Let’s say this is right and we all have the same reaction to this in all instances. Is this the extent of our knowledge, the one thing we can all be sure of? Or more likely you mean this as a good example of a category of knowledge. But then there is so much outside of such a category, and we, the various bodies if you like, disagree about what is knowledge outside this category.
It’s actually the easiest philosophical conclusion to make, ever.
If you are consciously awake, or even dreaming, then the body must biologically and automatically presume that it is not dead. You do not have to be conscious to be alive. In fact, many times consciousness and living are in direct competition with each other. This is demonstrated by suffering and suicide. Somebody who is highly conscious, of pain, of other people, and of self suffering, can and will make those steps toward suicide. Consciousness is not always an aid to life, but sometimes a fatal hindrance.
Even a dream signifies that your body is alive. Therefore, knowing what is real or unreal, conscious or subconscious, must begin from this premise and distinction.
If you are dreaming, then at the very, very least, as an absolute premise, your body is alive. You don’t even have to be conscious to “know” this.
That is also why some people prefer their dreams, or “day dreaming”, to reality, or to “daily life”. Daily life is boring. Fantasies are much more entertaining.
I’m not disagreeing, I am wondering how much it helps us in general with knowledge.
It’s a bit like Descartes ‘I am aware, therefore I’m alive not dead’. Though it’s even more tautological, arguably
= I am therefore I am.
But I like the brute experiential, feeling base of better than Descartes, I just don’t know how it helps resolve most epistemological issues.
I dream therefore I live.
It goes beyond this: Some parts of what others would say was us, we cannot Control at all. Some parts of what we call us, we cannot Control at all. From common sense, to folk psychology, to cognitive science, parts of ourselves, what gets defined as the person, is not in the person’s Control, already, Before we even look at ideas like solipsism.
Well, solipsism eliminates the distinction. But what I notice in most criticisms of solipsism, the solipsists gets challenged as if they should be able to Control Everything since Everything is them or in them. So I raise the issue of us already not being able to Control all that is in us or is us.
I am not saying one should throw it out, just I find no reason to assume the distinction Always holds or is even meaningful (on some levels, perhaps).
[/quote]
I see no reason to assume that they are metaphysicallly true, period. Which is quite different from using them where it works, having them as parts of various heuristics, and so on.
Though it might simply be: there is dreaming. And one cannot really draw any conclusions from this.
I mean, look at your Imeme thread for example.
Though maybe there isn’t dreaming, I mean, why should we trust what seems logical to a dreamer?
Don’t doubt so seriously, I have already asked myself why that is - like I said, I used to think like you. Why aren’t they the same stuff, seeing as one is more controllable on average, and the other is less controllable on average (though let us be careful about leading ourselves into a mutually exclusive dichotomy where things like imagination are always under control and reality is never under control - but like I said, I still know what you mean)? Because they belong to different sources. Right? I say not necessarily. Just because one side of a normal 6-sided dice faces perpendicular to any adjacent side, doesn’t mean it is made of a different substance, or comes from a different dice, it’s just distinguishable in a particular way. Just because my car is controllable when I’m going slow and straight, doesn’t mean my car is made of a different substance or is a different car when I’m going fast and all over the place.
Ok. This is why I suggested exploring why “lack of proof” constitutes “having every reason”. Your answer so far is only that lack of certainty is better than some particular alternative, but with no explanation.
I’m disputing what you’re calling “further” here. I’m saying it’s not further, but a distraction from going further. I think it’s your turn to explain how calling something real or not is “going further”. It’s an extra classification, but why exactly is it so important? (Why is a fast windy car real and a slow straight car not real?)
I dream therefore a dreamer lives.
The only way to refute this presumption is to claim that non living things can dream, like rivers, trees, and rocks. Non living items and objects don’t seem to have any cognitive functions, therefore, probably have no dreams. Dreaming is a function of cognitive systems, with brains. Different living organisms have different cognitive systems. If there is a living organism that does not dream, or sleep, then its cognitive system is too low on the life hierarchy to register.
Do cells, bacteria, and viruses dream, therefore, they don’t live? Well, the human body is made of bacteria, cells, and viruses. So what is the correlation between them and dreaming? Dreaming is a function of the brain, comprised of complex proteins and charged with electricity.
Life makes dreaming possible, yes. This does not mean that all life “dreams”.
But insofar as human knowledge goes, and reality, this may be the very limit of all humanity can “know” about dreaming, about life, about reality.
