot know anything about reality beyond your perception of it. They are inextricably linked.

That is where any 'fact finding' must ultimately begin.

So no, sorry, the sun (til you prove otherwise) only exists in your mind. Any interaction with reality you have is totally in your mind. There is no 'ultimate reality' beyond your mind. When the lights go out, so does the music.

If you disagree, I'm all perception about a non-perception based reasoning around it.

uh, no. wtf is this. Maybe you are not aware that "v" in logical notation is an inclusive or?

Ya I know I cant do the other symbol on my phone and tried to edit it but it was too late

A OR ~A

I think the symbol is valid in mathematical logic but not 100% sure

I think he's just trying to prove the law of the excluded middle?

Nope. You assumed it.

Blah, blah, blah. As usual, I end up being blamed with the arguments and claims you give the caricatures in your mind rather than the actual people you are arguing with. Hmmm...actually, that makes sense given your solipsism I guess.

This is unjustified. How can you know that the sun only exists in your mind? Shouldn't you just say you don't know whether the sun exists outside your head?
Okay, I disagree. I believe the sun is a giant ball of gas 93,000,000 miles away from my head, that my perception of the sun and the sun itself are not the same thing - that my perception is of an object external to myself, so that while the perception is in my head, the object itself is not. I can't prove any of this is true, so my belief is unjustified. Nonetheless, when I examine my head, the belief, even though unjustified, is still there.

What about you? Do you think that the sun is actually less than a mile wide like my head? Is it actually very small and fits in my head? If you cut open my head, would we find a tiny little sun there? Or are there lots of suns, one in each person's head? When I go in a building, how does this sun still provide sunlight for plants to convert into energy? Should we hire people to stand in farm fields to provide sunlight? Maybe we can hire extra suns to stand in our fields for 24 hours straight for more sunlight and so greater efficiency?

You cant ever know. It can never be proven beyond your perception. So for all practical purposes, it may as well just be your perception.

An illustration. Imagine that you're wearing a pair of blue tinted glasses. It hues everything you see in blue. Now at first glance, your perception seems to be implying that the world is blue. But you think well, maybe it's the glasses, and if I take them off the world really isnt blue. So you take them off and you perceive now that the world isnt blue after all. Looking further into this, you realize that your perception without glasses is now dependent on something else. Your mind. And theres no more good reason to believe that your mind is accurately depicting reality than the blue glasses were. So you decide to confront the proposition that reality is mental in nature. We can simply remove the mind from reality and assume it's there. However, while you can remove the glasses, you actually cannot remove your mind. As soon as you remove your mind from the equation, perception evaporates altogether. So your perception really is limited to your mind, and even if it weren't, you wouldn't be able to perceive the converse. You realize it's actually impossible to prove that reality isnt mental in nature. So for all practical purposes, it is.


Now remove your head from the equation and tell me what you perceive.

Even your beliefs are perceptions.

Evidently not, since you have claimed that the sun ceases to exist when I no longer perceive it, and eventually I'll die and hence no longer perceive it. Sucks for you guys!

Umm, nothing. Weird. I guess when I say that I don't believe the sun and my perception of the sun are the same thing I must actually mean it. What is really going on here is that you struggle to acknowledge that I really do distinguish between a belief and a justified belief. You keep arguing that I'm not justified in believing that p, which I accept, and then [waves hands] means I don't believe p, which I don't accept.

Also, evidently you realize how ridiculous your viewpoint sounds given how assiduously you have avoided admitting that you don't believe the sun is bigger than my head. That the sun is not actually at the center of the solar system, that the planets do not actually orbit it, and that actually it isn't in my head at all, nor am I having a perception of it, but rather only you are having perceptions in your head. I (OrP) don't exist, neither does the sun, neither does anything, including your head. Maybe some I exists, but you don't know anything about it other than that it is thinking and perceiving.

No, he said he is proving that logic is true.

If you were making assertions about the material nature of the universe outside of yourself, you were implying there is a material nature of the universe outside yourself. I've tried to give you the benefit of the doubt here, but there's really no way around it. You're claiming you didn't make an assumption about the material nature of the universe, when you clearly did. I asked you to prove that assertion, and you agreed that you cannot prove an external reality. Ok, fair enough. We both agree that we can not, of ourselves, prove that reality exists external to us.

What does this mean? It means that reality, to us, is perceptual in nature. But we are part of reality (do you contest this?), so reality must at the very least be perceptual in nature. Insofar as we are concerned, reality is only perceptual in nature. To believe, say, think, conceive anything outside of this is to step outside ourselves and our experience of reality (our perceptions). Even if it were true, we would never be able to perceive it as true, so it's meaningless to even talk about it.

You can say you believe it exists on outside our perception. Guess what? Even that belief is a perception.



No really, being elusive or otherwise opaque in your statements is not going to get you out of this. The only way out of this is to agree, or give up arguing. You cannot obfuscate or argue your way out of this.



