gib - you are asking if reality exists. Not if it’s real. Yours is not a philosophical position at all, not a good one or a bad one. It’s a language problem you are having. You really should be asking, “Is anything real?” or something like that. I’m not sure you are getting it - you are speaking nonsense. This is not an attack on your position, but on your literacy.
I do not mean to be rude, but I have no other way of saying it.
what does reality mean?
If I see red, is it really red I’m seeing? Or the lack of every other color.
To me a rose is not really a rose. You people destroyed the rose by makeing simple poems about them and selling them for 5 bucks a peice at the bar.
Assuming you mean “Is there a such thing as reality?” I don’t think it matters.
I mean, if things weren’t really real, what would the problem be? If nothing at all is real, then we aren’t missing anything. If we ourselves aren’t real, then who do we have to feel sorry for? If the world around us isn’t real, but we are, then our perception of the world is still real, and every application of the word ‘real’ is thus still relevent to the world.
if nothing was real would you get scared in dreams?
Not really
Many philosophers stand by the position that perception is reality.
in a sense, I agree with this. However, in another sense I disagree.
to me, reality is basic fundemental knowledge.
For instance, if you take ten people and put them in front of a tree and ask them to describe what they see internally (within the tree; ie spirituality, etc) and externally (outside the tree) you will get a vast range of internal descriptions (what the tree means to you, if anything) and essentially, though differing, one single external description. A person may describe its appearance in detail but each person will admit they are describing a tree. The tree, because we all agree it’s a tree, is part of reality. Just as, if you take ten people and ask them to verify that I am sitting on a chair, typing on a keyboard, and looking at a computer monitor they will all verify that I am doing this. That, to me, is reality. Just as, though everyone views death in a different light, everyone will admit that when one dies one’s heart stops beating and their life, as they know it, ceases to exist. Reality, therefore, is basic human fact. The rose is red, for those that are not colour blind or handicapped in any way relative to the majority. The rose is red for the majority, and those that can not see that the rose is red, know that it actually is, if they have the capacity for that knowledge.
Therefore, is not the rose red in reality if the majority of people agree that it is so? if we understand and can analyze and know about redness, and why the rose is red, and how the whole process works, is that not reality? is that not something we can refer to as real?
If we have no grasp of general reality, then what exactly do we have? is that not a starting point? the grass is green, the rose is red, the sky is blue…should we even question these things?
Reality is fact and perception is the way in which distort fact
No need to worry about being rude - spats like this are how we avoid boredom on philosophy forums 
.
Well, let me see if I understand you. It sounds to me like you’re making a Wittgensteinian argument. I only know Wittgenstein superficially, but from what I know, questions like “Is reality real?” are right up his alley. He thought philosophers tend to go astray with question like that because of mistakes in our language. It so happens that we have rules of grammar in our language that allow me to take the words “is”, “reality”, and “real” and put them together in the form of the question “Is reality real?” Because this question follows the rules of grammar, I can attribute a semantic to it, thereby treating it as a meaningful question. This is a mistake, Wittgenstein thought, because there is no meaningful context in which questions of these kind come up except by randomly throwing together words.
If I’m right in thinking this is what you mean, then I’m afraid you’ve misjudged me. I think maybe you’re assuming I hold conventional notions of reality, but let me tell you my views on reality are anything but conventional. I guess you could call me a quasi-idealist, but not in the tradition of Berkeley - there are some aspects of Berkeley’s idealism that I agree with and some that I don’t.
Here’s what I think of reality (I don’t have the time to defend this in total but these are my views):
Reality is:
The relativity of reality means that what’s real for one person might not be real for another. This goes all the way up to the level of beliefs, so for a theist, God is real, but for an atheist, God is not. How can God be real and not real at the same time? If we understand each person to be at the center of their own reality - that is, each one’s reality is distinct from everyone else’s - then you could have God in one reality but not in another.
In this system, we can’t make statements of the form “X is true” or “A is real”. Instead we must specify which reality the statement is true relative to. So the above statements could only be meaningfully said as “X is true in reality Y” and “A is real in reality B”.
