All Is Percept

The process of perception begins with an object in the real world, known as the distal stimulus or distal object. By means of light, sound, or another physical process, the object stimulates the body’s sensory organs. These sensory organs transform the input energy into neural activity—a process called transduction. This raw pattern of neural activity is called the proximal stimulus. These neural signals are then transmitted to the brain and processed. The resulting mental re-creation of the distal stimulus is the percept.

To explain the process of perception, an example could be an ordinary shoe. The shoe itself is the distal stimulus. When light from the shoe enters a person’s eye and stimulates the retina, that stimulation is the proximal stimulus. The image of the shoe reconstructed by the brain of the person is the percept.

-Wikipedia, Perception

Regardless of what anyone believes about the nature of reality or the world, it is an irrefutable fact that existence—as it actually and constantly appears—appears only in the form of someone experiencing and the things that someone experiences.

This is it; bada bing, bada boop; no two ways around it, no dancing around it, this is the form in which existence manifests. Existence does not appear in any other form.

“Someone” or a person, moreover, consists or is composed of the material substance of that person’s experience, i.e. that person’s experience is a substance: it is the substance of that particular person and that which that person experiences as opposed to the experience of any being that is not that person.

Everything you see around you, a desk; the sky; street signs, the bodies of every person in your visual field; every blade of grass seen on the side of the highway as you travel from one city to another; each of these are made up of your subjective experience as opposed to something that is not/is other than subjective experience, and the existence of their “you-absent” (through unconsciousness or death) or “you-independent” doppelgangers are actually entirely fictional entities made up by one’s consciousness in the form of thought in the form of that thought thinking up the idea of “you-independent” doppelgangers of objects, environments, and people that come from you and that are actually made up of you, that is, your subjective experience.

When you think about it, everything said above is actually a logical consequence of the belief that the brain creates consciousness and that consciousness ceases to exist when the brain ceases to function.

For those like yours truly that do not believe brains create consciousness or that consciousness ceases to exist at death, the above is the most simple induction about the nature of reality: that the only thing that exists is consciousness, distal objects and stimuli do not exist, and existence can only take the form of persons.

For as far as existence indicates itself in terms of the invariant nature in which it appears…

…All is Percept, and Distal Objects are imaginary fictions.

Even if they existed, they could not have any rational relation which subjective experience if they are not made up of subjective experience and more importantly, if distal objects are not made up of/can magically transform into the subjective experience of a particular person as opposed to any other being that is not that person.

Alright sounds good. Now we need to write a political treatise, which we shall extend from the metaphysical foundations of your system.

It being the case that your theory is right, how is man to conduct himself politically and economically? We can trace Hobbeses leviathan directly back to his materialism, for instance. Now what do we do with your theory?

Any political treatise extending from the foundations of panpsychism or pantheopsychism will entail a politic that is a construct: a “building” composed of the “bricks” of nothing but conscious experience in a domain in which subjective experience in the form of persons is eternal and is the only thing that exists or can exist. In the case of secular mythology of the brain creating consciousness and everything not created by a brain being composed of something that is not/is other than subjective experience, any political treatise will still have subjective experience as its foundation, only the politic is a construct of the subjective experience magically conjured by the brain.

Given that existence only appears in the form of a person and that which that person experiences as opposed to any other person in the totality of existence, we can trace Hobbeses leviathan directly back only to his fictional imaging of materialism, which given that existence only shows itself in the form of the consciousness of a person, may not exist.

Or as Hume so eloquently put it:

Why torture your brain to justify the course of nature upon suppositions, which, for aught you know, may be entirely imaginary, and of which there are to be found no traces in the course of nature?

As nature appears only in the form of the consciousness of a person and the course of nature appears only in the form of what the consciousness of a person experiences, as nature only appears as something that appears before an observing person. That which the person experiences, are actually nothing but formations or “figurines” made out of that person’s consciousness.

The reliability of my perception generally however, is backed with empirical evidence. Judgment can be affected by confirmation bias and to a lesser extent it seems even perception is affected by confirmation bias. But more importantly is to tackle judgement of situations, the low hanging fruit of distortion.

But…you only have empirical evidence of your perception and the things you perceive, which as proven by death, blindness, and the fact that, for those that believe the brain creates consciousness and no instance of consciousness cannot exist without being created or produced by a brain in a skull, is made up solely of subjective experience.