Your experience of reality is fundamentally mental in nature. You've already agreed to this by agreeing that we cannot prove reality is external to us. The reason why we cannot is that we have no access to anything but our own perceptions. I am open to being wrong about this. It's up to you to show me that it can be done, using anything but perception to do it.


Again, it is clear you either do not understand what I am saying or you are purposely leaving things out in order to obfuscate my argument. I said that when you no longer perceive the sun, it ceases to exist to you. This is so trivial and obvious it boggles the mind that anyone would argue with it.

You just finished saying that you can't show that external reality exists, so regardless of what you say, everything you say about the sun, including what you believe about it, is dependent on your perception. Conceptions about the sun are perceptions. Speaking about the sun is a perception. Everything you do regarding the sun is a perception.

So now we have you going making baseless assertions with built in assumptions to parsing between beliefs and justified beliefs, all of them totally dependent on perception. Let's see if you can define any of those things apart from perception. Go ahead.

Ok, so you agree you are not justified in believing in p (external reality exists), yet you believe it anyway? What does it matter if I share your belief that the sun actually exists (whatever that means) if you agree the question is relying on a definition you yourself have said is unjustified?

I didn't say I don't believe it. I said anything you say, think, feel, intuit, write, watch, listen etc regarding it is dependent on your perception. Do you agree? Why or why not?


A self-contradictory statement

If the world only exists in one's mind , which is also a function of the material brain or otherwise , then your perception of yourself must also be in your mind (brain).

The nervous system is a reflector of thoughts which are not material but supersensible. A thought is a living being to which man, in his thinking, perceives extraordinary or within the supersensible.

In truth cosmic thinking is what forms the brain prior to birth and when a man thinks he cannot stand or withstand a full appreciation of a particular thought being for it would overwhelm him. Therefore the thoughts we perceive are attenuated or in fact the corpse( due to our abilities but not dead as on earth) of a living thought being to which we can and do relate to in a living manner during the sojourn between death and subsequent birth.

Thinking is a sensory process ( not physical-have to use words which have meaning on earth to point higher) within the spirit "thinking as a spiritual activity".

If the universe only exists in the mind, why are you arguing that the universe is self aware, since (according to you) theres no proof of such a thing as the universe?

I'm not saying it only exists in the mind. I'm saying our experience of the universe exists in the mind. So we know that reality is partly mental in nature, because we are part of reality. Its self-evident!

You have a tendency to make obviously false but provocative statements and then later retreat to obviously true but uncontroversial versions when challenged. No one disagrees with the above. See for example:

The bolded is OrP stating the same thing as you just did, but you seemed not to accept this:

Also note that "Mind corresponds to Reality in a fundamental way" is potentially a very different and stronger claim than merely that reality is subjective in the sense that all of our knowledge of reality is mediated by our perceptions.

Again, this is OrP agreeing with that but pushing back on your attempts to jump from the above uncontroversial claims about the differences between perceptions and reality to claims about reality itself (e.g. your original claim that reality is self-aware, or the more recent claim that it's impossible to imagine a universe which does not contain any minds), to which you responded:

But it sounds like you do in fact already accept that the sun is not only the concept in OrP's mind.

Ok perfect. I'm glad no one disagrees. Thanks for admitting that reality is cognitive in nature. I guess that's the end of the thread.



I accept it. I just wanted clarification. Now that we agree reality is mental and material in nature, we can move on.



It feels like a stronger claim, but its directly implied. Because the universe is coherent there must be a mental-material substrate that the entire universe relies upon. You can call that information, or whatever else you want, but its there. If we experience reality mentally, that implies reality experiences itself mentally, as we are part of reality. It must necessarily be so that reality has an underlying mental-material structure to it that allows mentation. If not, then reality isnt coherent, but all of our knowledge is based on the assumption that it is.



It's not a claim. It's a direct experiential deduction.

It's impossible to imagine this universe without minds. I've offered a mathematical proof of it:

1) assume we can imagine this universe has no minds
2) to be able to imagine this universe has no minds we have to imagine this universe without our mind
3) since imaginations are contained in the mind, imagining this universe without our mind removes both our imagination and our mind
4) the assumption we can imagine this universe without minds is false

Note that this also applies to imaginations of other universes, since those imaginations are contained in this universe, which is the only universe we experience and can have knowledge of. This is the universe



Reality is mental and material in nature, correct. Now, either you are a dualist that thinks that mentation is entirely separate from materialism, or you think that mentation and materialism are at the structural level of the universe the same thing. Which one are you?

... and then you pretend that your retreat was not a retreat and return to the much stronger claim.

These are not equivalent

1) human knowledge of reality is mediated by subjective perception

2) reality is fundamentally cognitive

Are we part of reality or not?

Since we are, and our experience of reality is cognitive, then reality is partially cognitive (us). So either reality is as a whole materio-cognitive or its partly cognitive and partly material. Which one do you believe? Are you a monist or a dualist?