The hierarchical structure of reality means to convey that some realities take precedence over others. So if one is high on drugs and thinks he can jump off a 10 story building and fly, he may be right in his own reality, but the reality of physics - where gravity still exists - has precedence over his reality and preempts it in a bloody mess. Same goes for dreams, stories, fairy tales, and some religions (will not name any 
).
The dynamic nature of reality means to convey that reality can change as a function of time for one individual. So for a 5 year old who believes in Santa Clause, Santa is real, but Santa may cease to be real when the child ages to 6 or 7 upon learning that Santa=parents. Of course, the child doesn’t actually experience this as a transition of realities - he just looks back on his belief as a mistake.
Anyway, to get back to the point, with this paradigm of reality, the question “Is reality real?” is not a bad use of language - it is actually a good and meaningful question in the following context. Take the relativity of, let’s say, realities X, Y, and Z, and consider their hierarchical relation to reality R (i.e. R is a “super-reality” that encompasses “sub-realities” X, Y, and Z). Just to bring this into a meaningful context, let’s say R was this reality - the one you, me, and the rest of the actual world resides in - and realities X, Y, and Z were stories of fiction someone wrote. There might be an object x in X (say a dragon). We would say of x that x is real relative to X, but not real relative to Y and Z. Considering x is an object in a story, we would have to say that x is not real relative to R as well. All well and good for objects in a reality. Now what about the realities themselves? Well, considering X, Y, and Z could be thought of as objects in R, we could get away with saying that each one of them is real relative to R. What about to each other? Is X real relative to Y or Z? What about to itself? Is X real relative to X?
Given this paradigm, I find the last question to be a good one. Personally, I would say no since X is not an object in X, but it is tricky. One could say that X is an object in R as are Y and Z, so we would have to settle the matter of whether or not an object can be real relative to itself in virtue of its being real relative to the reality we find it in.
Anyway, those are my views on reality. I realize it needs a bunch more backup, and this post doesn’t do it justice. I’m sure you could find a paradox or two somewhere in there, and I try my best to resolve all paradoxes in the papers I’m currently writing (will have a website up soon - let me know if you’d like a link when done). You obviously don’t need to buy into this view, but I hope it serves as an example of a context in which the question “Is reality real?” could be meaningful.
Didn’t you just describe reality? Why would you describe something that you think is fictitious? All of your “sub-realities” (the X’s, Y’s A’s etc.) are governed by the parameters of what you define reality to be, i.e. relative, hierarchical, and dynamic. This is all pretty messy without a clear definition of what reality is, but it seems to me that this context in which you’ve defined separate realities means that they all exist in an overarching reality.
gib - In truth, I was merely making the Miss Leary argument. She taught us old-fashioned sentence parsing in sixth grade. Wittgenstein, on the few occasions when he is coherent, is writing at about a sixth-grade level - one of the Great Masters of the Obvious.
I have not misjudged you, if you’ll pardon. You’re just making stuff up as you go along - including the definition of reality. Have fun.
The rest is just New Age mumbo-jumbo. Philosophy by Prosac. Again, enjoy.
It’s only fictitious relative to my current reality. But in the worlds they depict, everything is real relative to those worlds.
Well, if they do, and if one was to believe in this overarching reality, then that would BE his/her reality, and all “sub-realities” would not be real relative to that reality.
I find the best way to understand this is to consider a story. Not that anybody would believe a story to be real, but the logic in the analogy can be carried over to other cases that people might actually take to be reality (like dreams). Anyway, consider Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. In Indi’s world, the Holy Grail is real. In the world of George Lucas, the Holy Grail is not real. For George Lucas, Indi’s world is a sub-reality and therefore not real. But in Indi’s world, George Lucas’s world is not real either. How much more paradoxical would it be if George Lucas, the actual man, existed in Indi’s world? How would one explain the chance encounter of Indi meeting George on the street one day. George does not write himself into the script, and thus we can clearly say that the world of George Lucas is not real relative to Indi’s world. This is a perfect example of the relation between a “higher” reality and a “lower” reality. Neither are real relative to each other.