Because there are limits to human knowledge. Outside of knowledge, there is superstition, fantasy, dreams, and imagination. Imagination is what transcends human knowledge. Therefore, some aspects of reality may only become accessible to the imagination, and never human knowledge.
Likewise, what is “known” to one person is not necessarily known to all people.
I’m not sure why this thread is going on—and nor should you be, if you have been reading my posts.
We have one person claiming to be more faithful to the senses, when he rejects some internal/external distinction. Think about that for a second: When you look at a tree, what do your senses tell you about the tree? --That it’s a figment of your internal mental life? Or that it’s not? And how do you think the internal/external arose in the first place?
So who is being more faithful to the senses? Riiight. It’s basic fucking English.
Another person thinks that solipsism is the elimination of the internal/external distinction. That’s straightforwardly false, to anyone who has ever read anything about solipsism, even if was just a wikipedia article. Try it, please.
I’m really not sure why this thread still goes on.
Once, twice, three times a river.
[tab][youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v5ruDqdZn_s[/youtube][/tab]
Refuting is one thing, presenting serious doubt is Another. I am not saying I can demonstate you are wrong, but rather that what you are saying is not demonstrated. Language, with its subject verb base, seems to make this all apriori. But that’s language. I see no reason to assume, for example, there must be a dreamer just becuase there is dreaming. And if trees Dream, this actually supports your assertion since then trees would be dreamers. Likewise rocks, et al. But it just seems obvious that if there is a Dream there is a dreamer, but some argue this is merely cultural and all we have is verbs without nouns, processes without objects.
If this is true, then it might be very good for some people to take what you are Calling imagination as knowledge.
Would you say that somebody inside an induced life will also fight and struggle to come out of it? Or does that just happen eventually anyway, because time passes, and you either come out of your coma at some point or you don’t yet, and you either come out of your life at some point or you don’t yet.
And then you go on to admit that whilst some people are fighting for reality, some are preferring “daydreaming” or even tending toward suicide.
So what did you say?
The point is, that it’s an effortless philosophical conclusion. You don’t have to assume there is a dreamer, but it’s too easy to presume.
To dream is also to realize the dreamer.
Eventually any state of consciousness can connect with “reality”, or the material objective world, by that presumption. To separate a dream from the dreamer, is an internal division, like the mind-body split. It is a division of inner subjectivity. Again, you need to ask yourself, do the “cells, bacteria, and viruses” inside your body also “dream”? If you say yes, then this presumption can be drawn out to the “external world”. Plant life is living, therefore, can’t it also “dream”? However, this is often an unnecessary parallel to make into obfuscation.
It’s a biological reaction. One person’s body will succumb to the coma. Another person’s body will come out of it. The value for or against dreaming, and living, is a reflection of the particular body’s biological state. Some individuals are very opposed to the dream state. Others are more open to it, and compulsive of it.
Drug addicts, for example, prefer the dream state.
One of the most persistent, absurd, and horrendous aspects of “living life” is the dullness, blandness, and boring ness of it, most of the time. Even if one man lives a life of adventure, or a warrior fighting war after war, and many people party their lives away with lots of fun, the time between is unbearable for most. But people do not call the boring moments of life their “reality”. The mind, the brain, skips between the boring, mundane moments. Everybody is looking for their next fit of fun. A boring life, is sufferable, and therefore many will claim, unreal. But isn’t it the mundane prominence of life that is real or unreal?
Reality, therefore, is a value judgment, by how people choose, or do not choose, to spend the vast majority time of their lives, living between what they call “truly living” and “day dreaming”. They proclaim, “this is the life!” or “now we are living!”
It tends to be irrational, emotional, hedonistically driven and pursued. What is not pursued, what is not dreamed of, is that boringness, blandness, mundanity, mediocrity.
Time is more powerful, though, as I see it. And that blandness of life, is undervalued. People often call life the opposite of what it is.
As I see it, life lived is fulfilling the purpose and meaning of an individual. We all have limited time, in the end. The least any man can do, is consume such time efficiently. The realization of this purpose, maybe what constitutes, validates, and ultimately justifies its meaning.
I agree about the effortlessness of it. In Dreams however we do not realize the dreamer, at least often. Sometimes there is an ‘I’ but often there is simply experience. I’ve had Dreams that had no objects, nothing I could look back on and label from waking Life. One even lacked 3 dimensions - a very unpleasant experience, whatever it was - I could see gray and White, shifting, and hear a kind of grumbling. Very scary. No me, no others, the grumpling was not a voice or at least I did not Think of it this way. There was just experiencing.
