The Illusion Of Physical Existence (Part 1 CHAPTER TWO)

Quetzalcoatl:

This is food for thought.

[b]Not if the info, in the fullness of the internal mental sphere of God, is isomorphic (an identical twin or clone). My theory of the mind of Christ as he died on the cross (Weird Christianity #4) is isomorphic to the flawed mind of every human being in the course of human existence (past, present, and future). Thus, hypothetically, your incorrect understanding of delivered info (as it were) would be primarily (in the first place) occurring in the mind of the crucified Christ before your hypothetical experience of “misunderstanding” in the future.

Absent this, if Berkeley (and I) are right and we do exist in the mind of God and receive our information from him, then it is necessary to understand the nature of info in terms of its existence, and whether or not that existence is eternal or magically finite (does the info exist forever in some form, is it reduced to some ultimate fundamental “bytes” or psychic particles, or does it magically pop into and out of existence?)

Even if there is different info evolving every time a new experience is born, unless this info magically pops into existence from a previous nonexistence, it is born from something that pre-existed, and one must take into account the nature of its content. If it is related to the info that manifest as someone’s (ours or God’s) experience beforehand, then it is safe to say that the new info, despite its difference, is a child of the previous info. [/b]

[b]In an ‘absolute’ sense, this would mean that the totality of reality (as we are imagining it here, regardless of what it is truly like despite what we imagine or believe it to be) is split then, between God and man (truth and falsity), and these exist in separate worlds separate and distinct (one could say that the first distills into the other, but the quality of the other is such that it is always distorted and never truly reflects the information of the first as the first knows or maintains the information).

This could be an eternal situation, or it could be a temporary situation in which the second (the world of Man) evolves or transforms through some natural mechanism into the First, such that falsity evolves eventually into Truth. Indeed, this is what I maintain. But I hold that Man and God, Falsity and Truth, do not exist in separate mental Realms, but that the constition of God that does not and cannot contain false information is merely one aspect of the Total God, that is, the conscious aspect of that fundamental person. The unconscious aspect, then, is the False (or Different) aspect of that being, in terms of that beings unconscious creation of examples of what its True state is not. This may be a matter, ultimately, of the goings-on of the mental material making up the complete mental space, which happens to be the totality of this person.[/b]

[b]We have to remember, in this, that info is itself nothing but experience. And that info exists in the form of experience (and experience doesn’t exist unless and until it is experienced). Everything that is not the infinite (following your description) would experience only what it is like to be themselves and the types of things they currently experience at a particular point in time. This is basically it when it comes to non-infinite persons. The infinite, on the other hand, would contain the finite (as opposed to being external to or separate from the finite) as well as everything else that is never experienced by finite persons (whatever that may be). So that which is ‘non-understandable’ from the finite perspective may be so because it simply is not experienced, nor cannot be due to its quality (whatever that may be).

That which is ‘false’ according to this understanding is simply ‘different in content’. In Pantheopsychism that which is ‘false’ is simply that which is ‘different’ in terms of being the opposite of that which is True about the conscious (as opposed to the unconsicous) mind of God.

The god-matrix, then, may safely exist within, rather than outside, god the absolute, as god the absolute, by its instinctual definition, should encompass even falsity, with falsity and truth separated by types of mind that only experience certain things which, in the interest of how info exists in the first place, pre-exists in the form of the psychic material comprising the absolute.[/b]

[b]But new informations (to us new experiences, as we use experience in order to imagine what ‘information’ is like in the first place, and use experience in order to conceive of the concept of ‘information’ and what it is like in the first place), unless they magically come into existence from a previous nonexistence (in which case new informations are not derived from that which already existed before they appeared), are derived from the substance making up ‘old’ information, in terms of that information existing before and during the interaction of the particles a Planck-second before the new information existed.

Puppetry can be redefined as “isomorphism” (identical twin-ism), and we really can’t assign, because we don’t like it, an ‘impossibility’ to the notion of puppetry. It may be that things are in such a way that this is the only thing that is accomplished or can be accomplished, in terms of how things are made to exist, or how they happen to come into existence. ‘Self-animation’ may actually be an illusion hiding actual manipulation by external forces, as the ‘self’ does not exist in a vacuum and is constantly a product of the external existence in which it is derives and entrenched.[/b]

I perused the topic posted. You guys are pretty esoteric and “out there” on that front. But I, in my humble and ‘non-expert’ way, am forced to turn my gaze toward the very beings coming up with such stuff, and find myself fixated upon the basic substance of which these beings are made. And it seems that we are, and these amazing concepts are, ultimately composed of nothing but experience, as we do nothing but experience, and we can say nothing of non-experience because it is not an aspect of our being in the first place. Thus code words such as ‘information’ etc. must refer only to experience or the mental, if we can trace the nature of the external world and the ‘absolute’ or the ‘infinite’ to the nature of ourselves. If we cannot, then we cannot rationally claim what it is in lieu of being the same thing we are, because one would attempt to use what one is to describe that which one is not. As Adolf Grunbaum states:

At this point, the argument is sometimes abandoned in favor of claiming that creation out of nothing [or ‘information’ or anything described or proposed to be something other than or something not composed of subjective experience] “passes all understanding” and that scientific theories of cosmogony leave much to be desired in the way of providing answers to well-conceived questions. To this I say: If the creation hypothesis is indeed beyond human understanding, then it cannot even be meaningfully taken on faith without evidence, and it becomes completely hopeless to try to give a causal argument for it. After all, if the hypothesis itself is beyond human understanding, then even the person who is willing to believe it on faith admits that he or she does not know what is to be believed. Our human species may well be limited by intrinsic intellectual horizons of some sort, just as theoretical physics, for example, cannot be understood by dogs. Yet the fact remains that one can meaningfully believe only a claim whose content one understands, even if one is willing to believe without evidence on sheer faith. If the belief-content is incomprehensible, what is it that is being believed?

Therefore, if creation out of nothing (ex nihilo) is beyond human understanding, then the hypothesis that it occurred cannot explain anything. Even less can it then be required to fill explanatory gaps that exist in scientific theories of cosmogony. Indeed, it seems to me that if something literally passes all understanding, then nothing at all can be said or thought about it by humans. As Wittgenstein said: Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent. Dogs, for example, do not bark about relativity theory. Thus, any supposed hypothesis that literally passes all understanding is simply meaningless to us, and it certainly should not inspire a feeling of awe. To stand in awe before an admittedly incomprehensible hypothesis is to exhibit a totally misplaced sense of intellectual humility! It is useless to reply to this conclusion by saying that the creation hypothesis may be intelligible to “higher beings” than ourselves, if there are such. After all, it is being offered to us as a causal explanation!

-Adolf Grunbaum

[b]As the now-deceased character Shane (Jon Berthal) from the AMC series The Walking Dead would say: “Nah, man.”

Or at least…not necessarily.

