A Theory about Everything

What is your experience of?

What is that guides you to the purported need for evidence, which seems to loom large for you?

How did the words you're using come about, and of whom are you asking these questions?

Dominic Osborn, do you not think that there are others beside you, such as me, who have experience as well as you? Doesn't your experience of communicating with others convince you that there are others? And doesn't this experience of communicating convince you that others have experience, similar to you having experience, but not the same as your experience?

Your writing is fluent but it is not philosophically informed, it doesn't make any arguments but simply states provocative ideas as if they amount to arguments, which they don't. So, it's not a theory. (Recall Truman Capote on Jack Kerouac: 'That's not writing, that's typing.)

If you believe there is no world beyond your experience then why have I just experienced your post? Unless I am just a figment of your imagination, or maybe you are a figment of mine. :)

Having said that, I am starting to believe we all might be part of one big consciousness. So it's possible our experiences are connected in some way.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I have no evidence of a world beyond my experience. I have no evidence of a time when I am not.

Haven't you been able to experience people who are older than yourself? History books or documentaries? Historic sites? Fossils? Explanations and/or demonstrations of how radiocarbon dating works? You've not experienced any of those sorts of things?

Reply to Terrapin Station I was thinking parents but yeah those things work as well! X-)

People asking about solipsism: mcdoodle, Bassplayer, Terrapin Station and Barry Etheridge:

You’ve taken me by surprise: you ask about solipsism as if you had never encountered it before. I thought the arguments for and against solipsism were rehearsed in these fora to the point of tedium. Maybe you ask me just out of politeness. The argument of the solipsist is simply: I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience. But I’ll mount a proper defence of solipsism in a couple of days. I need to do a bit of research; I’ve only got as far as Wikipedia so far. In the meantime: I thought the main problems with solipsism were 1. that it was neither verifiable nor falsifiable. I can prove neither that thereis something outside my experience nor that there isn’t: in either case, in order to do I so, I should have to step outside my experience and ascertain whether or not there were anything there, something that of course I cannot do, 2. There is no reason to suppose that my experience has anything to do with a self, 3. Even if what the solipsist believes is true, he can’t proselytise about it. 4. Solipsism and Material Realism somehow coincide. I’ll have to explain what I mean about this later.

Bassplayer:

As to your remark about “one big consciouness”: I certainly believe there is only one consciouness. I don’t think it has anything to do with this body typing now at its computer. That is just a part of it, just as this cup is, this table is, these shapes on the screen in front of me (what you said to me):

“If you believe there is no world beyond your experience then why have I just experienced your post? Unless I am just a figment of your imagination, or maybe you are a figment of mine. :)

Having said that, I am starting to believe we all might be part of one big consciousness. So it's possible our experiences are connected in some way.”

Wuliheron:

I think Materialists and all other philosophers are just as subject to vanity, self-obsession, self-love, etc. as solipsists are.

Look at this (from the Solipsism entry on Wikipedia):

“Solipsists may view their own pro-social behaviors as having a more solid foundation than the incoherent pro-sociality of other philosophies. Indeed, they may be more pro-social because they view other individuals as actually being a part of themselves. Furthermore, the joy and suffering arising from empathy is just as real as the joy and suffering arising from physical sensation. They view their own existence as human beings to be just as speculative as the existence of anyone else as a human being.”

Wayfarer:

You’re right, I am fairly philosophically uninformed. ––So inform me. You say there are no arguments in my post. Prima facie there are three of them (The epistemological one, Ockham’s Razor, and the one about Number.) Why aren’t they arguments? Inform me.

Thanks for the compliment on my writing but I am chagrined to be on the receiving end of that good Truman Capote quote.

