On Feb 3, 8:27 am, nothun...@enough.yet wrote:
> Howdy. I'm new here.
> The subject line is interesting. I'd agree with it as a broad
> statement. Sanity is a voting matter and all that.
That's last sentence is a bit ambiguous to me. Are you saying that it
really is insanity to disagree with the majority? Then what would
ever justify changing one's mind about anything?
> This door you guys are talking about. It sounds like you're assuming
> a physical reality within which it exists.
Well, yes and no. In my daily life, I do assume that the door et al
exist in a reality that is objective - that is separate and distinct
from my mental, subjective reality. And I'd call that 'physical
reality', provided 'physical' means only that I can sense it. But as
I see it, that's precisely the question in dispute here - can I know
anything at all about that objectively existing 'door in itself, or
any of the rest of physical reality in itself? - so I cannot and have
not been assuming a positive answer for this discussion.
> Suppose that physical
> reality isn't the thing that gave rise to the door which you are
> perceiving? Suppose instead that physical reality is generated by
> perceiving it? What then? Or is injecting that question a
> threadjack, I dunno.
No, I think that line of thought is clearly implied by a negative one
answer to the above question. If I cannot know nothing about the
door that exists out there, independently of mind - the "door in
itself" - but only about the purely subjective idea of a door in my
mind - then I cannot know if there's any door, or anything at all but
the purely subjective idea. In that case 'physical reality' would be
no different from my subjective ideas; whether I could open the door
and walk through it, walk through a wall instead, or be stuck in my
room with no way to get out, would be solely a matter of what I
believed.
The big question I have about that, of course, is: If I am simply
conceiving, or making up, physical reality as a mental construct, then
why am I making it up in this particular way? I know, and am quite
conscious that I know, that in many cases I would prefer that physical
reality be different. For instance, why would I always have to walk
over to the door, move it, and walk through it, in order to be
somewhere else? If I want to go to the bathroom, why can't I simply
be in the bathroom instead of here (the way I can simply be in one
place, rather than another, in my dreams?) For that matter, why do I
have to go to the bathroom at all? I certainly can't see any point
to 'generating' that particular fact.
> It just seems to me that your arguments are
> pretty straight-up but your underlying assumptions aren't the same as
> mine.
It's precisely those underlying assumptions that I think are in
question here. Accordingly I'd welcome your further input.
