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If you want to get solipsistic, you do not, regardless of whether the physical world exists, experience a piece of paper or anything external directly. Assumin
by perl4ever 7y ago
If you want to get solipsistic, you do not, regardless of whether the physical world exists, experience a piece of paper or anything external directly.
Assuming conventional reality and physics is as it appears, "you" experience a model of a piece of paper that is constructed by your nervous system (part of your brain presumably) in response to all of the sensory information that you get. This incidentally, implies that consciousness cannot inhabit the whole brain, because if there is an observer, there must be something to observe, but it cannot be reality, because reality has to be mediated somehow.
So I guess I've disproved solipsism?
- Zenst 7y agoI'm starting to grasp that it is like trying to prove or disprove `god` and with that, it is a large rabbit hole of thought.
- perl4ever 7y agoWhat I've often thought, although never been able to express elegantly, is that assuming all conventional views of reality are accurate, a person's consciousness has to perceive an image in a mirror that exists within oneself. The sensory inputs have to be assembled for observation. That mirror is assumed to be accurate, if you aren't hallucinating, dreaming, drunk, or whatever. It must be part of the brain/nervous system, but normally separate from the self. So it seems to me that the visceral sense of God's presence (during religious experience, madness, or both) must be from the self feeling the presence of that part of the mind. But then if there is something that creates reality within our head and is/is not ourselves, why not a second level - God that created (or creates from moment to moment) the universe? It's not that such a thing must exist, but it just seems like it would be symmetric if it did. And the mirror within provides the compelling feeling that there should be such a thing.