You ought to like the implications of my thinking (I’ll call it that if it doesn’t merit the title of “theory”). I looked at your profile and saw that Zen is something you like. This is from the Solipsism article on Wikipedia:

"Some solipsists believe that some tenets of eastern philosophies are similar to solipsism. Taoism and several interpretations of Buddhism, especially Zen, teach that the distinction between self and universe is arbitrary, merely a habit of perception and an artifact of language. This view identifies the unity of self and universe as the ultimate reality. Zen holds that each individual has 'Buddha Mind': an all-pervading awareness that fills their entire existence, including the 'external' world."

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience.

But what you experience includes things like other people.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I can also adduce Ockham’s Law of Parsimony (razor) in support of my assertion that there is nothing other than my experience. Why postulate anything other than my experience? My experience is, I concede, unexplained and inexplicable. But so is a physical universe. And so is a self. All of these are utterly mysterious; all of these represent the end of a line of enquiry. Why not choose the simplest ontology––there is my experience, and nothing else––?

But as you say, your experience is a very complex state. It includes mysteries like the fact that kicking rocks hurts and not eating has unwanted consequences.

So Occam's razor would say the simplest thesis to explain such extravagantly elaborate illusions is that they are instead a mental model of real non-mental constraints.

Note that I accept when it comes to an inquiry after the true nature of this reality, we are indeed epistemically stuck on the solipsistic side of the fence. But then, Occam's razor in particular is a principle that could only apply if we believe already in the kind of physical reality in which the complex is grounded in something simpler.

So in invoking Occam's razor, you have already abandoned solipsism proper for some variant of pragmatism at least.

Quoting apokrisis

But as you say, your experience is a very complex state.

The point you make is a good one, and one I hadn't thought of. But I don't say experience is a complex state. I say it is not many things, and so not complex. (I don't say it is simple either, that is to say one thing.) These assertions of course require their own defence, which I shan't do now, but if I say that experience is not complex, am I then entitled to invoke Ockham (or Occam)?

Quoting apokrisis

Occam's razor in particular is a principle that could only apply if we believe already in the kind of physical reality in which the complex is grounded in something simpler.

Why only if we believe already in a physical reality? Why can't it apply if we believe already in any kind of reality in which the complex is grounded in something simpler?

Quoting Dominic Osborn

But I don't say experience is a complex state. I say it is not many things, and so not complex.

It seems complex to me that I would have both the illusion of the rock and the further experience of the pain of kicking it. It would be simpler to have just the one and still simpler to have neither.

So you may claim that there is just "one state" - experiencing. But it has a structure that is robustly divided between "self" and "world".

There is the experience that seems constrained by "reality" in a reliable fashion, and yet then also another set of experiences which are not (like dreams, imaginings, hallucinations). So you are positing a state of experiencing which is intrinsically complex. And that sets up the question of what is the simplest way to account for that particular experiential structure. The simplest answer must be that there is a world that accounts for those constraints on experience.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience.

Right here seems to be where you start to go wrong. Firstly "know" is just defined in such a way that it's impossible no doubt. Quite useful I bet, that notion of "know", at least to the argument. Secondly, "all you ever encounter is your experience" is hardly apodictic. Descartes had it backwards, it's not the mind that can't be doubted, it's embodiment that can't be doubted.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I can’t know if there is anything other than my experience, because all I ever encounter is my experience.

Even if that weren't patently and trivially false (by what experience do you know that you can't know if there is anything other than your experience and who is this I person that's doing all this experiencing and therefore cannot be itself an experience?) it implies that all experiences must in fact be total illusions or fantasies since all experiences are by definition of something other than the experience itself. But if that is so then they are not experiences at all!

Solipsism is an extreme philosophical position. It is as far removed from everyone’s everyday working picture of existence as a philosophical position can be. Any understanding that we have of how things are, whether it is expressed in the sciences, in literature, in religion––in language itself––is in direct contradiction with solipsism. There are thus those who seem to think (quite understandably) that the solipsist position is simply completely insane. Terrapin Station and Barry Etheridge, in their first posts, seem to be two of these. Most non-philosophers, of course, come into this category too.