The un-experienced machine need not exist in the first place. Nor is it absolutely necessary that our experience of oneself (or each, if done in the same room) making a machine magically possess a power to create a third, un-experienced machine. Why? Because the contiguity must be explained by derivation (i.e. the third un-experienced machine must somehow play a direct role in the existence of the two experienced machines from two different perspectives). Without this simple derivation (or “equation of derivation” as mentioned in the main article above), the third machine, if it exists, happens to exist by random chance outside the minds of the two individuals and has absolutely nothing to do with the fortuitious formation of the experience of the machine (in terms of the shape, form, and experienced substance of the machine) within the two individuals.

And unless we’re talking a heretofore unknown or inconceivable form of backwards (or a new type of forward) causation here, our experience (form one’s unique perspective) of the machine in our personal experience is usually the end result of some collocational machinization in the external world: but I forget, this is a thought-experiment. :sunglasses:

Nevertheless, the pertinent theory is that the third chair, if it exists, must somehow cause the existence of the two individual’s experience of creating the machine, as it must form by reason of a zombie (philosophical rather than “horror movie” type) version of the two individuals making the chair in the external world. But we must be clear on what’s at stake here: the individuals and the machines as they appear in the individuals’ distinct experience are composed (at least) of subjective experience. Russellian inference of the substance of the third, non-experienced machine (as stated in the article above) must rationally indicate that the substance making up this third, external chair must also be composed of subjective experience (and subjective experience is inseparable from a subject of experience), or the two individuals’ experience of the machine is derived by the external machine (and vise versa!) by magic.[/b]

[b]Bloody good point (seemingly) with the third-party ‘non-experiencing experiencer’ there. :sunglasses: In Phenomenalism, this would pose a good problem for Idealism. The Idealist, however could respond to this by stating that the third party experiencer is simply an aspect of the experiencer, and has no ‘outside’ existence on its own independent of all experiencers. Thus it is, ultimately, a vivid phantasm of the experiencer, created of the experiencer’s own subjective substance and accompanied by a (ultimately false) belief that it has objective existence (in some form) beyond the experiencer. Reality, then, may only be composed entirely of persons (regardless of whether or not these persons exist within a larger, surrounding Person) surrounded by a larger “mist” of potential psychic substance (instantiating its own bizarre form of internal experience) and that ‘objects’ (machines, chairs, cars, Playboy magazines, etc.) are extensions of the person (supplied by the outer “mist”) and are not independent entities capable of existence separate from the existence of the “mist” or the individual.

Or something like that.[/b]

No, thank YOU, Q.

Jay.

J

Some very good points there. I had thought that information always exists, otherwise history has no record of itself and hence doesn’t exist et al? …how can history not have existed.
What I now think is that there is no such thing as information alone, that there is something we can think of as info as if like an entity or something ~ as you say like bytes. What is a piece of information?

For me if you take any two things - lets take two items of experiential thought, a single information doesn’t mean anything, it is not until it relates to something else e.g. another piece of info, that it makes any sense or even exists.

Indeed information probably only arises as part of a relationship between two or more things, and when there is a communication either in that or between that and another set of informational relationships. This is how language and concepts are strung together, even in the physical world.

So now your god-matrix is doing something! The whole experiential thing is live.

It could be that, and/or that could be within every process. When we learn about a thing we go through a set of thought processes until we arrive at a resolution on a given matter. We could say that there are the resolved and unresolved sets, though perhaps the unresolved sets are not information ~ they are unmade or being formed and they don’t become info until made. That describes thought as I see it, most of what we think doesn’t become ‘full’ until resolved, no?

I don’t know, that’s a massive debate in and of itself. I think things outside of experiencers may contain info as noted early in my thought experiment. Data is one such kind of info. Hmm I suppose in theory god can be experiencing informations that we are not, but you’d still arrive at a third party between him and us by the same logic.
However, I would say that ‘communication’ is universal, in us informations communicating are thought, and that we experience. Does that mean communications are always experienced? For me there is a level of pure thought where the experiencer is pure mind and without communication, info etc. this is what gives us the ability to be detached, and I assume means we are speaking about different worlds or different universals.

For me a ‘god-matrix’ comes in layers, the world or the matrix itself is its body, as like our bodies are to us.

It all seems to come down to weather or not the ‘god-matrix’ is or contains the ‘information carousel’ [and indeed we its puppets], or weather or not it is a set of instructions which loosely define things - like a guiding hand, such that we exist in a living organic, plastic free universe. For me it’s the latter most definitely.

Infinity is a kind of nothing, it has no thingness or parts. Yet it would have both information about itself and also its relationships with universe and us. The singularity [universe] could collapse into ‘nothing’ and re-emerge ~ or indeed originally emerge, from that instruction set.

There are two know derivations and two unknown derivations, one cannot experience the unknown. Same applies in terms of what is being experienced, one does not experience the other except from ones original perspective. If the machine makes another machine, would that exist even though it would not be experienced et al?

Now imagine that we the experiencers come after the machines in the material world!

Hmm intriguing. Well I imagined all the machines and any thereafter in my mind, so I suppose the very same thing could occur idealistically.
I had not expected to consider an extra experiencer in my mind or the other experiencers mind. Perhaps though, experiencers are equivalent to perception from a given perspective, and we can take one such perceiver and view ourselves ad infinitum.

This leaves us here…

viewtopic.php?f=1&t=178657

There are perceptions, observations and experiencers, all are probably variations of the one kind of thing. ‘When they look upon themselves there are no others, when they don’t there are only others’.

It seems that beyond perspectives there are ‘others’? there are non-mental objects and informations out there ~ other things.

Thanks J

WOW! :slight_smile:

_

Geeze, I thought abstract idealism died in the 1970s! Neither scientists nor mystics buy that anymore.
Nietzsche did in Hegel–remember? Russell changed his mind several times.
I’m Spinozan simply because his beliefs include what is, not speculation on what could or couldn’t be in some imagined absolutist world-view. We live in a world of experienced processes, with evolving consciousness.

Ierrellus:

Even if they don’t buy into the notion that the external world is purely mental (experiential) in nature, they must, or should, buy into the fact that reality as it actually occurs (as it is experienced to occur) nevertheless consists of nothing but experience, as existence is experienced as a particular person and the current experiences of that person. Nothing else can be known to exist independent of being experienced by a particular person (all other forms of “knowledge”, are actually make-believe or magical thinking). From here, one can induce Idealism, as nothing other than experience or experience-material can rationally explain the existence of experience.

Even Nietzche must concede to the point made above. Heck, everyone should. Russell may have changed his mind about things, but he must have held on to the notions of Immediate Acquaintance and Inference: these are just plain elementary, when it comes to how we know of the existence of something.

Sure. And beliefs that include what is must contain the experienced fact that everything, to oneself, is composed only of one’s experience. This is what is. Speculation on what could or couldn’t be, on the other hand, involves anything that is not oneself and one’s own personal, private experience. That which we claim to be something other than ourselves, curiously, exist in the form of our personal experience of the thing from our perspective or point of view. This is what is. What it is like when we no longer experience it, however, is speculative, and exists in the field of make-believe of “what could or [might, may] couldn’t be”.

