From time to time I have attempted to make a legitimate connection between “reality†as I understand it and the effect of marijuana. The biggest obstacle, embarrassingly, has been the substance’s illegality, its “taboo†status, and the fact that most of the literature devoted to the subject is riddled with health bias: where the focus of the inquiry is always the drug’s “adverse†and “empirical†effects, and never attempts to include an inquiry into its “actual†effects. The result is that, because this information, too, “connects†with the concept of “marijuana,†I have never been able – or wanted to – truly put together a cohesive picture of the matter.
As I said, I bring this up in connection to my more “usual†attempt to describe the effect marijuana has on me: I attempt, in short, to paint a sort of Buddhist picture, a senses of “onenessâ€; I also tend to allude to Fight Club where Jack says something like, “after fighting, everything else in your life got the volume turned down.†My experience with marijuana has been similar to that, and today I discovered an even better way to describe what happens.
Given what I know of Jean-Paul Sartre, which is practically nothing, one of his big things is a notion he calls “the Look.†The basic way I understand it is that when we encounter another person, when we encounter another “self,†when we encounter “different aspects†of what we have until now understood as our “personality†or “identity,†when we encounter, indeed, what Sartre calls “the Other,†we experience ourselves through the eyes, as it were, of the Other; we “experience†“reality†such that we are what the Other says we are.
This applies perfectly in two ways. First, it explains very clearly the phenomenon of falling victim to “the Look†of those who would keep marijuana a taboo and/or illegal: I experience their “Lookâ€; as such, I literally manifest a reality in which their opinion is relevant and even active. This is the mistake. Instead, I want only to explain the effects of marijuana, and, moreover, I want only to explain the effects of marijuana on me. Second, it also applies perfectly, coincidentally or not, in the description itself of the effects marijuana has on me. Specifically, to those who know Sartre, marijuana takes the Look away.
I think this post is a very interesting one and needs much development. You’ve crammed a bunch of information into 5 short paragraph (which is actually quite long as far as OP’s in ILP go), and we should pick apart each one separately.
I don’t really have much to say on your first paragraph, and I get the general gist of it anyway (that there is much more to the effects of marijuana than what objective/scientific studies can illuminate - the subjective first-person experiences for one). Your second paragraph is much more interesting to me:
One point I feel I should warn you about is that although the experiences marijuana has to offer (and every other psychedelic for that matter) feel like a whole other reality unto itself, this isn’t incompatible with the notion that it’s “all in the head”. The problem is that we in the western world have a poor understanding what exactly consciousness is. I wouldn’t go so far as to claim I do have a perfect understanding myself, but I hold to a particular philosophy of mind that, to me, sheds a lot more light on this subject than western thought has hitherto been able to. The “reality” we see when we get stoned is indeed another reality, but it is one that the mind constructs for itself. This is not to be taken lightly, however, since my philosophy of mind also says that the reality we see when we’re sober is also a mental construction.
We change our perceptions of reality all the time. When these changes in perception go through a shift that is so radical that the contents of reality we end up perceiving are incompatible or mutually exclusive with those of the previous reality, we have no choice but to compartmentalize those conflicting content into separate realities, and then choose one as the reality we label as “the” reality - that is, for the moment - the other being just “in the head”.
I used to think of my philosophy as an answer to the question “what is consciousness?” I no longer think so. I now think of it as an answer to the question “What is the relation between mind and brain (or mind and matter more generally)?” But even then, I’ve recent come up with what I take to be the best articulation yet: the problem of consciousness (i.e. what is it?) is just the problem of ontology (i.e. what is being?). In other words, my position - my claim - is that one common philosophical problem (i.e. the problem of consciousness) reduces to a seemingly distinct philosophical problem (i.e. the problem of being). They are not two but one. I’m not solving the problem of ontology, I’m just simplifying the discipline of philosophy a little. That’s the contribution I’d like to leave.
Anyway, I’ll make a point on your other paragraphs later. Something should certainly be said on Sartre’s “Other”.
Hey gib, just wanted to let you know that I will respond to you in detail, but it might not be until the end of the weekend. (Probably just should have PM’d this to you, but oh well.)
If I implied that it was (incompatible), I didn’t mean to.