I don’t know whether Terrapin Station and Barrye Etheridge really don’t (as it were) instinctively feel the force of solipsism, or whether they are just testing me, but I’ll assume the former. For want of something better, I’ll try an argument from authority. Think of those big names of the past, who, although not lost into the black hole of solipsism, nevertheless felt themselves sucked towards it, who at least expressed some distrust in the certainty of the existence of the external world, who expressed some version of the thought: What seems to be independent of me, a given, a fact turns out to have a great deal of me in it. Think of Descartes’ brain in a vat, Berkeley, Hume (all I know are my sensations), Kant (everything I experience is stamped with my mode of understanding), Schopenhauer (“‘The world is my representation’: this is a truth valid with reference to every living and knowing being, although man alone can bring it into reflective, abstract consciousness. If he really does so, philosophical discernment has dawned on him.” Early Wittgenstein (“What the solipsist means is quite correct, only he cannot say it.”). Feeling dubious about the existence of a world independent of the subject, feeling that you are trapped within your own mode of understanding is not the same as solipsism. But if you can understand something of what these philosophers were saying, it is perhaps not such a great leap to understand what the solipsist is saying.

Then there are those (sometimes the same people) who pick up on the contradiction inherent in the solipsist communicating his position. In order that there be communication, there must be something that speaks, something that is spoken and something that is heard. Mcdoodle, Metaphysician Undercover and bassplayer come into this category. They ask questions like, “How did I just get this post of yours then?” “Who are you talking to?”

Others pick up on the impossibility of solipsistic statements conveying information. They notice that all statements of the solipsistic position seem to be ultimately revealed either as tautologies or contradictions. Wosret picks up on a tautology. Barry Etheridge picks up on two contradictions.

I really don’t know how to answer these objections. I’ll try the following. (If Wayfarer and others thought my first post just stated provocative ideas as if they amounted to arguments, they’re not going to like it.) A world beyond, other than and independent of my experience is inconceivable, practically inconceivable, just as a round square is inconceivable. The notions of Ignorance and Knowledge are just other terms for a dualistic existence of––my experience––and what is not my experience. The idea that there are two kinds of inconceivability, practical inconceivability (like experiencing something outside my experience) and inconceivable because internally contradictory (like a round square). The subject of Epistemology assumes Dualism.

There are also those who think whilst it might be possible to not believe in things, it would be harder to not believe in people or experiences other than your own. Terrapin Station says, “But what you experience includes things like other people.” Metaphysician Undercover says “…do you not think that there are others beside you, such as me, who have experience as well as you? Doesn't your experience of communicating with others convince you that there are others? And doesn't this experience of communicating convince you that others have experience, similar to you having experience, but not the same as your experience?” I think I understand where you are coming from here. You are saying “Whilst I do not agree with you that there is nothing other than your experience, I concede that it might be difficult for you to believe in something utterly distinct from experience, such as a physical body, but it is surely less difficult for you to believe in another experience (another mind): something that is the same kind of stuff as your experience.” Of course I, as a ordinary person (not a philosopher) can’t help believing that there are other minds. The solipsist position however is rigorously sceptical: there is nothing other than my experience, of any kind, not even something that is like my experience.

But now to Apokrisis. Apokrisis (I think) feels the force of solipsism, as I do. He (or she?) says: “Note that I accept when it comes to an inquiry after the true nature of this reality, we are indeed epistemically stuck on the solipsistic side of the fence.”

Since he (or she?) is giving me the time of day, I shall expand a little on this stuff I am talking about: Experience.

“Experience” is the name I have been giving to Reality. I don’t like the word because it implies something that is experienced and something that experiences, things that I don’t think exist, but I have to have some word for it: “Experience” will have to do for the minute.

You take it as a given that Experience is complex. And why shouldn’t you? It certainly seems that way. And yet I don’t believe that it is complex.

To begin with, an epistemological argument. How do I know that there is any experience other than the experience I am having? What’s the way out of this extreme version of solipsism?