But those processes are only known to exist as, or in the form of, one’s experience. External to our experience, if the processes even exist, they must be composed of the same substance that composes the very act of experiencing, or we lapse into magical thinking; that which is not made up of experience or the act of experiencing cannot non-magically produce that which is not what it is from itself: if cannot use itself as the source of the very opposite of itself, if the opposite did not pre-exist before production.

J.

Quetzalcoatl:

Amen. The very notion of existence ex nihilo or the very notion of coming into existence from a previous total nonexistence is problematic at the onset. There’s no pre-existing substance or creative/transformational process that can be deduced or traced “up” to the presence of the existing entity. It cannot be explained as a product of something existing before it. I shoot slingshots at ex nihilo creation and explanation. :sunglasses:

[b]‘Communication’ for me, is ultimately just collocation, or jigsaw-puzzle-ism, disparate parts existing in such a way that they, fortuitiously link up with other jigsaw puzzle pieces in certain ways to create a coherent ‘whole’ at the end of the process. ‘Communication’ aside from this is pretty imaginative, as if two slices of reality actually ‘talk’ to one another and it is by this ‘talking’ that they form a third entity (which is ultimately an amalgamation of the two or something that is an amalgamation of the two that exist separately as different perspectives. Hmm. I think I get what you were saying before. :slight_smile: ). But yes, the nature of our experience is, I believe, nothing but the result of collocation or relationship between two separate things.

Look at a t-shirt or a human face. Every single point on that shirt or on that face is unique to every other point on the shirt or on the face. There is not something that is itself making up another point on the object. All these unique points, which are sui generis from every other particle or component making up the macroscopic portrait, combine and ‘communicate’ and ‘relate’ to each other (by squeezing into their ‘assigned’ places, without which we would not have the t-shirt or the face as we experience it but something totally messed up or different) to produce that which we currently experience.[/b]

As it is a product of disparate psychic “bytes” fortuitiously existing in such a way from the jump that they must form the relevant God and man experiences that happen to be.

In a collocation way, yes, thoughts do not become ‘full’ until they are a coherent thought (or even ‘coherent’ irrational or jumbled thoughts) experienced by some being. Independent of this full formation (in whatever form) my guess is that they are indeed ‘unresolved’. My point about the ‘false’ becoming ‘true’, however, refers to man becoming a psychological reflection of God as opposed to our current state, in which we (most of the time) are a reflection of the opposite of the moral and existential nature of God. However, this moral evolution is, in a sense, a “learning about a thing until we arrive at a resolution”.

[b]Well, by ‘experience’ I did not mean the specific experience of an experiencer but experience qua the act of experiencing itself. Its an induction based on experience of reality as it actually (rather than speculatively) occurs: reality actually is and actually occurs as subjective experience (that is, reality is primarily ourselves, and this is the only reality that manages to actually rather than imaginatively exist, or at least it is the only reality that is actually experienced to exist).

‘Data’, ‘information’, ‘communication’, ‘relation’ all exist, non-imaginatively and speculatively, as someone’s experience as far as we are concerned, and relevant reality (and more importantly, rational imagination of the origin of ourselves) is reality that produces us and what we are like or imagination that uses oneself and that out of which one is made to hypothetically create the nature of that outside oneself. Everything else is unknowable and part of Hume’s “fairy land”. Using oneself as the base, one can homogenize reality so that it’s intrinsic substance is, and reliably explains, the nature of oneself.

We are composed entirely of experience (or we experience the existence of nothing save our personal experience), thus one can induce that reality must be composed entirely of experience, and this easily (rather than magically) explains why we are made up exclusively of subjective experience such that we experience nothing but personal experience. For me, there is not some non-experiential ‘other’ (something that is not the act of experiencing nor composed of the act of experiencing) that is somehow linked to or formative of experience itself. The two cannot possibly relate, because one simply is not the other, and cannot produce from itself, using itself as the base material, that which it is not.[/b]

As long as its made up of nothing but experience or the substance of the act of experiencing, I can’t argue with or deny your model of the world (I may have my own model, but I cannot outright deny yours).

[b]The important thing is that we cannot logically and rationally deny either state of affairs. This stuff exists (if it exists) outside ourselves, and we only experience ourselves (even ‘ourselves’ in the form of our imagination of what’s going on ‘outside’). Trapped in this deprivation tank or bubble of personal experience, we have no right or sufficient knowledge to claim that there definitely is not puppetry or that there definitely is not loosely defined laws of resolution leading to a plastic reality or universe. For all we know, one or the other may nevertheless exist.

Thus, as you may have noticed, I do not deny your view of reality. I can’t (rationally). I simply have my own.[/b]

Once again, I must take this at face value as a logical possibility and refrain from denying it outright. But honestly, it is your imagination of what’s going on or what exists ‘outside’. Same thing with my view of God and Pantheopsychism. These, following Kant’s lament, are ultimately matters of faith (no shame nor harm in that 'neither.)

If the machine makes another machine even though it is not experienced by anyone, I would hope that the substance making up the first machine and its creation is nevertheless made up of, as John Stuart Mill put it: “the permanent possibility of experience”. Otherwise, we’re talking magic. And it is not that I can deny external machines exist, I just have faith they do not (even if in fact they do). My point, however, is that we don’t have the wherewithall to impute necessary relations given our epistemic situation. We cannot impute that certain things in the external must obtain in order for our experience to exist or manifest a particular way. We can’t know that this is a necessity, or that the contents of visual perception necessarily exist in the absence of visual perception itself (particularly if the external objects, being things that hypothetically can exist in the absence of the experiencer and his/her experience of a mental percept of the object, are not one and the same thing as percepts).

I hope this isn’t the case. But one can’t help but to wonder how deep the rabbit hole goes, in the supposition of sub-dimensional mind or “people living within people”.

Copied.

[b]Good description of an Idealistic world. One must believe in the existence of others, and there is good reason to believe in them (God, no solipsism here). However, if by ‘non-mental’ you mean ‘non-self’? Sure. If ‘non-mental’ means ‘non-the act of experiencing’, well…we have the problem the main article above chafes about.

Good thought-workout for today, Q.[/b]

J.

I’ll bow out of this thread so as not to sully the angel dust with my clay feet.

If there is nothing to experience, we don’t experience it. I don’t experience a cat on my lap at the moment, for example, or a glass of beer at my desk. This implies that something is experienced; usually, the experiences we have are of something.

It seems you’re saying that “only experience can cause experience” is the only rational way of looking at it, that everything else is magical. That nothing can create or be created by that which it is not. If that’s what you’re saying, it’s not the case at all.

J

Hmm well the communication in our imagination isn’t simply collocation, is it? If it were I don’t know how the mind would know what’s being communicated. Collocation arises in the patterns in the world which do act kinda like jigsaw-ism, computers probably communicate like this.
Info in the mind occurs in the fluid exchange of communications, derived of the mind and brains plasticity.

Somehow we have to get from info carrying signals in the brain, to an ability for the mind to recognise that collocative info ~ as mental information! The latter being very different to the former, such that we should probably have different terms for them both.