Did I say it was another reality? Again, if I did, I didn’t mean to. In fact, my contention is precisely that what we call “reality” is our “consciousness.” There’s the obvious difficulty in the fact that “reality” can be easily understood as “that which doesn’t go away when ‘I’ cease to exist”; but pragmatically, I don’t give a shit about that reality. So I think we’re closer to utter agreement than you seem to think, as when you say
I agree. And indeed my entire premise is that we manifest “reality” in consciousness, and the extent to which we block ourselves from various “potential” realities (e.g., trying to make a legitimate philosophical assessment of one’s experience with marijuana because of its “taboo” status) determines the extent to which we are either grabbing life by the balls or allowing the opinions of others (or our own preconceptions) to dominate our phenomenological experience - i.e., reality.
And as such we change our reality - that’s part of the point, don’t forget.
But it’s all just in the head; there aren’t degrees of reality, reality is just what we manifest in consciousness. If we encounter information that is “incompatible” with our reality, we do compartmentalize, as you say, but I think it’s a mistake to think of the compartmentalized data as in some way distinct from the one “reality” we manifest. I can’t quite get what you mean by the phrase “separate realities,” for example. Instead, conflicting data is compartmentalized (or ostracized) into the category of FALSE. Reality is everything we think TRUE.
I’m interested only in the question: how should I live? The “conclusions” of my investigations to this point say, at bottom, that humans create their own values, and as such they create their own states of mind. My reality is a manifestation of my own creation bothered only by others (Sartre’s “Hell is other people” and “the Look” speak directly to this point); i.e. at any given moment I choose the reality I manifest.
Note: I have no idea where this is going, or to what extent it still relates to the OP. I am in full existential crisis.
I guess we are. And your following statement seems to be the point that we pivot around:
From what I’ve seen, most people who have had ample experiences on marijuana and other psychedelics are lead to either one of two extremes: 1) that ALL their experiences are real (which is a dangerous thought) or that 2) NONE of their drug-induced experiences are real (which is utterly closed-minded). What I said about “compartmentalizing” realities is my compromise between these two extremes. In the case of 1) - where ALL experiences are real - there is only one grand all-encompassing compartment that subsumes all things experienced to be real regardless of conflict or incompatibility. In the case of 2) - where only sober experiences are real - there is, again, only one compartment, but this time so much is excluded from it, cast into the category of FALSE as you put it, rather than into an “alternate” reality.
I’ve had experiences on marijuana and other psychedelics which I just couldn’t integrate into the same reality I call the sober one (i.e. the ordinary everyday reality we take for granted). Now, I would have gone with 2) above in resolving this dilemma if it wasn’t for that central premise we both agree on:
So if it felt real at the time, it must have been real. But if it conflicts with what I now take to be real, then the only solution is to posit an “alternate” reality. There are many implications that follow from this which I won’t get into now, except to say that this necessarily “relativizes” reality. What’s real suddenly depends on which reality, out of a whole slew of “alternate” or “compartmentalized” realities, one takes to be “the” reality. My point is not that this one reality that one choses as “the” reality is ultimately the “actual” one and everything else just FALSE, but that what reality ultimately is is not FIXED to this one. If I choose to say that my drug-induced experiences weren’t real, I can only say that in virtue of what I CURRENTLY take to be reality (i.e. they are not real RELATIVE to my current reality). But all that changes the moment I get high, and now I take a different reality to be “the” reality, and the sober reality I just came from viewed as wrong (relative to the stoned reality).
So to answer you question (of what I mean by “compartmentalizing” realities), it’s much like Einstein’s relativity. A “compartment” is like a frame of reference. Which objects in a given frame are moving depends on which others are still relative to the reference frame. Of course, one can just as easily choose a different frame, one in which it is the previously moving objects that are now still and the previously still objects that are now moving. It is the same with the reality of our experiences. I can choose to view my drug-induced experiences as real by choosing the drug-induced reality as my “frame” of reference.
Anyway, maybe we should get onto Sartre’s “other” and “the look”. I’m actually not too familiar with these concepts. Maybe you can start me out by giving me a brief rundown.
Seems to me that all experiences are equally “real.” I suppose you’re referring to the difference in reality between, say, a dream and waking life, and in that sense I agree with you, but it doesn’t follow that dreams are “less real” than waking life. I mean, “what I experience” is what “reality” is, right? How could it be anything else?
You’re absolutely right. But my stance on this is that something’s “being real” is not permanent. A thing can go from “real” to “just perceptual”. It is real when it is experienced as such and it is just perceptual when it is thought to be such.