A second argument is the following. The apparent complexity of experience is accounted for by an external world which is complex, which is many things. That is to say that it is my mistaken belief in an external world (of many things) and my mistaken belief that my experience is of that external world, that makes me think that my experience is many things too. That is to say that I only think that there are two things, the experience of the seeing the rock and the experience of having the pain after kicking it, because I mistakenly believe that there is such a thing as the rock (independent of my experience) and such a thing as a foot (independent of my experience), each of which is independent of the other. I interpret my experience as many things on the back of my belief that there is a world of many things.

A related argument. I think (mistakenly) my experience is many things because I mistake an external world for my experience. My experience is not something that I can look at, that I can stand back from and assess, something bits of which I stand back from and compare with one another. My experience is not something I can leaf through, like the pages of a book, or something I can hold up to the light, like a film, and look up and down, at the various frames. As soon as I have that sort of relationship to something, that something is not experience, it is the external world. To put it metaphorically: the self that might assess the nature of an experience, as it is having the experience, is swallowed up in that experience, and is unable to characterise it. It’s only a moment later that the self can make some judgement of what that experience was like, but then that which is being judged is now in the past, and is no longer Experience: the mantle of what is actually experience has passed on to that act of judging. That which I might think to be my experience is actually something my experience is of.

Another argument. If experience is complex, then it is many things. If it is many things, where are the gaps in experience? Experience is one unbroken flow. How is it divided into different bits?

Another, which I shan’t flesh out. (You might find the presentation of this argument too perfunctory to bother with.) Each part of my experience implies all of it. Red implies blue and the whole colour spectrum. Colour implies texture, form, etc., the other components of the Visual. The Visual implies the Aural, the Olfactory, etc.. Each tiniest sensation implies the whole experiential panorama.

You also say this: “There is the experience that seems constrained by "reality" in a reliable fashion, and yet then also another set of experiences which are not (like dreams, imaginings, hallucinations). So you are positing a state of experiencing which is intrinsically complex.”

Of course Experience seems divided into inner stuff and outer stuff, between dreams, hallucinations, thoughts, etc., and perceptions and physical sensations, etc.. But really there is no division between the two. You can’t know if this is a dream, and when you are dreaming, you can’t know that it is dreaming. Again, to merely assert the point again, though in a non-epistemic way: what I dream is just as real as the waking world. When I am awake it is just as much a dream as when I am asleep. This belief in an inner and outer world is completely at odds with the monistically neutral ontology expressed in the OP.

“It would be simpler to have just the one and still simpler to have neither.”

I don’t think “neither” is more simple than one. More about my notion of Experience (and Reality): I think Experience is, in a way, nothingness. But not nothingness in the sense of absence, or in the sense of blackness, or silence, or air, but in the sense of––nothing determined, in the sense of everything piled on top of everything else (a metaphor), in the sense of having no characteristics because having all characteristics, in the sense of being identical to everythingness. I think Experience is like what Anaximander called apeiron. I think Experience is like chaos, what there was before Jehovah started dividing this from that.

A last thing about Experience: As I say, people think a major problem for solipsism (and it is certainly a defining feature of it) is its incommunicability. I don’t think that is an argument against it. Indeed, it persuades me of its truthfulness. The truth, the ultimate nature of Reality, as has been said, from Taoism to Wittgenstein––is indescribable, unknowable (in the ordinary sense, and so not even a candidate for communication), ineffable, etc..

Reply to Dominic Osborn

So why are you posting this if there's nobody out here to read and reply to it? And why would you even address the issue of communicability? Who would there be to communicate with?