The key point to remember is that if you posit a higher overarching reality that contains all sub-realities beneath it, you have just espoused a belief in that higher reality, and therefore it becomes your reality.
I feel I should clarify something. I’m not pushing this view as the way reality actually is - that is, I’m not saying “This is the correct way, and the more conventional view that there is only one reality is wrong.” I’m pushing this view as a paradigm by which reality can be described. I usually compare this to the geocentric vs. heliocentric views of the solar system. Even though one is scientifically correct and the other isn’t, both are valid as descriptions of how the movement of the stars and planets look. In other words, one could view reality as one thing, or as a multiplicity - and what I’m offering here is a paradigm by which the latter view can be taken without encountering inconsistencies. Of course, I am somewhat of an idealist, and as such, this view is not only descriptive for me, but necessary for my beliefs to hold. But what I’m saying is, even if you weren’t an idealist, I maintain that as a descriptive tool you could work with it.
Well, now you do mean to be rude… but I still don’t mind.
Not at all, gib - I do not mean to be rude.
Geocentric models only look good if you aren’t able to look too well. Or if you don’t look hard enough. You are simply mistaken here.
A movie script, or any part thereof, is not a subreality of anything. It is fiction. Fiction doesn’t describe anything real. It is not meant to. You are relying on fiction here, and have shown it. When I say you are making it up, I am not pulling that out of thin air. You have as much as said so - you use fiction as a model of your theory. I am not trying to be rude - I am characterising your position in just the same way you do. We just have different ideas about the value of fiction in philosophy.
Wittgenstein was one of the greatest philosophers ever, in my mind. His Tractatus, while being on the somewhat crytic side of things, silenced people for years and remains an absolutely seminal work. His Philosophical Investigations is one of the most interesting works of linguistics and thought I’ve read and I think the most interesting that one could read.
wait till you get to derrida…
btw, ludwig disavowed the tractatus thinking it filled with “grave mistakes”…
-Imp
Wittgenstein, among his many other faults, has the Snapshot Disease. He doesn’t know, for instance, the difference between a closed system and an open one. Language is dynamic, except in his hands. He thinks he knows the entire language - thinks anyone can. No one can. Language is not a body of knowledge, it is an activity.
Flippin’ through the wondrous pages…
"Defining, then, by means of other words! [You can just feels his pain, here.] And what about the last definition in this chain? (Do not say, “There isn’t a ‘last definition’. That is just as if you chose to say: ‘There isn’t a last house on this road; one can always build an additional one’).”
I grabbed this just about at random. He’s got a million of them, though. Roads end. The length of a road is static. You can build more road, you can rename some pavement, but there is always a terminus. Not so with language. Roads are linear - you can discern an end. Does he mean the last house you get to, or the last house you can build, anywhere on the road? Does he know? He says “chain”. Are there chains of definitions? Is this linear? Or do definitons refer back to others, in a spiral, or figure eight, or, heaven forbid, a loop? Eh, Wittgy? A loop? Is your paradigm wrong to begin with? Isn’t this linear model a bit, er, stupid? Isn’t there always a last definition that we need?. Don’t we choose the loop from an openended, dynamic system? Or are we to allow the language to control us, to control our navigation through it?
Wittgy has trouble with navigation. Mainly because he doesn’t know where he is. He flounders around with every obsessive confusion he can think of, perhaps assuming that everyone has the same obsessive confusions, and then pops out with gems like, “Before I understand, several interpretations [of a sentence, he means] may pass through my mind, and then I decide on one of them” - which, compared to the neurotic ramblings preceding this, seems like a revelation of some sort. Yeah, Wittgy, no shit.
In general, Wittgy chooses paradigms that seem very clever, but do not fit the situation, and do not allow for any results but those which he desires at the outset. His application of deep-rooted anxiety to logic and language is entertaining, and perhaps unique in philosophy.
What do you mean by “look good”? Do you mean “explains well”? Look, I realize the geocentric model was abandoned for the anomolies it could not explain (stars seeming to travel in small loops partway through their journey across the sky). But explanations are irrelevant here - I made it clear that it is the descriptive power that I’m using in this analogy.