Well, first of all, let me just say that I’m NOT suggesting that there are a multitude of realities coexisting side-by-side. These “alternate realities” are just abstract models of what reality could have been if one would see it that way. For example, when dreaming, we typically take the dream to be reality. In that time, the dream just IS reality. But when we wake up, we look back on the dream as “just a dream” - i.e. it is NOT reality - and the waking world is the “new” reality. But rather than say the dream was “just a dream”, I’m describing it as an “alternate reality” - not one that really exists “out there” in some way - but more like a specific configuration of real things that could constitute a reality.
I usually describe this concept with something I call the “design analogy”. Here’s a quote from my website I’m in the process of building:
Remember that all I’m saying is that reality is relative - that what’s real depends on what we experience to be real - not that there are many coexisting realities.
Marijuana can be interesting in slightly distorting one’s perceptions and outlook, which lets gain new experience. But it is not much different than taking alcohol in that respect. I think psychedelic drugs are the ones that become especially interesting when we talk about changing our relationship to reality.
This is rather beautiful, if you don’t mind my saying. And I think it hits straight to the point of the matter: realities we experience are motherfucking reality. I mean, that’s kinda the whole fucking thing, isn’t it??
I want to stop you here. I like what you’re doing; your analysis is spot-on; however, I can’t help but notice the connection between what you here describe and temporal accounts of reality in general. That is, the dream “is” reality as we experience it, yet no more so than this moment. The way you here describe the dream is no different than the way we might describe any past event. I mean, we might say “just the past” just as son as we might say “just a dream.” Is there any tangible/phenomenological difference?
See, yeah, we seem to part ways here: it’s not that the “dream world” is an “alternate reality” so much as it is reality. Honestly, has anyone truly deciphered the difference between “reality” as we experience it and “reality” as it is defined by “others”? Dreams are not “alternate” realities, they’re motherfucking reality. I honestly don’t see the difference. You seem to want to say that dreams are in some way “potential” realities? I don’t follow that logic.
Special note: I would like very much to comment directly to the quotation from from your blog; yet, at some level, such a response seems out of place here.
To be honest, you’re not really saying much here. You mean to say marijuana is not much different than alcohol, yet … I mean, this post almost means nothing.
Well, there is a bit more to it than that, but it’s subtle. It’s true that we say of past events that they are “just the past” in the same way we say of dreams that they are “just dreams”, but we don’t say of the past that it never was real, but we do say this of dreams (“we” meaning most people - not you and I, Daybreak). Your observation that this has a lot to do with temporality is very acute. What I’m trying to do with my “multi-reality” scheme is reconcile this view that you and I share (and many others, I’m sure) that conscious perceptions and experiences just are reality (what I call a “dependent model of reality”) with how the layman views it (that consciousness and reality are seperate - what I call an “independent model of reality”). If conscious perceptions and experiences determine reality in virtue of being reality, then this must be true of beliefs too - and it must be true of those beliefs held by the layman and all other people who believe in an independent model. So as the typical layman believes his or her dreams are “just dreams” - that is, they never were real even in the midst of being had - then the only way this could be true - and therefore a dependent model like ours upheld - is if we who hold such dependent models partition beliefs, perceptions, experiences and other artifacts of consciousness into separate realities. That way, we can say of the layman’s belief about his dream being “just a dream” that it is true. How do we do this? By saying it is true in the reality he now takes to be true - that is, by making it dependent, or relative, to a particular reality - the one he means for it be taken relative to.
This has the effect of divying up time so that each reality has its own seperate timeline, full with a past, present, and future (think of Back to the Future when Dr. Brown draws the timeline skewing into an alternate 1985 ). These timelines maintain a one-to-one correspondence to each other. Whereas in one reality, the dream is real, the objects and events in that dream/reality correspond to a different set of objects and events in the “awake” reality - namely, the perception of those objects and events - that is, to things that only take place in the mind of the dreamer.
But like I said, these realities with their independent timelines don’t “coexist” - as though there is some transcendental plane of existence beyond ours where these object-like entities we call “realities” reside. Rather, I think of this scheme as a way of talking about reality so that we don’t end up being inconsistent or run into contradictions. I mean, if you think about how the layman views his own dream after waking - that is, as “just a dream” and never was real - then for us to maintain that the dream was real, and more importantly that he is wrong to believe it wasn’t, we would be contradicting our own view, for our view says that his beliefs must be true.