Just to be Clear:

People’s responses have prompted me to try to defend solipsism. I am not however a solipsist. A solipsist is someone who believes only in himself (or herself) (sol: only + ipse: self). My philosophical position, as outlined in the OP, was that there was nothing other than experience, neither an external world nor a self, nor, indeed, in any selves. We usually picture experience (in a prephilosophical way) as something between a world and a self: there is me on the near side of it, practically a point, and a world on the far side of. My contention is that there is nothing that is experienced and nothing that experiences: there is only experience. (Of course the word “experience” suggests both a self and a world, but that is a trivial objection: it could be obviated by another choice of word.)

Nor do I contend that there is only my experience for the reason that I cannot experience anything other than my experience. I contend only (following others) that solipsism is not falsifiable: I cannot know that there is something other than my experience.

Barry Etheridge: I don’t know whether I have made this sufficiently clear. There is me, the ordinary person, who cannot help believing in a world outside himself, other minds, his own mind, etc.. He is the one who writes these posts and who seeks the approbation of others. Quite another thing is my philosophical stance. I wish I could believe, with my heart, and with everything I did, in the truth of the philosophical stance that I here lay out, but try as I might, I can’t. Don’t physicalists have the same problem? Don’t they, in spite of their philosophical beliefs, find themselves talking and acting as if there were such things as mental things?

I think solipsism is something that you have to come upon yourself. If you were a solipsist, you would look at these lines in front of you and think, “These lines have no authorship; they just appeared in front of me, causelessly.” (The “in front of me” bit of that is just a figure of speech.)

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I cannot know that there is something other than my experience.

On purely semantic grounds, you can know that there is something other than your experience.Quoting Putnam

Meanings just ain't in the head

Quoting ?????????????

Or one has to remain silent, maybe.

Right, a solipsist doesn't publish.

Quoting jkop

On purely semantic grounds, you can know that there is something other than your experience.
Meanings just ain't in the head
— Putnam

Not quite sure of the connection between your remark and your quote. To take them separately:

Do you mean that because I use the word “experience” and because the word “experience” presupposes that there is something that it is of, I acquiesce in the proposition that there is an external world? As I say, the incommunicability of solipsism is a central and defining feature of it.

Putnam’s remark is (obviously) to do with the philosophical subject of meaning. This thread really isn’t (though there is no reason why it should not change its subject matter.) Putnam’s understanding of meaning assumes dualism: there are internal experiences, and external things that they mean. I reject dualism and so, I suppose, I reject Putnam’s understanding of meaning.

Quoting ?????????????

But that cuts both ways, doesn't it? If you want to make that argument, you're essentially saying that nothing can be said of experience, yet you're apparently saying quite a lot about it. If you think that, when you try to say something about experience, that of which you are talking about isn't experience, you're speaking nonsense. No?

This remark is very much to the point.

You might think that I’m trying to have it both ways: I am saying both that you can’t say anything about experience and that you can.

Yes I do believe experience, or Reality, or the Truth––is unfathomable and unspeakable and indescribable. And that indeed there is a sense in which there is nothing you can say about it. But the position is not entirely hopeless: you can say what it is not. So I say, for example, that Experience is not divided, that it is not many things. Note that this does not say that Experience is one thing. (I also say that Experience is not one thing; it is not unified.)

All anyone who understands Reality as I understand it can do (in philosophy) to point people (including myself) towards the truth of things is to identify the self-contradictory natures of other conceptions of Reality.

You can also make tautological remarks about Experience. You can say things like, Experience is infinite. Experience is Reality. These remarks, though ultimately revealed as tautological, somehow have some explanatory value.

Quoting ?????????????

I think you answered that above. Experience is divided into bits by reflection and judgement. Or maybe it's something like a system? Interconnected parts forming a whole.

I don’t think there are two things, an internal world, experience, and an external world. Nor do I think there are two things, an internal world and a self, something that “reflects” and “judges”. As soon as you posit a self, as it were further inside experience, you simultaneously (as it were to make room for it) push experience further out, making it external to the self, making it the world. (Forgive me if this paragraph is too metaphorical or too cryptic: I can try to elucidate it a bit if you want.)

