What is reality?

Nothing is objective, for reason does not always lead us. At times we are irrational beings which only feel and don’t think. We cannot reasonably explain our feelings/desires. Are we simply then supposed to suppres/neglect these feelings? This is reality. Until we first begin to understand and comprehend the limits of reality will we ever uncover objective/universal truths.

If you trusted your senses and a logical mind, you would have no evidence to conclude that your house may not exist when you were not there or that you cannot prove something else exists.

Don’t you mean to say that sometimes we do not use reason and then we are misled? When did we ever do something on blind faith with the same results as when we use reason?
Objectivity and logic are inseperable, all knowledge is objective. Leave it to the mysticists to argue that nothing is objective.

Bum shankar, nothing is objective.

But who or what “invented and projected” the Self? The Self itself? as it is the “cause to everything” including itself? :smiley:

I suppose you can think of this as the original circularity, but there is nothing logically flawed in the structure of the argument. It is called recursion where something is defined in terms of the something itself. And it works in computer and system sciences, and very effectively too.

The issue here is whether something defined recursively is “real” at all.

It is really like the chicken and egg issue. That the chicken comes from the egg, and the egg from the chicken, does not make the chicken or the egg any less real. We only do not know which came first, but thats beside the point here.

Now a view about solipism. That you can only be certain of yourself or can only know yourself is not an argument to say that there is no other. It is just that you do not or cannot know of others. But I do not think this is completely true either.

You may not know of others, not in the same degree or sense as you know yourself, but that does not mean you cannot know anything at all of the existence of others.

Imperfect and incomplete though our perception of the world “outside” us, yet we can discern evidence of certain consistency and stability to support the hypothesis that there is an “outside world” and that there exist others similar to yourself.

Well you may say that whatever so-called evidence that you perceived are simply a delusion or some outcome of a self-projecting mechanism. This is true and indeed people are deluded. But delusion is not the only possible hypothesis. The hypothesis that others like yourself exist, and that the evidence is not an internal delusion but is “externally” triggered, remains a valid hypothesis.

A blind man may not be able to see an elephant or the colour red but he knows that there exist something to which he can correlate to what sighted people called elephant and such things as colour.[/i]

So, Rafajafar, nothing exists except your dream, right?

Well, I’d like, with your permission, to enter your dream, and take you for a meal.

Now when the waiter brings over the wine list and you order Champagne, I’ll agree with your choice. Fine.

The waiter is off to the cellar, and in the meantime I’ve excused myself from your scintillating company and am off to catch the waiter and tell him that he should bring a bottle of urine to our table and pour you a glass of that.

What will you do?

Will you rear up and shout at the waiter and tell him you asked for Champagne not urine? And will he not tell you that there is no difference, everything is the same, nothing is real in your solipsist cardboard dream? So what difference does it make whether you have Champagne or urine?

And who am I but a character in your play, so you can dismiss me. And what if I hold a gun to your head and tell you to give up your solipsist nonsense, will you give up believing in it?

Finally, you are someone who realizes what a stupid idea that is. Rafajafar must live in pure conflict and misery.
He thinks he is smart because his can spell his name backwards.

I had a professor who argued for Solipsism and after he had finished he said, I don’t understand why more people don’t see it. The whole class started laughing.

To me, Solipsism is one notch above universal skeptism but like skeptism it denies explicitly what it affirms implicitly. The absurdity of this is manifest enough. As Aristotles said, if a man rejects this thesis, then one is better off arguing with a tree.

Objectivist said:

I believe reality has to be more than that because you statement is not perceived but conceived. So, unless you are leaving out something, would it not fail your test for reality?

all that is and could ever bee is the almighty dollar. the dollar goes round and round in furious pace. the dollar is, was, and forever shall be world without end. i, you, we, us, them, it and everything could not live without the dollar. without its physical manifestation of the Greater Energy, our minds would explode, and our bodies would fade. I, Consumer, have spoken the truth…possibly for the last time.

Your right. My quote was not clear.

Reality is as Aristotle was able to realize. The Law of Identity.
Everything that is does exist on its own and outside human consciousness. A is A. Ayn Rand adds that man, by choice, can achieve awareness of reality. “Man’s power of volition is the power to seek such awareness”(Leonard Peikoff).
So, any half conscious mind can achieve awareness on the sensory-perceptual level but the conceptual level, abstractions of what is perceived, that takes an active thinking mind.

This leads very nicely into Rand’s idea of epistemology. If all knowledge is originally obtained at the perceptual level, than objectivity rules.