Of course! Movies are fiction relative to our reality. I’m not denying this.
I did make it clear that I’m just using fiction as an analogy. That’s perfectly legitemate. I don’t think there’s every a condition under which fictitious tails could ever become real for someone, and I don’t think it represents a reality that’s somehow “out there”. You can’t talk about a reality being “out there” in this model - such a statement is meaningless. A reality is its own existence and doesn’t exist “in” another reality. If you must talk about a reality being “in” another one, you have to consider it in a form other than a genuine reality - like a story. In this case, it cease to be a reality and becomes an “object” in a reality.
Gib - Yeah, descriptive power. You mean here only the power to impress with a story. Geocentric models lack descriptive power, the description is the explanation - there is no difference. Science describes. That’s how it “explains”.
The word reality is meant to describe objective phenomena - things that happen outside our “minds”. Empirical events. You are confusing this with a purely subjectivist approach. My point is that you need a different vocabulary. Or you can make up your own definitions. Kant did it - so can you.
But there is no such thing as “a” reality - that’s my point. Just as there is no such thing as “a” red, in the sense of “a” redness. There are shades of red, but they are all only quailities of light as we perceive them. They are not objects. “Reality” is the word we use to describe a class - it is the name of a class.
You are taking a subjectivist approach here, which is fine. But a purely subjectivist aproach cannot say “reality” at all. Cannot posit individual realites within the context of one reality - your approach realy assumes that there are only individual realities. Not that they are subsets of a set, but that they are descrete sets - that there is no intersection with one big set of reality. That big set precludes such intersection without contradiction. Your subrealities will contradict with each other within the big set - they must exist independently, which again, if fine. You just can’t have it both ways and still make sense.
I do not object to your subjectivist view per se, only to the obvious contradiction that subjectivist sets are compatible with the big set of reality. I am struggling to say this in a way that you understand. I cannot seem to find that way. The fault is mine, I am sure.
No worries. In fact, I think my views are just as hard to articulate as yours, if not more so. I realize it’s a very different way of thinking about reality.
I still think there is a clear difference between description and explanation, but to avoid digressing, I’ll leave that for another thread.
You’re right that I’m a subjectivist, and I’ll grant that I am redefining “reality” - namely, as being relative. I also agree that, as a subjectivist, I can only rationally posit individual realities rather than realities within larger realities. That’s why I refrain from saying that X is real and not real at the same time. Given just one reality, X is either real in it or not real in it.
I also agree that “reality” is not a concrete thing such that we can talk about “a” reality, but as an abstract thing, I think we can say this. Just like with redness - no one finds a thing called “redness” lying around, but I think it’s fair to say that, as an abstract concept, we can talk about “redness” being a thing (as in a property). Your example of reality being a set works this way too. It’s true that we define reality to be the set of all things real, but a set is an abstract entity. It is a thing in the abstract sense. We can talk about there being 2 sets or a multiplicity of sets. No, we will never find these sets lying around or growing from trees or whatnot, but in helping us to talk about them, it’s perfectly fine to think of them as things.
So what does that entail, from a subjectivist’s point of view, about reality as a set? A subjectivist would say that, since we define what is real by what we perceive to be real, the matter of what goes into the set we call “reality” is not always an objective task. A theist would add God to the set whereas an atheist would not. The subjectivist says that it is not a matter of trying to guess what elements are in the set and which aren’t, it is a matter of defining the set as containing those elements one perceives to be real. And yes, this requires redefining “reality”.
As for the reasons the subjectivist thinks “reality” needs to be redefined is a matter of the theory supporting his/her subjectivist position. It’s not just whimsical. This gets into the matter of the explanatory power of his/her point of view as opposed to the its descriptive power. That is, it’s one thing to describe reality in a certain why, but quite another to explain why you think that description is more fitting. An example of this is Berkeley’s theory about the relation between reality and perception. Berkeley’s theory was more than just a subjectivist’s description - it was a theory about how reality works. I haven’t even touched upon my reasons for holding a subjectivist point of view (and I won’t here 
), but I don’t think that’s necessary to argue that a subjectivist could use this alternate model of reality that I’m presenting here in order to talk about his/her theory in a consistent way. So long as he/she has some reason, he/she is best off using this model.