Nor do I think Experience is a system. I don’t believe in parts and wholes. It seems to me that either two things are entirely separate, distinct and independent, in which case they do not form a whole. Or two things do form a whole, in which case they are not separate, distinct and independent. I think the notion of “part” is intrinsically contradictory. (Another unsupported, controversial assertion. But I am here just stating my beliefs, for what it's worth.)

Quoting ?????????????

Or one has to remain silent, maybe.

A solipsist’s conception of Reality is indeed incommunicable, but so is a (true) non-solipsist conception of Reality. It is not just the solipsist that has this problem, but everyone.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Putnam’s understanding of meaning assumes dualism: there are internal experiences, and external things that they mean. I reject dualism and so, I suppose, I reject Putnam’s understanding of meaning.

Dualism? Putnam's argument for semantic externalism has little to do with dualism. Its conclusion is that the meanings of words (or thoughts) are causally constrained by speakers' encounters and interaction with the things that they speak or think of, and a division of their meanings by speech. An alleged solipsist has no sufficient reason to think of anything, for nothing comes from nothing.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

“Experience” is the name I have been giving to Reality. I don’t like the word because it implies something that is experienced and something that experiences, things that I don’t think exist, but I have to have some word for it: “Experience” will have to do for the minute.

So two points on that.

First, I accept the full force of solipsism on a non-solipsistic basis. So it is because I believe - after Peirce - that our mentality is "pure symbolism", that this then is a justification of the Kantian impossibility of knowing the "material" thing-in-itself.

I "know" - as a reasonable belief derived from scientific investigation - that even when I see colours, or shapes, or motions, such perceptions are indirect constructions. It is modelling. And that leaves me "trapped" on the side that is the play of symbols. There is no getting outside my own mental creations. It is a categorical difference.

And yet of course, the very idea of a modelling relation only makes sense if there is indeed a world, a thing-in-itself, that causally constrains the impressions I might have. So to believe in this epistemic "full force" solipsism - the one due to being trapped in my own play of symbols - requires also the ontic commitment that there is something the other side, a material world. It would be the biggest surprise possible, the most impossible conceivable thing, for it not to be true that my impression of there being a world is not sustained by there being a world.

But then beyond that, this semiotic argument also pretty much mandates that the world I think I see is such a selective and self-interested impression that I'm not really seeing that world at all. This is especially obvious when it comes to talking about colours or odours. But rigour would demand it applies to primary qualities as well as secondary qualities.

Anyway, you can pursue that semiotic argument still further (winding up in pansemiotic metaphysics). But the key point is the strength of my epistemic solipsism is due to a positive belief in the world - a belief that the world exists, therefore I must be symbolically modelling, and therefore I am trapped due to the necessary indirectness of this modelling relation. If I stopped believing in the world in this fashion, my reasons for accepting the force of solipsism (which is usually due to the weakly defined notion of "mind" rather than the strongly defined notion of "symbol") would collapse. I would lack an evidential basis for making that very claim.

Second, or continuing on from that really, you are in the same boat as you can't talk about "experience" as "just whatever everything is" in some uncontextual fashion and claim that to be meaningful speech. For any statement to be intelligible, it has to be so by virtue of a claimed contrast.

To speak of "experience", it must have a definition in terms of what is its "other". And you are claiming to be talking about "a state" which has no other. In logic, the principle of non-contradiction fails to apply and so technically your claim is simply vague. It may sound as though you are making a definite reference to something, but you really aren't.

Now you try to sidestep this difficulty by starting with a crisp dichotomy - the usual one of self and world. Then by virtue of their metaphysical intelligibility - it makes dialectical sense that such a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive pair such as self and world could exist - you can claim dissolve each into the other to arrive at a third thing. Let's call it dasein. Let's call it "experience". Let's call it whatever. You only have to point to the fact that starting with the fact of a strong separation, that gives you the grounds to reverse the separation and arrive back as at some logically unseparated state.