I am actually going in the other direction. I am not separating out two things, but rather saying there is simply a process. Using Occam’s Razor to say we have a perfectly adequate description - dreaming - and there is no need to bring in something that is dreaming this Dream.
I don’t need to ask myself that following my line of skepticism.
I’m really not heading in that direction here.
Oh I see, you’re talking about dreaming as if there is no dreamer, no identity, and no human consciousness. There is just “dreaming” by an organism, without a noun, name, or presence. However, I would call that an inner subjective division, a mind-body split. You are saying there is no body, by claiming there is no dreamer. It’d be like claiming that you can dream, without a brain, which is obvious that you can’t, correct?
But I agree, once you remove or deconstruct the “I”, the iMeme, and reject identity of the dreamer, then the dream-state becomes unrestrained in a way. There is no way to “know what is real” or determine reality, except by awakening to consciousness.
Now that you mention it, what we all awaken to, perhaps, is our respective, perspective, identities. We awaken to “I”. I awaken to “we”. To awake is to become, to remember, your “personal” identity.
Psychology already clarified much about the dream-state. Even if you reject the iMeme, then you still cannot reject that the dream-state, while dreaming, immediately indicates your inherent individual identity. This is instinct. Maybe your iMeme becomes aware of your instincts and intuitions while dreaming these comfortable or uncomfortable dreams.
To dream, is to awaken to your cognitive instinct. In other words, your brain is “doing” things that you are not always conscious of. This is discovered in the dream state.
This leads to psychology, and studying the subconscious and unconscious world of the mind brain body.
Organism? No, just dreaming. Somethign like phenomenalism, say.
The Word brain represents a huge batch of phenomena. It is an idea drawn from many experiences. I am saying that perhaps only the experiences exist. And note I am not making the claim that that is the case. I am saying it is more parsimonious and I say this in response to your assertions. IOW to me ‘there is a Dream occuring so there must be a dreamer’ is nto a self evidence truth. It seems that way because of Culture and habit.
The idea of their being a subject may simply be an illusion.
Or even then.
yes, that happens. And sometimes, when it doesn’t, it can be disturbing. Waking up in a foreign country can do this, but even sleeping on the sofa instead of your bed can also.
It doesn’t indicate it though. I don’t Dream as Moreno. Sometimes, yes. Soemtimes, no. I would say more often it is not quite me or not anyone at all. Soemtiems there is just a witness, sometimes I am other people.
Well I can’t really say it is necessarily the case, so you may be right there. I feel quite confident in saying it is most probably the case though.
When I say I can’t prove it to you, I mean I can’t conclusively rule out all other possibilities. There is a ton of evidence though, and that’s what constitutes having every reason. I don’t think there is any alternative to a lack of certainty here. The evidence may allow us to approach certainty, but there’s always room for doubt.
Don’t take offense, it was probably just a poor choice of words on my part. What I mean is that you’re willing to make an intuitive judgment like “we sense what we sense”, but you’re unable or unwilling to follow your intuition further in making an entirely practical distinction. I don’t understand it. I think it’s extremely important that we understand, or at least behave as if, other people with other minds exist externally to us. To believe otherwise can be dangerous for obvious reasons. I think you probably do, at the very least, behave as if other minds exist.
I’m not sure it eliminates the distinction. I think solipsism just entails that we can’t be sure about knowledge of anything outside of one’s own mind.
Well it seems awfully meaningful. I’m not sure how you could argue otherwise.
You see no reason to assume that other minds exist externally from you?
Is that supposed to be me? Because I don’t reject the distinction.
I think the thread goes on largely because I’m asking questions. I’ve never actually discussed this sort of stuff with a professed solipsist, so I find it interesting.
No of course not. It’s Silhouette. As far as I can tell, you’re the only other person talking some sense in this thread.
Well take good care of your solipsist friend… because when he goes, we all go. ----yo badda bing!
Guess how many people showed up to a meeting of the American Solipsist Society? …Just one! ----yo badda bing!
Frankly, I’m surprised he’s not being ruder to you----it’s not a given that a solipsist has to treat figments of his imagination well. ----yo badda bing!
Is it getting solipsistic in here, or is it just me? ----yo badda bing!
Why is Silhouette so self-centered? ----yo badda bing!
I thought I stole these jokes… then I realized I actually wrote them! ----yo badda bing!
Ok, ok, I’m done. God bless…