Finally, I’d like to touch upon your comment “Cannot posit individual realites within the context of one reality”. I don’t think you can either. I don’t think the stories that we find in our reality actually constitute realities themselves. They are just stories. As such they are members of the set we call “reality”. But what I’m saying is you could treat them as depicting another reality, one in which all things in the story (aliens, fairies, the Holy Grail, etc.) are real realitive to the reality being depicted (or all being members of the set being defined by the story). The key to avoiding the problem you pointed out - that is, the problem of having a subreality in a greater reality - is to realize that once you treat the story as a reality, you have to forgo treating your actual reality (the one in which you are reading the story or watching the movie) as real. You, being a reader or a movie watcher, don’t exist in the story, nor does anything in the reality surrounding you. There is no reality within a reality, there are only members of one set corresponding to other sets (i.e. the story as a member of the set we call “reality” corresponds to the set the story is depicting as “reality”). Same goes for coexisting stories - you cannot treat both as realities at the same time. Either one is real and the other doesn’t exist (or corresponds to an object) or the other is real and the first doesn’t exist. So the structure is not one in which realities exist in other realities, but of individual realities with correspondences to each other’s members.
What the subjectivist would say about this is that, if it was possible to mistake the story for reality (and it’s not impossible to imagine some kind of hypothetical scenario in which this is the case), then the story would indeed be reality for the person making the mistake (of course, it wouldn’t be a mistake for that person).
Okay, gib. This makes sense - finally - as far as you have taken it. Two notes - one, you may have been making sense all along, but I missed it. Or, you have cleaned up your language. I believe it is the latter. My posts are all extemporaneous, and I am sure that my language is, at times, sloppy. Two, you have expressed your view, as far as it goes, as subjectivist. That alone provides more context. Thank you.
I’m not sure you can get away without addressing the difference between description and explanation (in science) for long, but we’ll see, if you keep posting.
You will need to have some interesting things to say about communication, about language - more than you have, to flesh this out. Undoubtedly you do have more to say. But I am already wondering what purpose you have for holding this view. The question of purpose arises, in my mind, because the classic subjectivist view remains Descartes’ in my opinion. He was a theist, which is another wrinkle. How does your view, or should I say, where does your view digress from his? The constant in his view was God, of course. This device allayed many difficulties in describing a common experience. And provided instant purpose - God’s purpose, of course. Do you have such a device?
By the way, this last post of yours is the most interesting thing I have seen on this board for quite some time. That is as meaningless as any opinion I have, but I mean it as a compliment, at any rate.
I am holding in abeyance one objection that I have still - calling a class a thing. It is a slippery metaphysical, or rationalist, slope to call a class, any class, a thing. It soon tends to become an object, just an abstract object, which is still okay, but my point is that a class is no more a thing than is any other mathematical idea, like a point or a line. An idea is not an object, not really. But I will wait and see if you have more to say before I can say that this is a difficulty in your position. I am still not sure how important this idea is to your thinking. But I would like to know more, if I may.
Can you answer my questions about Descartes and God? I am just wondering how people communicate under your view.
I think you’re right. As a matter of fact, this whole discussion has been sort of an exercise for me. It’s actually changed the way I think about my views somewhat. For example, in one of my earlier posts I said “R is a ‘super-reality’ that encompasses ‘sub-realities’ X, Y, and Z…”. Now I realize I should have said “R is reality and it encompasses ‘could-be’ realities X, Y, and Z.” The general gist of what I was trying to say remains the same, but your right in that careful attention to the words one uses can make the difference between being taken for a rational person or a mad man.