That's fine. It's good logic. But we need to call it what it really is - and that's vagueness (or Firstness for Peirce). And it is as far away from actual experiencing of any phenomenological kind as it is from the noumenal world.

Being that, it is unlike anything an actual traditional solipsist - as an end game idealist - is conceiving of. We are not reducing everything to some kind of mental stuff, some play of ideas. We are reducing everything to vagueness. We have gone way beyond the kind of definite being that an idealist is imagining as the basis of all existence.

So strong epistemic solipsism is warranted in the sense that we "know" that ourselves and our impressions can only be a play of symbols. We are trapped on one side of the modelling relation we have with the world (but we can only "know" that by believing the world to be there on the other side).

And then strong ontic solipsism is not warranted. If you try to reduce our state of mental representation, our embodied state of being, to its greatest state of simplicity, you find that the only way that this can be done rationally is by beginning with the definitely separated and - from there - argue towards their foundational unity. And that unity can only be a state of vagueness or utter indeterminacy.

And indeed, we can do that, even using weaker ontic notions such as self vs world rather than my preferred symbol vs matter.

But we then arrive at a "state" that resembles no state of mind. We arrive at a "vagueness" that could hardly satisfy any traditional notion of idealism and thus of solipsistic being.

So idealism/solipsism fails as we track back towards the very origins of ontic possibility. But that then becomes why I say there is this other ontic expedition of pan-semiosis. Instead of being a bug, the fundamentality of vagueness is now the metaphysical feature.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

The apparent complexity of experience is accounted for by an external world which is complex, which is many things.

Remember that my original argument to you was that you were having to assume at least two simples - the self and world. So my argument did not rely on the world being complex (even if it surely is).

Quoting Dominic Osborn

That is to say that I only think that there are two things, the experience of the seeing the rock and the experience of having the pain after kicking it, because I mistakenly believe that there is such a thing as the rock (independent of my experience) and such a thing as a foot (independent of my experience), each of which is independent of the other.

But what warrants you treating the pain as real, the rock as illusion? This shows you have already assumed that existence has the character of being "mental". And as I argue, you can only claim that intelligibly by virtue of already believing that "mental" stands in meaningful contrast to something "other", such as physical reality. Thus we are starting at an irreducible complexity that contradicts anything further you might claim about there be a monistic simplicity when it comes to this thing called "experience".

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Another argument. If experience is complex, then it is many things. If it is many things, where are the gaps in experience? Experience is one unbroken flow. How is it divided into different bits?

But we know that if you run the frames of a strip of film through a projector then - at the right rate - you experience an unbroken flow of imagery. Or if we introspect on dreams with accuracy, we discover each is in fact a "still", just a still with a psychological sense of swirling, camera-tracking, motion in which nothing actually changes in the momentary snapshot "view".

So there is abundant evidence - both empirical and even phenomenological - that we can be fooled by the general assumption experience has no composite structure, no "bitty" complexity.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Each part of my experience implies all of it. Red implies blue and the whole colour spectrum. Colour implies texture, form, etc., the other components of the Visual. The Visual implies the Aural, the Olfactory, etc.. Each tiniest sensation implies the whole experiential panorama.

That makes no sense to me. If I am deaf and blind, how would my remaining kinesthetic knowledge imply anything about those other sensory modalities?

And if we imagine removing every modality, what are we going to be left with. No state of sensation surely.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

You can’t know if this is a dream, and when you are dreaming, you can’t know that it is dreaming. Again

Quoting Dominic Osborn

You can’t know if this is a dream, and when you are dreaming, you can’t know that it is dreaming. Again, to merely assert the point again, though in a non-epistemic way: what I dream is just as real as the waking world.

Again, you can't argue positively for ontic solipsism on this basis because you are trying to employ terms like "dreaming" and "awake" in ways that presume the knowable difference you are seeking to deny.