It could be that the mind simply matches the pattern or shape of the info derived of the signals delivered by the senses, then it finds some manner of ‘match’ for that in mental-informational terms. However this delivers the same problem as we ever get in making two disparate things correlate, when, if they are different, how can they relate ~ communicate!?

There must be something in each of the two different kinds of information which forms the match. Indeed if my ontology is correct; ‘everything has or contains information about itself’, then information of the second or mental kind [hang on I’ll get back to that] exists as concerns information of the first kind [patterns, shapes, DNA etc]. …I say of the ‘second kind’ because I have already [and I think you agree] noted that mental info is not purely pattern like.

Now we may go on to state that this ‘mental information’ is the same as information that’s ‘out there’, or we wouldn’t be able to say what’s out there. Yet the info which is out there is assumedly not mental information [even in the god matrix, for reasons stated before], so I’ll go all out and state that;

‘Information is a non-mental thing’.

Communicative but non collocative information is even in the mind non-mental! The mind can produce it simply because ‘there is always information concerning a thing’.
The mind can experience said info because there is a relationship between any things and the object of that thing.

There will be advancement imho, but if god has a purpose designed into us or otherwise, that to me amounts to puppet strings, which renders it pointless - if I may. Perhaps all he needs to do is set the conditions and intelligent beings will naturally rise to that. A final resolution may be an ability to understand things extremely well, though I’d expect there will always be new challenges and things to learn ~ even if we all become geniuses or whathaveyou.

Hmm I suppose that if we considered all info as gods experience when it is not ours, then I too cannot deny your view of reality. Depends if information is part of the experience/r [as above].

This is the part that I feel philosophy needs to get beyond; the imagination is informed. We don’t make up the world without knowledge of it, though that knowledge could come from the god-matrix in your theory. It is not faith, it is being informed either by god or as a function of the world and us.

The machine made by the machine made by us, could be in the experience of god as we and all things would be, it depends if there is only experience as you say. The problem is that we have to place everything else into that one thing [experience], I don’t see how we can do that, there would be no un-experienced things in reality?

If I experience a thing and god experiences that thing when it goes out of my experiential sphere, there must be a point when our experience is shared, part of the same entity. Or, there would be a point of non-experience.

Or experiencers [us] within the experiencer [god] ~ that sounds a bit better eh! :slight_smile:

thanks.

_

Only Humean:

[b]But you can’t know that its not the case at all.

Typical defense of non-mental externalism insists that we experience ‘something’ in the external world, and that, as you said above, if this ‘something’ does not exist we do not experience it. This belief proposes that what we experience (visually) has an external analog that continues to exist even if visual perception of this object does not. That is, if no one sees a certain chair sitting in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Poughkeepsie, New York, this chair nevertheless exists and is capable of being perceived should a human being accidentally stumble upon it. At best, this belief answers John Stuart Mills phenomenalistic description that in the absence of experience there nevertheless exists “the permanent possibility of experience”.

But it is not a logical necessity (although a logical possibility in the Stuartean sense mentioned above) that there should be correlation between visual perception and a pre-existing external analog. We can’t establish the metaphysical necessity of that, given that we do not experience the pre-existing external model (if it exists) in the way that it actually (hypothetically) exists in the absence of any and all perception ‘of’ it. In the end, we merely take our visual perceptions as they are and we then form an imagination that it mimics something external to it. That is, we merely imagine the nature of the external world, come to believe that this imagination is the absolute truth, and insist that what we imagine must be necessarily true, despite the fact we do not and cannot experience it in its true form, as this is not and is outside the experience of anyone (if it can exist in the absence of anyone, it is of something that, barring a purely mental world, something that is not the same thing that makes up anyone, as that which makes up ‘anyone’ is current subjective experience).

But we are not qualified to assert what exists in the external world nor any ‘necessities’ between that world and our experience. As Kant lamented, our imaginations and beliefs about the external world and its relation (if any) to our personal, ongoing experience must ultimately be taken on faith. Thus it is logically possible that our experiences are formed by fiat by an external mental substance in the form of mental particles or even mists that happen to collocate our experiences on the spot independent of external models. After all, we have no problem with the notion that physical objects independent of perceivers collocate by fiat by physical particles, such that at one time there were disparate physical particles that, through the fortuitous action of electromagnetic and gravitational fields come together to form everyday physical objects. It is difficult to see why it is impossible for experience or perception to form the same way, through just the happenstance collocation of psychical ‘bytes’, particles, or undulating psychic mist (Idealism).

When it comes to the notion of that external, pre-existing models somehow create and relate to the content of visual experience, one must take into account the nature of the substance making up the external model and the substance making up visual perception itself. If the substance of the external model is not that of the substance of the act of experiencing itself (as perception is experience), then the substance, whatever it is, cannot produce the act of experiencing, as it is not experience qua experience. Thus, even in the process of perception (in which external models emit a force that initiates the contraption formed by the peripheral and central nervous system), the external model does not ‘personally’ create the percept that supposedly mimics it: the external model merely, like the hand outside the machine flipping the switch that activates the machine–leaving it to do its ‘dirty work’ independent of the person that cuts it on—initiate a process that eventually leads to the circuit that does the actual ‘creation’ of the percept.

The point being, there is no actual relationship, save random chance, between the external model and the percept (visual perception ‘of’ the external model) that supposedly mimics it, precisely because the external model does not give of its very substance to form the percept. If the substance making up the percept (fundamentally the act of experiencing) does not pre-exist before the act of visual perception as part of the substance of that which supposedly can exist in the absence of experiencing itself (and experience only exists when and if it is currently experienced by something that experiences), then the very notion that something can be created by that which it is substantially and essentially is not is a magical concept, because the supposed creator (the external model or even a process in the brain itself) is creating something whose substance previously did not exist before it is ‘created’.

If there is no one looking at the abandoned chair in in Poughkeepsie, visual perception of the chair does not exist. It can potentially exist, but it does not as yet exist in all of reality because in all of reality there is no actual perception of the chair (for the sake of argument, there is not a single observing entity: human, animal, or insect, in visual proximity to the chair). If the chair nevertheless exists, its substance is either that which is not experience itself or its substance is experiential in aspect, and thus can be used to create visual perception of the chair (this is the gist of Ernst Mach, David Hume, and John Stuart Mill’s Phenomenalism—but not Idealism, which states that we do not need external models at all).

We, however, are composed entirely of experience, and the nature of our reality is such that everything that is known to exist (that is, that which is known to exist because it has been sensorially experienced) is known to exist precisely because it is experienced, and it appears only as someone’s experience of it.

The upshot is that there is no absolute necessity for external models of experience to exist in the first place, such that our experiences can, in principle, form without pre-existing models. Why? Because the models, absent Phenomenalism, are not composed of the substance of experience itself, and thus cannot non-magically play a role in the existence of experience (as in Non-Mentalism the substance of experience does not exist as part of the substance of the external model and presumably does not exist until it appears as the actual experience of an actual person). Thus we do not and cannot know, given our epistemic situation as experiences (being composed only of experience) that the non-mental even exists, much less that there ‘must’ be external, pre-existing models of experience in order for there to be experience in the first place. This connection is not, absent Mach’s, Hume’s, and Mill’s Phenomenalism grounded in any rational mode of connection, derivation, and relation (i.e. connection, derivation, and relation between substances—in which one substance actually pre-exists within and can be “pulled” from another) and is simply a product of magical thinking used in order to save a particular belief in the nature of reality.