It’s really just a way of reconciling a dependent model with how the human mind so happens to work - how it marks out the boundaries of what it takes to be reality.
I think what I said above answers this too. Keep in mind, it wouldn’t be a mistake for you or I or any one individual to say that everything we experience, whether a dream, a delusion, and altered state, or whatever are all real things in one whole integrated reality so long as we have a way of addressing the seemingly paradoxical notion that others who disagree with us must either be wrong or are right while somehow not creating an inconsistency in our own view.
I think this point might lead into the problem of other minds and even solipsism. You think?
Hey, gib. Sorry about the delay. I’ll be picking up where the subject concerns the difference between “past events” and, for example, the dream world.
But we don’t care that it was real. What we care about is now. The “past” and everything that connects to it only benefits us in subtle, nondescript ways. The fact that it “was real” is only a marginal (if not arbitrary) portion of what, in fact, makes it valuable. We can agree in this, can we not? In turn, having come full-circle, we should also be able to agree that the “past” and “dreams” are virtually indiscernible if only inasmuch as they are useful to our current needs. In this way a dream (or, for that matter, a movie, poem, internet exchange, etc.) can be every bit as useful as is the “past.” What is the “past” anyway if not just a hodgepodge of our own memories! We want to attach some kind of “objective” significance to them, but in all fact, they can only be what they are: out own memories and imaginations that, taken together, make up our conception of “world history.” In essence, however, it is nothing more than our conception of “self” or our conception of “life”: it is merely whatever we’ve managed to put together; there is no “objective” standard to measure it against.
Of course, you want to reconcile the fact that there’s no way to escape the system with the fact that there seems to be “other” things “out there.” That’s what everyone’s trying to do. And if I may say so, from what I’ve read, no one’s been able to do it. We go all the way back to Kant and the idea is that we cannot escape our own perspective: we must, necessarily, view “reality” through the “lens” of our own kind. Perspectivism takes this a step further and says we cannot view “reality” outside the lens of our own selves. If there’s one philosopher I see eye-to-eye with on this it’s Berkeley. No one has escaped the human mind. All we can say is that there is self and that there is other. But even this is an assumption on logical grounds: it follows only from the point at which we view reality.
Utterly correct, my friend.
Sheesh, that’s complicated. Reading it twice … I don’t know that the layman, as we’re calling him, thinks that his dreams “never were real even in the midst of being had.” I don’t know quite where you’re fetching that from or why it would be significant to this discussion. The rest of the paragraph, I’m sorry, is scattered - to me, I mean. Moving on …
Had to stop there because, again, yes, this is utterly correct. We configure “reality” such that certain things go into the three categories of past, present and future, and one of the ways to identify when the mind is “wandering” is when we’re occupying multiple levels of time. A part of us is thinking about the past, part of us is thinking about the future, and what’s left over - I don’t know, 20% - is left to actually experience the present. The whole point of denying the past its significance in relation to dreams is in the fact that, ultimately, the past is just another diversion from the moment. I suspect that makes it perfectly clear why I’d say the dreamworld can benefit us every bit as much as the past: my dream is in the past the same way my past is in the past: all I can do is use whatever I have left in memory to serve the present moment.
Right. It’s the fucking mind-body problem, dude. And I’m tellin’ ya, unless my education has failed me miserably, no one has fucking solved it. We can’t leave the system, it’s just a fact.
But we will. You’re breaking into two what in essence is only one thing: “reality.” Appealing to the “layman” is the last thing you want to do!
No, dude, we’re not contradicting anything. Our view is that his dream was reality. The layman who feels his dream “never was” real is just configuring the terms improperly; he understands that as he experienced it is was real, but is now saying that it is no longer real. We and the layman don’t disagree. (How could we?) The disagreement is in temporal and phenomenological terms.
You’re no different from anyone else. When we talk about being limited in perspective, that is to say we’re limited to the human perspective. We’re all in the same fucking boat, it’s just what we do with the cargo. Sorry about the lame pun. I just mean that we know what “reality” is, it’s this fucking “thing” in front of our eyes. No more, no less. Anyone who says it is more (or less) is fucking wrong. End of story.