There is no empirical evidence of things that are not you and your subjective experience: i.e. things that exist outside your consciousness. Existence only appears in the form of your consciousness and the things you experience: evidence of this is the fact that every object, person, environment, or event that demonstrates that it exists does not appear unless you are present.

This suggests a dependency relation in which objects, persons, etc. cannot appear unless you are present.

(When appearing, objects, persons, events, and environments always appear in the form of how they look to your point of view.)

If objects, persons, etc. cannot appear unless you are present and attending to them, they certainly are not things that exist outside your consciousness but, given the constant contiguity between the subject of experience and the objects of experience, they are actually creations of the subject that are materially composed of the subject’s own subjective experience, that “Mystiques” or shapes itself into the form of the objects, persons, environments, and events the subject perceives/experiences. An ancillary effect of this is the granting of the psychological illusion that these “you-composed” objects are things outside and independent of the subject.

As a panpsychist, I deny the brain creates consciousness or that death equals the cessation of the existence of consciousness, but I find that the concept that the brain creates consciousness and common belief in the nature of death (that I call “godless death” for brevity as this type of death is usually espoused by atheism) are excellent logic-tools that conceptually demonstrate that the world one perceives is not one and the same as the world that is believed to continue to exist when one no longer perceives it.

Godless death is the cessation of existence of consciousness and perception. This means cessation of existence of empirical evidence, which is only the subject of experience and consciousness-composed doppelgangers of the external, non-brain created, non-consciousness-composed objects in the external world (for those that believe in external, non-consciousness composed doppelgangers of the content of visual perception in the external world). If consciousness-composed objects were one and the same as external, non-consciousness composed objects, the non-consciousness composed objects would cease to exist alongside their consciousness-composed/brain-created doppelgangers when a person dies (or sleeps). Given that, for those that believe the brain creates consciousness, you have a “world” that is composed only of a person’s consciousness that exists or appears only when a subject of experience lies before it in a “fourth wall”, and a world (for those believing in this world) that is a doppelganger of the content of visual perception that is not created by a brain and that does not cease to exist when the brain ceases to function.

But…existence only appears in the form of a subjectively experiencing person and that which the person experiences. This literally is the “ground state” of existence and if it is honest, philosophy itself.

It doesn’t suggest that at all. It is merely a logical possibility that counters another logical possibility that the objects exist regardless of us being present and don’t simply “appear”, they are there and vulnerable to being perceived by anything with the ability to perceive it, including automated cameras for example.

Solipsism is fun and all but ultimately doesn’t have much probability of being viable considering our percepts are typically validated by other conscious beings and their reports of percepts.

Just because everything is perceived by the mind does not mean that everything is mind dependent in any absolute sense
Things perceived by the senses are taken to be objects in and of themselves rather than just imaginary mental constructs

Something does not have to be perceived in order for it to exist since that would suggest causation between the perceiver and the thing being perceived
Were that true it would mean that the observable Universe for virtually all of its existence did not exist for there was nothing to perceive such existence

Were the external world merely a product of my imagination then I would be able to manipulate it anyway I wanted to but I cannot do that and nor can anyone else
Such a limitation brings me to the logical conclusion that that world is therefore mind independent even though my mind still perceives everything that I experience

Solipsism may be incapable of falsification but that does not mean it is true

Is thirst a perception? Is hunger a perception? Is the sensation of “up” as balance a perception? What about pain?

In the case of what has become a shoe… there was a time when what has become known as a shoe did not exist save as an idea in the mind of a person with sore feet. And it’s not like the shoe was imagined in it’s final state. It evolved into a shoe and along the way it evolved into a slipper, a sneaker and a sandal as well.

The “door” appears to swing both ways.

WWIII Angry:

I think it does, but even if one think it doesn’t does not rule out the fact the constant contiguity between a subject of experience and the things it experiences may be due to a dependency of experienced objects upon the subject for their existence and type of appearance.

The possibility is not logical if external objects are composed of something other than subjective experience. Experienced/perceived objects are composed of subjective experience, i.e. are composed of the subject’s experience of them, for they appear only when they are experienced by the subject.

(Can experienced/perceived things be experienced/perceived by the subject without the subject, the existence of any person other than the subject notwithstanding?)