J.

P.S. To Quetzalcoatl: WIll respond to your post this evening. Off to work. :slight_smile:
[/b]

Dude, could you post a link to chapter one?

I can’t find that shit.

Here you go.

Thanks. I’ll read all of this the next time I feel in the right mood to give it credence.

Hi pg,

Thank you for the time you took to respond. I understand the basic tenets of your view, although I think that logical necessity is missing from all of the metaphysical options, and pragmatic efficiency and intersubjective agreement favours constant external objects; I think there’s a mangling of the use of the word “imagine”. But that wasn’t my point. My point is:

It’s stated as a logical requisite, but I don’t see any requirement to accept it… could you elucidate? It’s just… I don’t buy it. As I see it, certain chemicals can affect and even create perception/experience, for example.

I don’t follow how “act of experiencing” can be a substance. You have a verb/process, and a noun. It seems to be a category error.

Similarly:

Does an object give of its very substance to form a shadow? Or is there no relationship besides chance between the two?

I know I have a television in the next room. I’m not experiencing it now. If you don’t think I know that, then I don’t think you should use the “know” that I highlighted above, or the following perfect tense (has been… experienced). If I do know that, then memory plays some role in things; in which case, how far removed are we from continuous objects?

We all make predictions all the time, thousands of times a day, using the “rule of thumb” of constant external objects. The computer that you use to communicate on works (perhaps I should say ‘nominally’) using abstracted theories of physical matter, while none of its transistors are observed - millions of unobservable, unexperienced operations take place each second just for you to read this. I hope it’s worth it :stuck_out_tongue: Given the remarkable predictive power that it affords us, what reason do we have not to accept it? Ultimately, the substance of experience will turn out to be identical to the substance of matter, except with a different name. I suppose if you’re going for panpsychism, that’s an angle.

This seems like an appeal to common sense (as it is embedded in language). Perhaps we made some ontological booboos when we set up language OR when we started taking language as describing ontology rather than some ad hoc thing that elicited certain processes.

Occam’s Razor gives preference to Phenomenalism.

Breaking down phenomena into subject and object isn’t as parsimonious.

Quetzalcoatl:

Not too soon after work do I reply, eh? Got home, then became obsessed with design for cover of Berkeylian Realms Part One, Conclusion (Chapter 3). :sunglasses:

[b]I would say that the communication in our imagination is caused in the first place by collocation, or the coming together (through Frederick Hayek’s polycentric order or through some teleological, either conscious or unconscious, polycentric order?) of smaller elements to form one larger object or entity. I would think that collocation, in your paradigm of external to internal passage of communication (in which the external world communicates what’s in it to the internal world of the experiencer), gives us the stuff in the external world that’s being communicated to the experiencer. This is what I meant. Thus there is jigsaw-ism (I like that better than my previous “jigsaw-puzzle-ism” :slight_smile: )even in the external world of the source of info. With this collocation not applicable, I think, at some basic level.

I believe what you mean by all this is that our experiences are what they are because they are messages, so to speak, received by the experiencer by the external world, such that by nature we are mirrors of the larger world outside our current experience, and our current experience is a true (more or less) reflection of the nature of that world. We communicate with the external world in the sense that it sends us ‘pictures’ of what its really like in the symbology of forces and moving electrons, until those moving electrons (impelled by force) reaches that part of the brain that mimics the symbolic info. Amazingly, the brain is set up statistically and probabilistically with neurons and synaptic connection that just happen to be able to visually mimic or represent the objects existing in the external world. No brain, no communication.

It’s an elegant theory to be sure, but I still say that we are simply looking at ourselves (as we have only ourselves as a base for knowledge of the external world) and simply “making it so” that the content of visual perception must be a reflection of the appearance and behavior of the external world. But this reflection must be by chance if the very existence of visual perception is not derived from the external world itself. We only experience our experience, and it must come from somewhere if it did not magically pop into existence ex nihilo. The brain, a mass of cells within a bony skull, is ultimately mere symbology, and if it somehow contains experience (in phenomenalism this is easier to envision and accept) the a priori relationship between neurons and conscious experience is representationism: neural circuits giving rise to specific experiences must exist before the experience and represent or symbolize the experience in neural/synaptic form (the function of the neural circuit, reduced to the forced motion of electrons through the structure of every involved neuron, is a given).

In phenomenalism, brain, neurons, electrons, and experiences are composed of the same basic substance, so it is easy to see how neurons can come up with experience in the first place. In Idealism, the brain is merely an symbol of God’s intelligence and may function in the same way it does in Phenomenalism, but is generally thought to be a false machine in that it only appears to give rise to consciousness, when external psychical phenomena actually does the work.

In Non-mentalism (“non-mentalism” in the sense that something is not made out of or is something other than experience or the potential to experience altogether, not “non-mentalism” as that which exists but cannot experience), the relationship between that which lies within the skull and conscious experience requires magic, as the substance making up the brain is not the substance of experience itself.[/b]

[b]But in the end, you’re simply assuming that there is an ‘everything’ shaped like the content of visual perception and that it contains information about itself that can translate into the visual perception of a specific experiencer from that experiencer’s point of view. The only thing we experience is the experiencer (oneself) and the visual perception of something that exists as something seen from the perceiver’s point of view. We do not experience its supposedly external counterpart. However, some, coming to believe that a counterpart exists, create fictions of the existence of the counterpart and a fiction of the necessity for the existence of the counterpart in order for there to be the existence of the experiencer and the experiencer’s visual perception.

Don’t get me wrong: its an elegant theory, but all we have…all we experience is the second part, not the first. We simply come to believe (if we do come to believe) that the second is the first or that the second indicates the first. There is, I believe, a ‘first’ of some kind, and in the interest of Pantheopsychism I am bound to your informational theory in a theological sense, but in practice it is not at all necessary that there be pre-existing, external copies of the content of visual perception in order for visually perceived objects to exist. These can in principle be created by fiat by an external something or state of affairs that looks nothing like visual perception. It may ultimately just come down to collocation, akin to the “just so” collocation or piecing-together of macroscopic everyday objects by disparate energetic particles in physical theory. It is not necessary that there be a pre-existing model to the content of visual experience in order for the content of visual experience to be what it is—unless the model plays a direct role, giving of its own substance, in the very creation of an experiencer and that experiencer’s visual perception of the model, which “reaches in” to “portray” itself within the experiencer.