Again complicated, my friend, and I sense there’s a grammatical mistake to boot. In any event, I suspect you’re saying that anything we experience is “reality” so long as “we have a way of addressing the seemingly paradoxical notion that others who disagree with us must either be wrong or are right while somehow not creating an inconsistency in our own view.” I believe this is correct, and I further believe that no rational human being would (or could) disagree with our view.
I think I get the general gist of what you’re saying. We agree that we need a way of ironing out the wrinkles that show up when people seem to disagree on their accounts of reality, but we seem to have different ways of doing this.
I do it by relativizing reality.
You do it by saying we all agree on this point anyway, and any aparent disagreement is only superficial because it reflects a difference in terminology only.
Just curious, then; how would you resolve this one:
An atheist and a theist argue over whether God exists or not. Since each one’s beliefs create reality (by what we’re saying), then God must exist and not exist at the same time. How is this resolved?
I say God exists in the theist’s reality and doesn’t exist in the atheist’s. Add to this that each one’s “reality” is more of “design” for reality (see the exerpt I posted above). This includes my own. You’re right that we can’t escape our own perspectives, and so even my beliefs - the one’s I’m expounding here - are a design. Whether we like to admit it or not, whenever we refer to “reality”, we are referring to our own designs - always. But I don’t take the design to be distinct from the reality it is a design of. It’s like if someone wanted to make a design for a building, and realizing that it didn’t matter what medium the design was built within (i.e. pen & paper, computer graphics, oral description, toy model, etc.), he decided to make it out of brick and mortar. If he also decides to make it to scale, it will turn out the be both a design and the actual building itself. This is how I see all our experiences and perceptions. They are the material out of which our minds build a model of reality and the reality so model at the same time.
I want to respond to this before I even read what you’ve posted below. YES - God must exist. (Now, let’s see what you have to say. )
This is incorrect. The atheist believes in God as much as the theist does; “God” is as much a part of “reality” for the atheist as it is for the theist. The difference is, for the atheist, “God” is just an “idea”; for the theist, “God” is an “actual thing.” For us - to distinguish “us” from atheists and theists - we believe that “idea” and “actual thing” are indiscernible.
Nor should you, they’re the same thing.
Of course.
You don’t have a problem with that, do you? I mean you basically just described “reality.”
I think I get the gist of what you’re saying, and I think it could be translated into what I’m saying. Let me just see if I do get it first:
The theist and the atheist are both referring to the same thing, but the atheist sees only the ideational form of the thing whereas the theist sees the objectified/reified (I used the word “projected”) form of the thing. It’s like arguing whether an electron is a particle or a wave. Since both forms are coexisting aspects of the same thing, they are both right in their assessments, and the problem comes down to one of language.
This seems like a fair assessment but some things should be noted: first, any aparent disagreement between the two can only be a matter of miscommunication (like you said). Which means that if the atheist ever says “God doesn’t exist” he can’t mean it as it literally sounds - he must mean instead “God is an idea”. If he really meant “God doesn’t exist” just like that, then that’s an undeniable contradiction to what the atheist asserts, and I’m not so sure it’s impossible for the atheist to mean it this way. In that case (which is the second point), the two disputers must be referring to distinct things - one’s an idea in the atheist’s head, the other is an objectified/reified (projected) object in the outer world apprehensible only by the theist - but these things may nevertheless be identical in all their features - i.e. the idea/projected duality may still hold for each one individually. In this way, neither one’s statement can contradict the other’s. If we both have boxes, mine filled with (say) marbles and yours filled with nothing, it is hardly a contradiction for me to say “There are marbles in the box” and for you to say “There is nothing in the box” because “box” refers to different things in each statement. That’s how I would translate your scheme into mine (where “box” is replaced by “reality” - or “design” - take your pick). Again, this comes down to a matter of communication like you said.
Goddamn, this is really interesting, gib! We’re communicating very well together. I’m just going to unpack and add to your post; you can decide if we’re still on the same page when I’m done.