We are, and you're back to the fallacy of composition apparently.

Nope.

1) our experience of reality is cognitive
2) we are part of reality
3) reality is partly cognitive
4) reality is partly material (rocks aren't cognitive)
5) reality as a whole is either partly cognitive and partly material (dualism) or materio-cognitive (monism)

Which one do you believe?

But you are claiming that we cant know anything about the universe, because everything we know about it is from our perceptions only. And you are also making claims about the universe.

"Insofar as we are concerned," "that reality, to us, is perceptual," "meaningless to even talk about" all these claims are where we disagree. I don't accept your reductions of either our language or epistemology to being about purely mental phenomena and think it is completely fine to believe in things outside of our ability to directly perceive. We can use mental models of the universe that imply the existence of things we don't or can't perceive, and then accept the existence of these unperceived things because of our confidence in those models being accurate as a description of the universe. You don't agree, largely (as it seems to me) because you refuse to distinguish between the map and the territory, the thing being represented and the sign being used to do that representation. I don't know why, because we haven't found a common language to talk about this.

FYI, as it is typically used in philosophy, "perception" doesn't refer to any type of mental content, but specifically to the mental content that comes from our senses. So, for instance, solving an abstract math problem is not typically considered a form of perception, although it is a form of cognition.

I wish the bolded wasn't so accurate as a description of your approach to philosophical discussion. Disagreement and argumentation is a good way to explore a topic, but we also need to remember that discussion is a cooperative endeavor. Ultimately, the goal should not be to win or grief other people, but to come closer to the truth of a matter and to expand our own sense of what is reasonable to believe. This requires trying to find the areas of agreement between us as the starting points for understanding how or why we disagree on other areas.

I'm not purposely leaving things out here - I'm pushing you to clarify the area of disagreement. You say all we can know is what we perceive, and our perceptions are in our heads, so all we can know is in our heads. Okay, but if this is true, what about our ordinary conception of the world as being external to our heads? No one believes the sun, understood in the ordinary sense as a giant ball of gas is actually in our head, so where do you go with that? Do you think the ordinary conception is wrong or useless? Are you able to connect your view that everything is in the head in some way so that this ordinary conception does make sense? I don't know, because you avoid answering this question.

And if you actually read or understand my posts, you would easily grasp that this is not what I claim. It's easy enough to make a mistake by calling out people for misunderstanding obtuse language used in ones own posts, but when you do the same thing despite the crystal clarity of someone else's, a reasonable person might start to suspect you're doing it on purpose to avoid the gravity of the arguments.


Yes, and the reason we can do that is because the underlying structure of the universe that gives rise to both mentation and materialism is ultimately isomorphic with the models we create! Of course it must be so or the universe would be unintelligible to us. The models we have created thus far leave out any fundamental relation between mentation and the universe writ large, and as a result have given rise to fundamental paradoxes in the nature of our understanding. The resolution to those paradoxes is not to continue to hammer away at the round hole with our square peg and saying "it fits pretty well" while looking at the banged up edges, but to find a circular one that might fit.

No, what you dont understand is we have no map. All we have is a flashlight in a dark room, but we're wearing a blindfold.



Perception is any regarding of anything. It includes math, because math is dependent on content to be intelligible. Even a euclidean shape is dependent on space, boundary and relation to be intelligible; all of which are perceived (in physical space or mental space).



No offense, but all it requires of you is to read and understand the posts I'm writing before you respond. When your first, and many since, response in this thread is pointing out how I'm committing the fallacy of composition when I'm not doing anything of the sort, it shows you have either a fundamental misunderstanding or a fundamental disregard of the content of my posts. I could care less if you 'believe' me. But doing something as silly as what I pointed out above just proves you're not as engaged in the discussion as you purport to be.



I did not say this. I said all we can know for absolute certain is that we perceive, and how failing to take that into account in a model that seeks truth about the greater universe we find ourselves in is a fundamental mistake in our modeling of reality that ultimately leads to paradox.

first, let me say: lol

but secondly, it seems to me the only person who finds your arguments in this thread "crystal clear" is you. You might want to consider that.

n.b. I haven't gotten around to some of your earlier posts but partly that's because I'm not really very clear on what it is you're even trying to say, because you keep changing your formulations but it appears you think they all mean the same things.

Not so. Other people have gotten the gist of it plainly and restated it eloquently. See both tame_deuces and spankwookie for examples.

It is clear to me you dont understand it, because of the unintended hyperbole of your criticisms.

What else does imagination do besides create? Am I ruining some joke I missed!

My rough take....

1. What is not a view cannot support existential (“is real”) claims.
2. A view from nowhere is not a view.
3. A posited mind-independent reality necessitates a view from nowhere.
C1. A posited mind-independent reality cannot support existential claims.
C2. Only a mind-dependent reality can support existential claims.

Or something like that, maybe.