In the end, this point is (it seems) quite clear: the information that’s ‘out there’, in order to reasonably have anything to do with the mental information ‘in here’ (the experiencer and that which it experiences), must have the same substance as that which is ‘in here’, if it is truly responsible for the existence of the experiencer and that which it experiences. It is ultimately a question of the existence of subjective experience, the existence of the nature of our experience (the seven modes of VAGOTET), and the condition under which subjective experience exists (if it is not magically conjured or randomly pops into existence ex nihilo, it is somehow eternal, and has always existed in some form). Experience must come from somewhere, and there is a reason it takes the shape that it does (in the form of the experiencer and what its currently experiencing at a particular moment in time). This means that the substance of experience, if it does not emerge or is created ex nihilo (wholly without the use of any pre-existing material or substance) must exist before Russellian “logical constructions of sense-data, feeling, and thought” (aka an experiencer and its current experience) in the external world itself, and must make up the structure of the external world. There is the question of third-party experience, which you raised before. One knows that oneself exists, and that one is an experiencer that has experiences, with visual experience being something that appears to oneself and appears only in the form of how it is to your point of view. But:

(i) Does an external counterpart to your visual experience exist (such that, in principle, it does not require your looking at it to exist in the first place, and continues to exist when you’re no longer looking at it)?

(ii) If it does, does it experience?

(iii) If panpsychism (in which everything experiences, even if it is not a person) is false, then it does not.

(iv) If it does not experience, is it then non-mental?

(v) Does something have to experience in order to be mental?

In the end, says the Idealist, this assumes that there is something that is not a person in the first place, as that which is not a person is not a part of the person and exists separate from the person and its experiences (it must, if it can exist in the complete absence of persons without need for disconnection from the person!). But if only persons (with the experiences of those persons coming from or being a direct adjunct of the person) exists (with the substance of an infinite, fundamental person forming the ‘external’ warehouse that supplies the experiences of internal ‘micro’ persons), then there is no such thing as non-mentality, and objects of perception do not have independent existence, but are aspects of experiencers. However, there is a quasi-non-mentality in the sense that objects of perception do not have their own experiences because they are ultimately phantasmic extensions of the experiencer, but this is just to say that non-person experience simply does not exist because there simply does not exist anything save persons. [/b]

I used to think that overall, God has a purpose designed into us and that we do run on deliberate puppet strings, but in recent years the idea that we reflect (positively or negatively) rather than are deliberately controlled by God seems to have taken hold. Following Berkeley (inadvertently), I think that we are walking, talking, positive or negative symbols of God and God’s nature, and that we are autonomously (a quasi-puppetry here in the form of the fundamental mechanics of our being) ‘made’ so to speak, to be these symbols, and it is the only thing we can do. Thus we reflect God’s intelligence (in the form of our own intelligence and in the regularities and relative predictabilities in nature), God’s morality (in the form of our own morality or internal move to generate and foster positive experience and emotion) and God’s negativity or what it is to be the opposite of God (God’s Jungian Shadow in the form of or propensity and will to generate and foster negative experience and emotion, and the world’s generation of negative experience by quasi-unthinking mechanics). God, in this sense, is the background nature and mechanic of our being that, by fiat, sets the conditions. Our so-called ‘self-development’ is actually a process of being an internal barometer of God’s evolution from Jungian Shadow to pure Superego.

[b]Well its a safe bet that the imagination is collocated or pieced together to form what it is, at the very least (if not, it popped wholly into existence ex nihilo). But as for it being informed by something outside itself, in the sense that it appears as it does because of the appearance of that which informs it? In principle, this may not necessarily be so: it could have simply formed, collocated, out of something and by something that’s nothing like it apparitionally. This is never out of the question. And we do not experience information transfer between the external world and ourselves because we only experience ourselves, not the external world. We only experience the ‘message’ that is received, not the giver of the message (Although we may confuse the giver of the message for the message, confuse the external world for ourselves. I get into this in the Conclusion of Part One of the Berkeylian Realms series). Thus, what we make of ourselves and what lies outside ourselves is, and must be, operationally just a matter of our imagination. We can’t really know that our imagination and our knowledge of the external world is informed to us by the external world—we just believe it is. Heck, it may be, but from our vantage point we only believe in things that may not be true in the objective. We only know (through Russellian immediate acquaintance) of the existence of one’s own experience and oneself. We only experience one’s own experience and oneself. What’s going on outside ourselves is speculation. One only believes that one is informed by God or the world outside oneself (in the absence of gods).

Empiricism (the belief that knowledge is derived only from experience) v.s. Innatism (the belief that some knowledge is innate, or given from above: revelatory knowledge and such), I suppose. I believe in revelatory knowledge, being theist, but I play devils advocate for Empiricism as something that could be in principle if not in practice. I do not deny your ontology of external informing the internal in its structure: I simply deny that this information is, or worse must be, in the form of the content of visual perception, and that this must be in order for the content of visual perception to exist as it does.[/b]

Not if, by chance, the only things that exist are persons. It’s not a matter of what we can do or what we can imagine. Its a matter of what actually manages to exist, despite what we can imagine, or not. It may be that there are nothing but persons, and that before there were ‘others’ there was the one fundamental person. Or there have always been persons within the fundamental person, though not human. Or there may be un-experienced things. But the un-experienced, if it is not composed of the same substance of the experience of persons, cannot rationally play a role in the experience of persons, as it substantially is not experience or the act of experiencing at all. If it exists, we can say nothing about it, precisely because we do not experience it at all and it has nothing to do with experience itself.

I suppose so. But we cannot say what that point of experience is actually like. It cannot inform us, being not experience itself.

[b]Concise and to the point. Like it. :character-luigi:

Very good discussion. Lots of things still to consider, but at the end of it we must start with ourselves, because the only thing we experience is ourselves.

J.[/b]

It’s an appeal to meaning. If language is insufficient, explain why, but don’t use it knowing it’s broken and leave everyone else to just fill in the gaps. If you prefer that approach, I can only suggest you grape fiduciary through cat severaltimes to up. You know what I mean. :stuck_out_tongue:

Seriously, we all manage to communicate. With abstract nouns, I can parse such a phrase - “love is the act of giving freely”, “respect is the act of empathising with another as an equal”, such things. With a concrete noun, that doesn’t work: “my shoes are the act of walking to the shops” “cats are the act of contempt for humans”. So I’m asking clarification, because as it stands it seems senseless to me. And if you can’t explain precisely what pg means without heavy caveats on “my interpretation” and so forth, it might indicate the same for you.

Occam’s razor appeals to the -explanation- with the fewest entities/classes, not the description. Why would physicists bother with neutrinos, bosons and quantum mechanics when “god did it” is simpler? Because we can do nothing with the latter.

If it appears there’s a continuous external reality and we can live by that, what is conjuring these impressions each time we return to a room and find it the same? Is a Berkelian Thinker (for example) that intercedes on every moment of our waking lives, tracking the aggregate of our expectations and predictions and supplying us with the appropriate experiences -really- more parsimonious than a physical universe?

Only_Humean:

No, thank you for your response and input.

[b]But constant external objects, if they exist, are not the same thing as experienced objects (visual experience, as there are no external analogs for non-visual experiences, with non-visual experiences being subjective reactions to rather than visual depictions of external objects), because experienced objects cease to exist when they are not experienced and external objects, if they exist, exist regardless of experience or subjects of experience.