If objects that are not created by the brain (for those believing the brain creates consciousness) are not composed of conscious experience, it does not follow how they, being something other than subjective experience, can have anything to do with the existence of subjective experience in terms of them lending their substance to the brain to create subjective experience itself, if they themselves are not subjective experience.

Given that existence only appears or manifests in the form of a person and that which the person experiences, there is no evidence of the existence of external objects that are “there” ahead of perception of the objects. You only believe that there are. In reality external objects, their pre-existence prior to perception, and their “vulnerability to being perceived” have only been ideas invented in the mind. Doppelgangers of the content of visual perception existing independently of person-consciousness in the external world are ultimately imaginary ideas, make-believe spoken as if they were irrefutably real. And this is done with such regularity that people believe…ignoring the evidence of the only way existence appears and manifests…that the existence of non-person external objects are rote fact. But they are entirely imaginary and have only ever been imagined to exist.

But other conscious beings and their reports of percepts are made up of oneself, and are not things that are not made up of one’s own subjective experience. Existence only appears in the form of oneself, one’s subjective experience, and the things constructed out of/made up of one’s own subjective experience. It does not appear in the form of another person’s subjective experience. Solipsism, while it bases it’s strength on the first statement in this paragraph, takes things too far to say that given that existence only appears in the form of oneself, one’s subjective experience (as opposed to the subjective experience of any other being in existence), and the things one experiences that are actually constructs made up of one’s subjective experience (this negatively proven by death)----one’s mind or oneself is the only thing that exists.

I don’t go that far, I’m with other people that say that other people and conscious beings exist, but the truth is, I can only believe and have faith that other consciousnesses exist.

Solipsism is “half right”: it is probably wrong that one’s mind is the only thing that exists and that when one dies, reality ceases to exist, but…existence still only appears in the form of a single person and that which that person experiences, and this is the most obvious fact about existence if anyone is willing to be honest. Given that existence only appears in the form a single person and that which the person experiences, there is no evidence of the existence of everything that is not the person and that which the person experiences and as such the existence of everything that is not a person and that which the person experiences must be accepted merely on faith.

Given the above:

1. A solipsist is someone who believes that only one’s consciousness exists, and nothing other than the self exists in the whole of non-person infinity.

2. A non-solipsist is someone who notes that one’s consciousness is the only thing that demonstrates it exists, but does not believe only one’s consciousness exists and that nothing other than the self exists in the whole of non-person infinity.

I and most everyone else considers it knowledge, not faith. Other conscious beings of their reports of percepts that are drastically different from our own is evidence enough. The fact that someone else can see something that we couldn’t comprehend is a fair dose of proof to consider solipsism a faith and not “non-solipsism” as a faith.

I agree, “belief” is the added element to be a solipsist. And anything can believe whatever they would like. Yet philosophy ends where belief begins, I say. That is when it turns into religion.

surreptitious75:

Things perceived by the mind are not dependent upon the mind that perceives them unless solipsism is true (for one’s mind or subjective experience is the only thing that exists).

If solipsism is not true, while it is (or probably is) a fact that the objects, persons, environments, and events one perceives are actually constructs made up of one’s subjective experience, something outside a person and that which the person experiences (given that one’s existence is the only existence that is demonstrated one must have faith exists) is responsible for one’s subjective experience and the content of one’s perceptions.

(Note: if one believes in person or mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception in the external world, one certainly does not believe these are composed of one’s subjective experience, as mind-independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception in the external world are not one and the same as the objects one perceives (which are composed of one’s subjective experience): the difference between them proven by this guy:

)

For me, it doesn’t make sense that the “whatever” that lies outside that supplies and forms the content of one’s perception is made up of something other/that is not subjective experience, as oneself and the things one perceives/experiences are made up of subjective experience (i.e. one’s experience of them). How does something go from being something that is not subjective experience to becoming subjective experience, or how does something that is not subjective experience pull subjective experience out from itself to supply subjective experience to something else when the source is something other than the thing it is said to supply? Where does something that is not experience or the act or fact of experiencing “get” the act or fact of experiencing if it, itself, does not start out as/is not the act or fact of experiencing?

This is true, if solipsism is false. As I am not solipsist (see the definitions of a solipsist and non-solipsist in my reply to WWIII Angry above), I agree. I have quasi-religious faith that other people exist: indeed I must, in order for me to logically possess my brand of Judeo-Christian belief.