Well, let me take a crack at it. This might be a matter of ambiguous wording, once again, so let me clarify what I mean by “descriptive”. When I talk about something being “descriptive”, I mean it depicts what it looks like. So, for example, when one describes the motion of the planets across the night sky, pointing out how it rises from the horizon, travels across the sky, temporarily doubles back and then resumes its course - making a small loop - and then sets below the horizon on the opposite side, he/she could say of it “It looks like the planet/star is moving around the Earth, making small loops on the way.” I think this is a true statement. Of course it looks like this. This is drastically different from the statement “The planet/star is moving around the Earth, making small loops on the way.” because the latter statement entails the phenomenon being observed actually is a result of the solar system being geocentric. The latter statement attempts to explain the phenomenon observed (poorly, of course).
Well, truth be told, I’d rather not give too much away, and I have a couple reasons:
If I had to put in this much effort to argue my case about reality being relative, I can’t imagine how much it would take to argue for my subjectivist theory. That’s not to say that I’m uncertain about it or that the logic supporting it is shaky, just that it really is a very different perspective. I like to think the complexities in expounding it are more an aspect of the transition from a conventional way of think to my way of thinking, but that once the transition is made, it’s really not that complicated.
Before I explain my theory to anybody, I want to patent it. I feel that it is worth something, even if only for publishing a book. Of course, everyone thinks their theory is worth something, and mine might not be any better than the next person’s, but so long as I feel it has a chance, I think it’s worth taking.
That being said, I’ll give you the general idea. I’m not prepared to back it up to the bone, so I’ll expect you’ll have plenty of objections. I don’t think I’ll elaborate much on it past this post, but in respect to your comments, I will point out which objections I’m aware of and think I’ve resolved, and which I’ve never thought of and will need to resolve.
So where does my view digress from Descartes’? That’s easy - he was a dualist, I’m a monist. As a subjectivist, I’m more inclined to the mental side, but I refrain from reducing it to a form of anti-realism (i.e. I don’t believe that the world is “just mental”). I still believe that when you look at a rock or a tree, they really are there and they really are material, but I think the perception of them is primary - that is, they draw their “realness” from one’s perception of them. In a nutshell, my theory reverses the rolls of perception and the world. It says that, rather than a physical/3D world that contains a mind, there are minds that contain physical/3D world. The world is still real, it’s just not “out there”. In this sense, my view is more in line with Berkeley than Descartes, but even then I digress from Berkeley’s form of idealism.
In the paper I’m writing, I begin by defining “mental experiences”. I say that all mental experiences can be defined as having three essential traits:
All mental experiences are primarily qualitative (i.e. they are qualia), and that their quality can span far beyond the qualities familiar to humans. So although there is a vast array of qualities humans can experience (colors, shapes, depth perception, sounds, touch, pain/pleasure, emotions, memories, beliefs, fantasies, etc.), this represents only a small fraction of the possible qualia a conscious being might have.
All mental experiences contain what I call the “essence of reality”. When a new born first experiences the world, he/she experiences it as real. No one goes through their entire life thinking “Wouldn’t it be strange if all these experiences I was having were reflections of an actual world?” We take it for granted. There is something about our experiences that makes them feel real. It’s not just that the sky looks blue, it’s that it is blue. This strange something that makes them feel real, I’m proposing, is something imbedded in the experience. It is in this way that I say “my theory reverses the rolls of perception and the world”. That is, the reality of the world is in the experience, not the other way around.
All mental experiences are meaningful. Even something as trivial as feeling the coldness of water has a meaning - it means that the water is cold. As it turns out, the meaning in our experiences, when translated into words, comes as a statement about reality. For example, the meaning in the coldness of water is translated as “the water is cold” and this statement is saying something about reality - that in reality, the water is cold. So you can see that there is a connection here between an experience’s meaning and the “essence of reality” within it.