If this is true, then the pragmatic efficiency, let alone intersubjective agreement (as this can be nothing but multiple experiencers having relatively similar experiences, without the necessity for the existence of external objects) of experience based on the presence of external objects begs a causal relation between the external object and the experience ‘of’ the object. They are two different things, and the expediency of the existence of the second (the experience ‘of’ the object) depends somehow not just upon the existence but the speed with which the first (the external object) creates a mental copy of itself within an experiencer.

But how does it do this? In common methodology of the process of perception, the distal object (the external object) cannot fit (non-destructively) inside the skull (if it is larger than a skull) and brain, and the percept (a particular person’s visual experience of a thing it believes to be the distal object (Direct Realism) or a mental representation or simulation of the object (Indirect Realism) is believed to “come from” or “out of” neurons—so the external object does not directly create the percept: according to psychophysicalism, neurons within the skull do that.

But if Phenomenalism and Idealism are false, and external objects are made out of something that is not experience nor the act of experiencing at all, then it cannot use its own substance as the source of something it substantially and essentially is not. It cannot pull experience out of or from itself, as experience is not to be found before the fact within itself. The existence of subjective experience must be explained. If it does not magically pop into existence ex nihilo, then it must pre-exist in some form before it is the actual personal experience of a particular person. If external objects are made out of something that cannot also form the personal experience of a particular person, then there is no logical connection between the external object and the experience of a person. For one thing, we cannot experience external things: we can only believe they exist (even if in truth they do not).[/b]

As stated above, the very existence of experience, or of experiencing, must be explained. If it does not pop into existence (origination or existence ex nihilo), or if it is not created wholly without the use of pre-existing material and substance (creation ex nihilo), then it eternally exists. But it arguably cannot be created by non-experience, as non-experience is simply that which is not experience nor experiencing itself. Non-experience, or non-mentality (as “mentality” in the philosophy of mind is not just “thought”, but subjective experience per se) cannot produce that which is not itself (experience) from itself, as experience (which exists by being experienced) is not a pre-existing part of non-experience or non-mentality. They are two separate things.

The chemicals are made up of experience, as they are experienced. We do not and cannot experience chemicals made up of non-experience, so the chemicals that we know affect and ‘create’ perception and experience are experiential in substance. We do nothing but experience, and we are composed of nothing but experience, and the objects of perception are made up of the experience of the subject. We have no experience of the opposite of experience, but somehow believe that it exists. It’s paradoxical. We can’t experience it, yet incredulously claim we know it exists or that we know what its qualities are like based on something it is not: experience.

The term: ‘the substance of the act of experiencing’ is simply a play on ‘the substance of experience’. The act of experiencing, or ‘experiencing’ is a verb, as something that one actively does, but it is in a sense a thing: the act of experiencing is simply experience itself, and it is a substance in the sense that it is a palpable thing. In fact, it is the only thing that is known through experience to exist, as all ‘substances’ ( wood, steel, cloth, etc.) are ultimately experiences.

Interesting analogy. The object, however, does not give of its substance to form its shadow, as a shadow is simply an area, external to the object, where light cannot reach because the area is obstructed by the object. The shadow does not “come from” or “out of” the object: it is an aspect of the area behind the object . The relationship between an object and its shadow does not exist by chance, but the methodology of that relationship is not the same as the implied methodology of the relationship between an external model and the percept. The external model is supposedly mimicked apparitionally by the percept whereas a shadow is an outline of the object, and the external model, if the appearance of the percept and its similarity to the external model (as we could perceive the external model directly) is not a matter of random chance, should play a direct role in the very existence of the percept beyond just a remote flipping of the force switch between the external world and the central nervous system. In the case of the latter, the very relationship between the external model and the percept hinges (in psychophysicalism) upon the pre-existence and pre-existing potential for performance of something within a skull, not the external model itself.

[b]The point is not that you must constantly experience a thing in order to know that it exists. I am not using the term “know” in this sense or for this reason. The point is that that which is we known to exist independent of belief and speculation (with such belief and speculation taking the place of sensory experience due to the inability to sensorially experience that which the person believes exists) is known to exist only because it has been experienced. You know the television exists, regardless of whether or not you experience it in the future, because you experienced it in the first place.

There is primary (visual) perception (as I am using the terms) in the sense of directly experiencing something by standing next to it and looking at it (e.g. one may have primary perception of the Grand Canyon, or the Taj Mahal, etc.) and there is secondary perception, or the experience of something second-hand, through television, photographs, or even abstractly in the form of a pencil drawing of the object. There is a tertiary perception, or cognitive perception, in the formation of a mental image or imagination of the object in the absence of primary and secondary perception or if the concept is invisible or inconceivable, their is at least tertiary auditory perception of the concept by hearing a word that refers to the concept or a weaker form of secondary perception in terms of seeing the word on a piece of paper, in a book, or on a computer monitor. Presumably, we come to know of the existence of something through primary, secondary, and tertiary perception or we simply do not know that a particular concept or object exists at all, even if it objectively does. If something is not primarily, secondarily, or tertiararily (if that is a word) perceived, it simply is something that never comes into the mind at all. Knowledge, then, begins not only with those things that are directly experienced (or as Russell might have put it: immediately acquainted) but with those things that come to mind.

I use the word: “know” in conjunction with “existence” only in terms of the existence of primary, secondary, and tertiary perception and how these three together consitute knowledge itself.[/b]

[b]But these transitors, if they exist, would only be experiential transitors (phenomenal transistors) made up of the substance of someone’s experience of them. We do not and cannot know if they actually exist independent of experience. It is quite reasonable that they could (with this reasonableness applying only to phenomenalism and reflective idealism), but it may be that objectively they do not, and only form from disparate psychic stuff in the form of the experienced transistors and the person staring at them (they come as a set). Or they may exist when we are not looking at them in someone else’s mind (note to Quetzalcoat: the god-matrix again). The salient point is that they do not necessarily require external analogs of themselves in order to exist, precisely because the external analogs are not the experiential transistors.

The existence of the first (the percept) is caused by a process independent of and regardless of the existence of the second (the external object, if it exists), particularly if the second does not or cannot use part of itself to form the first. If the substance of matter is in fact nothing but the substance of experience with a different name (rather than the reverse, which, if matter is held to be non-mental, is impossible)—then and only then can it rationally be said to create or have anything to do with the existence of experience at all. If it is something that is not experience (qua experience itself) and as such cannot be used to form any experience, then it is not experienced (i.e. it is unavailable to primary and secondary perception, and exists only in tertiary perception as letters strung into particular words or terms). If it is not experience nor made out of the substance of experience, it cannot be known (although it can be believed) to exist at all (as we only know of existence through experience and with experience)—much less can it be said to matter (no pun intended) in the content and nature of our experience.

The only defensible position, in insistence that there be external models or analogs of the content of visual perception is not panpsychism but phenomenalism, as noted by Moreno.

J.[/b]

J

So there’s so kind of lego building going on where by chance the blocks form into houses, people and vehicles. Then that is also going on in everyone else’s mind too. Then because there are only minds within a mind, the shapes naturally correlate.

I do think that minds can produce info and concepts [lego blocks], but to understand an external world they would require instruments, which enable our collocative reasoning to correlate.