When it comes to something that is not/is other than subjective experience itself, if it existed it cannot logically have anything to do with subjective experience, as it is not subjective experience. Indeed, it does not follow why non-experience need be posited as something that exists, as it is useless to the existence of subjective experience and persons.

Causation as in bringing something that previously didn’t exist into existence? I think a perceiver and the thing being perceived have a relation in which the perceiver is a constant and that which is perceived is a variable, involving a constant shape-shifting of the “leftover” subjective experience that is not devoted to the formation of the perceiver. If solipsism is false, the subjective experience that makes up the circumscribed “sphere” of the person and that which the person experiences is supplied by the external world, but even if the circumscribed, limited structure that is a person “gets” its subjective experience from the external world, this can only logically be supplied by more subjective experience in the external world, as opposed to something that is not subjective experience.

Given it is illogical for something that is not subjective experience to lend itself to creating or granting subjective experience, the non-observable universe is probably made up of the subjective experience of a larger person in the form of that Person’s idea of the universe, that the Person then grants or “hands down” to a smaller, causally vulnerable consciousness, such that the universe is and has only been an idea in the mind of a Person that appears only within the minds of causally receiving subordinates, as opposed to the universe being an objective, non-person infinity filled with objective, non-person or non-experiential objects lying outside minds.

Descartes arrived at this conclusion, which is probably proof against solipsism. However, the fact that one cannot manipulate one’s percept anyway one wanted, while it may “disprove” solipsism (despite the fact a solipsist could argue that while one’s mind is the only thing in existence, the subjective experience making up the content is uncontrollable), the inability to control what one experience may be chalked up to an external Person whom controls the content of everyone’s experiences, as the external world is not an infinite space filled with non-person objects but that Person’s mind.

As a non-solipsist myself, I would have to agree: the world is “my mind”-independent though existence only appears in the form of me and those things I experience, but the world may not be independent of the Mind of a larger Person in whom I am a subset (Acts 17:28) as the world is the mind of that Person.

I hope it isn’t true.

PG

Mowk:

Thirst, hunger, and the sensation of “up” as balance and pain are perceptions, and perceptions are fundamentally experiences (re: “the experience of perceiving”; for how can one perceive without experiencing oneself perceiving? I find the terms synonymous.)

True, but I doubt there is or was distal objects not composed of subjective experience that were external world-dwelling doppelgangers of the evolving idea of shoes.

WWIII Angry:

But other conscious beings reporting their percepts and that someone else can see something we can’t comprehend is, or appears, as an illusion of the existence of these things in the form of one’s subjective experience taking the shape of or “Mystique-ing” into the form of the reports, and in the form of a concept that the subject finds it cannot comprehend. This is not actually proof of the existence of other people, but one’s own consciousness taking on forms that the subject (another, yet the central “constant” of the forms one’s subjective experience takes)thinks or believes is a doppelganger of things outside one’s consciousness.

Thus “knowledge” of the existence of other people is certainly not experienced knowledge, as one can only experience oneself.

That being said, the fact that one’s subjective experience can shape itself into what it takes to be other people and that it can shape itself into the subject not being able to comprehend what the illusion of another person says may be, if solipsism is true, a matter of the uncontrollable nature of the subjective experience of the only person that exists…or it may be the type of subjective experience granted to the subject from something in the external world. As it is illogical that something that is not subjective experience, given it is not subjective experience, should have anything to do with the existence of subjective experience (because it is not subjective experience), it is likely that the “experience” of other people is granted by still more consciousness in the external world, probably in the form of an external Person.

Fair enough. I think that in this sense even atheism becomes a religion.

It is experienced knowledge, through our sensory perceptions. The only way to experience knowledge of anything. Your belief is full of complexities that don’t make any sense. How are there other languages that we do not know about, if nobody else really exists? Are we imagining other beings talking to each other in foreign tongues that we cannot understand yet they somehow do? I’ts bizarre. How does all the historical information make any sense? What’s the purpose of learning everything we do as a child if its all made up in our heads?

Our senses are quite capable of filtering out the routine of external stimuli. A magician’s slight of hand is a reasonable example of how our attention can be misdirected. We “experience” a fraction of the stimulus we are exposed to.

In the case of thirst or hunger or for that matter balance, what is the distal object the “perception” begins with? I would call them sensations. Cognition plays a lesser role is a sensation then a perception. While it is fair to say one experiences thirst or hunger they are experienced independent of external stimuli, while external stimuli do relieve the sensation.