I take these tenets and draw further implications from them to show a few more things (and if you’ll excuse me, my language is about to get “sloppy”). For example, I argue that, the meaning in experience is enough to allow mind to exist without the support of anything more fundamental - that is, meaning allows experience to act as it’s own basis for existence. I also show how meaning gives rise to the flow and momentum of our minds - that is, the fact that our experiences are in a constant state of flux can be explained by the fact that they have meaning. I’m also careful to maintain a correlation between mind and brain (not in a dualistic sense, of course). I argue that the relation between mind and brain can be generalized to mind and all matter. The true form that matter takes beyond our perception of it is equivalent to what Kant called the thing-in-itself. Now the thing-in-itself is, properly understood, not conceivable - certainly not the material stuff we experience. The matter we experience is primarily perceptual, but it is also a reflection of other kinds of experiences going on outside our minds. These experiences are not conceivable (refer to first property of mental experiences above) and therefore they fit the definition of Kant’s thing-in-itself. They are still experiences, however, but they belong to a “universal mind” (I guess this is the equivalent to “God”). And because the inherent meaning within them permits them to be self-sustaining, they need not depend on an underlying physical existence. They go through flux, just as our experiences do, and one of the forms they can take are perceptions of matter. It is only when they take on this form that they become “our” experiences - that is, upon becoming perceptions of matter, they become the first of our experiences, and thereafter can continue to change form, becoming thought, emotion, memories, etc. They can leave our minds, returning to the “universal mind”, through acts of will (although I have my doubts about whether the will is genuinely “free”). Essentially, this also means that when we look at other people’s brains, we’re actually seeing their minds, just in a material form.
Phew! That’s it in a very compacted nutshell. I understand it sounds like a bunch of “new age mumbo-jumbo”, but hey - this is my belief! I stand by it, and I’m not ashamed of it. I also understand there must be numerous objections. One that I tackle from the get-go is what I call the “paradox of individuality”. That is, if our minds are “sub-minds” of this “universal mind”, shouldn’t we all feel as one with it? Why do we all feel individuated? I have ways of resolving this. I also feel I can get around the problem of “lower realities” within “higher realities” that you pointed out by saying that the reality beyond our perception - that is, the world of all things-in-themselves - is nothing more than the cumulative set of all perceptual realities (or “subjective realities” as I call them). It ends up being equivalent to the paradigm we were arguing about earlier in which we agreed that the subjectivist’s view can only posit individual sets of “realities”, not sub-realities encompassed by super-realities.
Well, thank you.
Yeah, I hear you. My general rule of thumb is to watch out for “Pythagorasism”. That is, Pythagoras made the mistake of assuming that just because he can abstract these conceptual entities called “numbers” that seem to hold immutable mathematical relations to each other, then they must exist in some transcendental form. This view basically posits that raw numbers are somehow “out there”. So when it comes to abstract concepts, such as sets, as soon as I notice myself using “out there” terminology, that’s a sure sign that I aught to do a check on myself. But insofar as we’re trying to test the logical implications of some abstract concept, I think it’s okay to treat it as a thing. In fact, there is a certain sense in which I don’t think we can avoid it. When we talk about things like “sets” or “numbers” or “redness” and so on, these words fill the roll of the nouns in our language. So from a linguistic point of view, we can’t help but to talk about them as we talk about “things”.
Yes, God…
Well, I do posit a “universal mind” and I do think of this as sort of “god-like”, but I don’t think this concept plays the same roll in my theory as it does in Descartes’ or Berkeley’s. The latter two had to include God’s existence as a necessary premise that the conclusion could not do without. My theory, on the other hand, posits God’s existence as a conclusion unto itself. It’s not even the central conclusion the theory aims for, but sort of a conclusion on the side. I guess you could argue it this way: suppose someone had a theory that there were 4 chairs in the room, and his premises were that there were 2 chairs to the left and 2 chairs to the right, and his argument was that 2 + 2 = 4. To say that my theory depends on God’s existence would be like saying this guy’s theory depends on there actually being 4 chairs in the room - it would be true to say this, but only because this is the very conclusion his argument draws. On the other hand, my theory does say that existence depends on God, but only in the sense that existence depends on some fundamental essence that supports and sustains it - and this we might call “God”.
As for how people communicate under my view, I’m afraid that question is a little ambiguous for me. Do you mean to ask “What does my view say about the dynamics of communication?” or “How must one communicate if they are to use the vocabulary my view offers?”