Correct, but it’s not that he must mean that God is an idea, it just means that “God” is at least an idea to him. The atheist, when he says those words, is thinking of something; I don’t care what that something is, because it literally could be anything; but we don’t know because the atheist hasn’t said anything. All we know is that whatever he’s talking about, it doesn’t exist. Well that’s just stupid! So what’s he talking about? Well, it could be some sort of neo-Judeo-Christian-Islam version that he’s fabricated; maybe it’s something like what creationism puts forward; maybe it’s the God of hard core Catholicism - who fuckin’ knows? It doesn’t matter. In any case, the atheist is bound to describing “God” as meaning something to him. If you ask him what this is, he starts to set up a nice little strawman to knock down: “all-powerful,” “all-knowing,” etc., etc. - sound familiar? Thing is, that’s not what the atheist believes “God” to be at all; he’s just describing what he thinks to be other people’s conceptions of God (which may or may not be accurate, for obvious reasons). In turn, to the atheist, “God” becomes literally coterminous with “other people’s conception of an all-powerful Creator, omnipresent … etc.”. Well if that’s what “God” is, then what sense does it make to say that it doesn’t exist? Hell, a lot of atheists spend more time entertaining the concept of God than theists do … but it doesn’t exist. Right, right, sure pal.
Which way? The contradictory way?
Yes, necessarily.
No, one’s an idea in the atheist’s head, and the other is an idea in the theist’s head. (And still a third and fourth: my idea as to what these ideas look like, and your idea as to what these ideas look like.)
Seems impossible.
What do you mean “may”? It will hold as long as the two don’t properly define their terms, so that we know what we’re talking about. It’s only subsequent to defining terms that our epistemology can shine through.
Yes, this is correct. And your choice to include the phrase “take your pick” was no coincidence either, in that “box” above indeed can stand for any concept. Any statement or proposition we make that begins with “There is” or “There are” is a claim to truth. What is truth? Seems to me it’s not much different than “reality.” Reality is truth. To talk about anything is to talk about the truth, it’s all there is to talk about. Even lying is only the truth of the fact one is lying. If I say “reality is everything” and you say “God is everything,” then we should be ready to agree on what we’re talking about. So that when you say, “God is love” I can readily know you mean something akin to my thinking - and, in turn, experiencing - “reality is emotion,” and this makes perfect sense to me; we’ve communicated; and, moreover, I am in the midst of experiencing the idea that reality and emotion mean the same thing … and in so doing I am drawn rather explicitly toward an awareness of my emotional state; this includes, if I so desire, avenues into darker waters, or, if I so choose, more delightful ones. But the point is that the intensity of reality is everywhere and in every moment - or, what means the same thing, the intensity of God is everywhere and in every moment. I exclaim, “Yes, yes you’re so right!” Have we not expressed something “true” in this? Does it not follow that “God is love” and “reality is everything” can express the same “true” proposition?
The problem arises with this notion of external reality. Being that I am allowed only the ideas of my mind, and have no way by which to assure myself that I am not dreaming and creating them myself and that they thusly have no resemblance to the external reality, or any reason to believe that even if I were ‘awake’ that the ideas presented before my mind resemble things in external reality.
So here I am; faced with some perceivable options regarding my ideas. I could assent to the conclusion that all these ideas have no objective reality aside from being simple ideas in my mind and that I created them. I could assent to the conclusion that they do have objective reality outside of my mind, and they resemble these things. That other people seem to be experiencing the same reality does not help me, since I don’t yet even know that they exist as anything more than my idea of them. There it is. The leap of faith. Without which we are not left with solipsism or subjective idealism as some might think because solipsism and subjective idealism are as faith-based as naive realism and no more justified since one cannot possibly assent to any conclusion about the nature of “external reality” or any reality for that matter with only the ideas one has in one’s mind as a starting point. Without this leap of faith from our ideas to a notion of where these ideas originate from and what they represent outside us, if anything at all, we are, I think left in inaction. That leap of faith onto some conclusion is necessary, and present with every thinking person.
I think I’ve got a whole lot more to say about this, but I find myself both out of time and, to be honest here, full of impatience; impatient with the slowness of my thought, that is.
Looking at what I just now wrote, I can’t but think that I didn’t contribute much to this thread. I did give order to some ideas in my mind though. So :-" , thanks for that. will continue reading it, and probably even posting.
It is actually the contrary that is the leap of faith.
Because it would require you to postulate an excessive amount of theory in order to explain how reality could be your mind only. In other words, a far more complicated theory would be required to explain things if it were “all in your mind”, then to explain things in strict materialist terms. Through analogy alone we could safely assume that other people are as real as us and not p zombies or figments of a dream or imagination.
Now, this is not to say it isn’t far more complicated than what we currently understand…only that honestly and rationally, we must concede that it is in the least…more efficient.
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