no i base my existence on my experience, but if i have to prove my existence, then of course i base that on the opinion of others - that’s what the word “prove” implies - most of the time however, existence is enough without proof
any concept of the world is just a collection of “singular perceptions”
I bet you $5 you could state it more clearly.
I think this is a good description. My view of the world is really based on what I’ve learned, much of which I’ve learned from other people. This belief system is like a web, one strand of belief strengthening others, strands collecting until it becomes a full picture. However, something about it seems unsatisfying when you think about truth. If my perception is the only way I obtain belief, then is there such a thing as truth? Or, in this case, existence, outside of my own mind’s belief system?
I think I roughly agree with you.
My view is:
There are things.
True statements describe such things accurately.
I can never be 100% certain that my statements are accurate and therefore true. I can only do the best I can.
hello solipsism
-Imp
Truth is a function of the effectiveness of your beliefs - so there is always truth as long as there is belief, whether or not anything exists outside your mind, and regardless of how you obtain those beliefs. Whether or not any truth exists outside of your system of beliefs then becomes a question of whether or not your system of beliefs can, when confronted with something that falls outside of it, effectively incorporate that something.
Do things exist of which we are unaware? Probably, otherwise there wouldn’t be anything to discover through perception - but they aren’t true until or unless they’ve been discovered and we become aware of (formed beliefs about) them.
Is that how you define solipsism?
I define it as the belief that nothing exists external to your own mind
OR
that we can only know our own mind.
I deny and reject both claims. But perhaps your idea of solipsism is different.
I think I disagree with you. What is true is completely independent of our beliefs. What we think or consider to be true, however, I agree is connected with your beliefs.
Is your belief that ‘what is true is completely independent of our beliefs’ true? It’s just another belief. I’m not sure, at the level we’re talking about, that there’s anything to be gained from assuming that there is some kind of a priori system of truth - otherwise you end up with a thing-in-itself which can’t be known …
Yes, because it is a conceptual truth. It’s just a definition. And no, we can’t end up with things-in-themselves because such an idea is unintelligible, at least in the way it is usually defined.
if we define truth as independent of belief then we are positing that there exists a thing-in-itself, but if we define a thing-in-itself as something about which we can know the truth, then we are back to a contingent relationship between belief and truth. Why assume anything is true independent of belief unless we want to posit that a thing-in-itself exists unknowably?
If that’s how you define thing in itself, then fine, there can be a thing in itself.
I don’t know what this means.
Why not posit that there exists a thing-in-itself that exists knowably?
because then the truth about the thing-in-itself becomes, for practical purposes, contingent upon our beliefs about it, which places us right back where we started. Cut out the middle man, or not - it’s up to you - i’m just saying.
This is a little abstract. Let’s use an example.
There is a television on the kitchen table. This is true regardless of my own belief about it. In fact, I could be dead, and therefore have no beliefs, and it would still be true, because there is a television on the table. Do you agree?
yeah, but only so long as someone else believes the television is on the kitchen table - someone’s got to be conscious of it in order for it to be true - if all sentience in the universe were suddenly wiped out, then there would be no truth to the statement that a television sits on the kitchen table, EXCEPT as a function of our current hypothetical beliefs about a sentience-free universe.
knowledge is beliefs conforming to truths, after all - so knowledge is also truth conforming to beliefs - if we don’t have beliefs about something it makes no sense to say that it is true
Well, that’s where I disagree with you. What makes something true or false “in itself” for a lack of term has nothing to do with sentience. It has to do with whether or not the tv is on the table.
how do you determine whether or not the tv is on the table without sentience?
You don’t. But that doesn’t mean the tv isn’t on the table. To say that it is true that the tv is on the table is just to say that the tv is on the table, not that we can determine that it is on the table.
To KNOW whether or not there is a tv on the table, we need sentience. But it is true regardless of our knowing it to be true.
That kind of truth is useless to us, though - like the unknowlable thing-in-itself.
It’s not useless at all. It gives us a path for inquiry.
For a stupid example, we don’t know if there is life on other planets. However, it is either true or false that there is. So perhaps we should invest resources into inquiring. Or perhaps not. But all inquiry is like this, at least scientific inquiries - finding out truths that we do not yet *know."