So now it just comes down to weather or not an external world exists. If it does then you’ll probably need to re-read/reply to all the posts lol.

  1. Does reality exist? Is there only one thing in reality? Only the first part.

  2. If only god then what are we, god or aspects of god, or don’t we exist? If we do then there’s more than one in the whole.

  3. If god is one thing then it is empty and infinite, there are no thoughts going on in that, no instances of anything other than the one thing. NO VARIATION!
    The collocation going on in our mind cannot exist.

  4. If reality is multiple, ~ even if that’s merely forms of the one, then there are instances of separateness [the first and second part] which require they are in a third party ~ a world of some kind!
    i.e. where we have 2 existing in 1 add them together and there is a 3rd, the whole which encompasses the two.

Yes it is in the 3rd [the world or shared].

No, unless its another experiencer, but even then its experience would not be in mine.

See above.

Yes. I got a feeling I just said something wrong :stuck_out_tongue:

Well its true that we only experience what we experience, yes, the rest is out there to debate further. E.g. as my experience is entire [or the entirety], why am I not the god-matrix? Are we all gods? Is the god-matrix a part of mine and you matrixes?

:slight_smile:

_

Quetzalcoatl:

[b]Looking at things from the level of what happens to exist (even imaginatively) versus what does not, it may be that the shapes, or general content of everyone’s mind (including God’s) are similar because there are only certain types of info that exist, and they manifest and repeat, relatively, in everyone’s mind. The same “tokens”, pre-cut before the fact of experience in the jigsaw pieces of everyone’s particular perspective (including God’s), happens by chance to exist and to express the paradigms of God/man mind. All the jigsaw portraits, so to speak, are relatively alike (or refer to the same corner or point of relative in the form of points prepared to make every distinct point of view) and bespeak the same concepts because only the jigsaw pieces making up these shared concepts and experiences (as well as unshared experiences that are, following John Stuart Mill, nevertheless “possibilities of experience” (for others)) exist, and they exist (by chance) in such a way that they only combine to give rise to God/man experience.

Even in the absence of a God or gods, one need only study existence from our perspective (one ultimately has no choice): our experiences, such as we actually have them, are “circumscribed” in the sense that we have only a certain type of sensorially/emotionally/cognitively amalgamative experience at a particular moment in time, with these amalgamations evolving through time to form a sequence or chain of different experiences blended together in a particular narrative.

One wonders why, bogus invocation of physical particles aside, why this narrative is the one that managed to exist in lieu of all others, and why the narrative of experience is so similar to everyone else’s. In the simplest way, if our experiences are indeed primordially quantized in such a way as to necessitate assimilation or collocation into the experiences of real persons, then it may be that only the jigsaw puzzle pieces forming actual individuals exist, regardless of whether or not God (or any other non-human anthropomorphic mind) is included in the set.[/b]

Sure, our minds require some type of bridge into the external world, if the external world is the material reservoir for our minds and experience. My only argument is that the instruments, the bridge, and the personal mind and external world itself can only rationally be made up of the same basic substance. Again, if the substance of one thing is simply not that making up another, two things have no logical or rational creative relation: something cannot take from itself that which it essentially and substantially is not, as the substance and essence of the other is not found at all within the first.

I believe in the existence of an external world. I just don’t believe in the existence of non-mentality or non-experience (That is, non-experience as a third person substance: the idea of non-experience in the first person is a daunting problem to the Idealist, but the Idealist can simply say that the only thing that happens to exist are persons, and their “exteroceptive” experience is merely an extension of themselves [albeit supplied by the material of the external world, even though in the very concept “supplied by the material of the external world” there lurks (gulp!) the spectre of first-person non-experience] as there is no non-person object at all: objects are simply experiences relative to each person in the “Continuum” (a play on the Q Continuum in Star Trek TNG).

Well, whatever the semantics one may apply to the term: ‘existence’. I think one should forsake all others and glare at the existence of oneself and the nature of that existence: the fact that it does nothing but subjectively experience (regardless of what is experienced). Taking this reality as primordial (as the fundamental basis of empirical knowledge), I’d say that we actually, in reality, only experience the ‘second part’: oneself and one’s immediate experiences.

[b]I would say we are microscopic aspects and anti-aspects of God (imaginative exercises, to God—although serious exercises to his alter, Christ (!) of what it is to be the oppose of God, using the materials and existential symbols available to depict such opposition), or living ideas believing themselves (if they believe so) to be separate from the macro-being but actually needing the material of the mind of the macro in order to exist and continue having one’s own mind.

In God we are akin, I think, to the imaginary people we conjure within our minds when reading a novel or creating one. These individuals are made up of thought (in our example), but they may, possibly, not be philosopher’s zombies at all! Even if they exist within us, they may, unbeknownst to us, have their own sub-dimensional (box within a box) mentality! The characters of Stephen King, for example, still within his mind (having not yet made it to paper or computer monitor), may have life all their own with the horror writer’s mind, and they may continue to exist in his subconscious or unconscious mind (although everything is causally connected in the end), experiencing new things, while the conscious mind of the writer has moved on.[/b]

While we can imagine God to be anything (i.e. God the orange on my counter or God=existence qua existence itself), if God is man writ the size of infinity, then you bet there is “just so” variation that just happens to exist in the potential and actual forms of the concepts that we, being the (positive and negative) offspring of God, also carry within ourselves.

In Pantheopsyhism and Berkeley’s proto-Pantheopsychism? Sure. Although these externals are just ideas within an external mind. Independent of Pantheo? Perhaps…or perhaps not. I can’t, and won’t, say that it is definitely one way or the other given that I cannot possibly know (as I do not and cannot experience its truth, and I do not claim that imagination is knowledge or revealed knowledge: if all imagination were knowledge, we’d really need an Omniverse large enough to contain a real-world Lord of the Rings, the zombie worlds of George Romero, and every single sci-fi and comic story ever told, among other things) that through either Russellian immediate acquaintance or inference.

I would say that the experience of another experiencer is not mine per se, and certainly not like mine in quality, but it is not out of the question that the other is somehow within me, such that it uses the material of my mind for its own, even if those internal experiences do not appear in my own conscious macroexperience. In the end, it may come down to the presence or absence of the derivation of one mind from a pre-existing one.

[b]I don’t know. You could be the god-matrix. I could be the god-matrix. Or we could all actually be gods. Or we could be a part of a real, external God. It all comes down to what one is convinced is true, and if this thing, whatever it is, is outside of oneself and the continuum of all of one’s experiences, then it must be taken on faith. The important thing, I think, is that it should at least be logically possible. Only then can one sleep the sleep of the just.

Side note: I’m going to push the peddle to the floor in cranking out Berkeylian Realms Part I Chapter Three—Conclusion to Part One. This means, me brothers, that my responses to your posts in this thread may be delayed, but I will respond to them as honor demands. Once again (if I haven’t done this before) thank you all for your input. It’s great to see good, no-nonsense philosophy, absent esoteric and obscure gobbledegook, obfuscation, and wilful ignorance. Good job everyone.

J.[/b]