The case of balance is an odd one, it is not experienced, generally speaking until, it is lost. It is often a reflex action that is attempted to gain one’s balance back after it was lost.

WWIII Angry:

So you can experience the consciousness (first-person subjective experience) of another person? If I’m driving along in my car, experiencing the world (which is composed of my subjective experience) from my perspective, observing the signs, the billboards, etc. as I move along the road—when I look over and see a person driving next to me, you mean I can stop experiencing what it is like to be me experiencing the inside of my car and my view of the road to suddenly experience myself as the other person in his/her car? I’m suddenly experiencing that person’s first-person experience as he/she experiences driving his/her car from his/her point of view and I am no longer experiencing myself in my car from the previous point of view? Whereas before I did not smoke, much less smoke in my car, suddenly I am the woman driving in the other lane as I experience myself placing a cigarette up to my/her lips as she/I drive down the road, experiencing the same objects I did when my consciousness was in my car, but from her “next lane” perspective?

People do that? That actually happens?

We can have sensory experience of the invisible, intangible, first-person experience of other people, such that we can experience what another person is experiencing as we are now experiencing that person and no longer experiencing oneself?

You have made the point that we cannot experience the consciousness of other people here:

As it would take a consciousness we cannot experience in order for that consciousness to understand a language one does not understand with one’s own consciousness.

You are mistaken. I have never said nobody else really exists. Despite the fact I have reiterated I’m not a solipsist, you bizarrely continue to believe I’m solipsist. There’s a HUGE difference between believing only one’s consciousness exists and admitting the obvious fact that one’s consciousness is the only thing that demonstrates it exists. These are not the same things. While it is obvious that only one’s consciousness appears, this is not the same as saying it is the only thing that exists.

But…one can believe other people exist. This is what you do. This, also, is what I do. If I didn’t, it wouldn’t make sense for me to believe in and tout my admittedly bizarre form of Judeo-Christian theology. Given that one has no experienced evidence of the existence of other people (if one did, one would be able to pull the “see-what’s-its-like-to-be-the-other-person-driving-the-car-next-to-me-from-that-person’s-point-of-view-rather-than-my-point-of-view-from-inside-my-car” trick), the only thing that differentiates a solipsist from a non-solipisist is that the non-solipsist has faith in and believes that other consciousnesses exist, though the person cannot experience them.

We are not imagining other beings talking to each other in foreign languages we do not understand, we sensorially experience (primarily through vision and hearing unless you touch, taste, or smell the person as he/she is talking) the bodies of other people. We cannot experience the other person’s consciousness. If we did, we would be the person talking in a foreign language experiencing itself talking in that language and not experience oneself standing next to the person experiencing oneself listening to a body making sounds we do not linguistically understand. Given you cannot experience what it is like to be another person from that person’s private, invisible, first-person point of view, you can only believe and have faith that the body appearing in your visual field has a consciousness of its own.

Again, this is not the same thing as saying the other consciousness doesn’t exist, it’s just admitting you cannot experience that consciousness because if you did, you would be that consciousness and not your own. That’s not solipsism, it’s existential honesty.

The historical information makes sense in that it exists. It does not require consciousness-absent or independent doppelgangers of the content of visual perception of objects, environments, bodies of persons, and events that were experienced in the near and distant past to have meaning. If Panpsychism is true, history is all in the sensory and mental consciousness of the only thing that exists: the minds of people. History still occurred, albeit in minds other than one’s own that existed prior to oneself in a universe or reality in which only minds exist. This is no less meaningful than if there were things outside the skull not made of consciousness that the brain mimicks with subjectively experienced “holographs”.

There is no purpose to existence, existence merely exists (I espouse a Theological Absurdism [a theological variant of secular or atheistic Absurdism which states the same as what follows but omits a God, gods, and the afterlife] which states that existence is meaningless in the sense that God, the drama of life and the afterlife, good and evil, and everything else exists for no other reason than these are things that simply happened, by chance, to exist–as there is no reason to existence other than things that exist exist for no other reason than they luckily happened to exist). And things that appear within consciousness do not need an external doppelganger in order to “make sense” or “have meaning”. Their meaning is in the form of the “meaning” that forms within one’s consciousness, as consciousness is the only thing we need.