Epistemic solipsism on this score is fair enough because now you are disposing of the "knowing" with all its absolutism. You are instead beginning with the structure of your beliefs and agreeing that's as good as it gets.

But then those beliefs are the ontic commitments. And so to talk about dreams and awakeness is intelligible speech - something we could actually argue about meaningfully, with ourselves even - because we accept they are terms representing different categories of experience. That level of complexity is already being taken for granted. Thus destroying the undividable simplicity you require to make ontic solipsism fly.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Experience is, in a way, nothingness. But not nothingness in the sense of absence, or in the sense of blackness, or silence, or air, but in the sense of––nothing determined, in the sense of everything piled on top of everything else (a metaphor), in the sense of having no characteristics because having all characteristics, in the sense of being identical to everythingness. I think Experience is like what Anaximander called apeiron. I think Experience is like chaos, what there was before Jehovah started dividing this from that.

Or as I've argued, not nothingness but vagueness, firstness, indeterminacy, potential - and yes, apeiron.

So the contrast becomes not that of something vs nothing, light vs blackness, but indeed more like an everythingness that is thus equally a nothingness in that all possible distinctions are overwhelmed by their own lack of proper contrast.

So it seems you do want to arrive at the same fundamental state as I do. But as I have said, I don't see this as a species of idealism or solipsism. It is a metaphysics that goes beyond all that. It undermines both realist and idealist ontologies in radical fashion.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Nor do I think Experience is a system. I don’t believe in parts and wholes. It seems to me that either two things are entirely separate, distinct and independent, in which case they do not form a whole. Or two things do form a whole, in which case they are not separate, distinct and independent. I think the notion of “part” is intrinsically contradictory. (Another unsupported, controversial assertion. But I am here just stating my beliefs, for what it's worth.)

I think we are on the same page. But the way out of this particular bind is the logic of the dichotomy.

Aristotle, Hegel and Peirce all wound up with a triadic, developmental, ontology as the way to resolve the dilemma. If you start with pure unformed potential - the unspeakable ur-stuff that is an ontic vagueness - then that can then get organised, structured, via a process of differentiation and integration. You have the division. And that division allows the mixing. And the division is never a real separation as such as it is just the same thing moving apart from itself with ever increasing definiteness.

So this was Anaximander's gift at the dawn of metaphysics. You have the apeiron. And it divides in logical fashion. Part of it, by concentrating the possibility of warmness, leaves another part that is subsequently a concentration of the cooler. And if such a separation is possible, what is to stop it proceeding to its limits. Coupled to a further consequent separation - the dry and the damp - you then get all four basic elemental categories, fire, air, water and earth. Or in modern physical parlance, plasma, gas, liquid and solid.

Thus systems thinking supports an ontology that is triadically developmental. You start with an unformed potential (that is no kind of substantial state - mental or material). And then all you need is the rational possibility of some "this" which then, in its very becoming, must produce its matching "that". You just need a symmetry that can be broken. From there, complexity can follow as the differentiation that then gets integrated, the brokenness that can mix and interact.

'Experience' is a transitive verb.

Reply to Wayfarer

How could, for example, 'having a headache' be transitive? Some experiences are not about anything.

Reply to jkop Interesting question. I suupose first-person experience is a different matter, but generally speaking 'experience' implies a subject of experience. I suppose when I experience pain there is still the awareness of pain as an object of experience; I could be free of pain, but pain couldn't exist without a subject who experiences it.

Reply to jkop its about your head surely?

I have just gone back and read the OP again, about which I made some dismissive comments some days back, but anyway I shall reply now.

I was asked in response to my comments:

Dominic Osborn:I am fairly philosophically uninformed. ––So inform me. You say there are no arguments in my post. Prima facie there are three of them (The epistemological one, Ockham’s Razor, and the one about Number.) Why aren’t they arguments? Inform me.

The passage that I was referring to as 'not being an argument but an assertion' was this one:

Dominic Osborn:I have no evidence of a time when I am not. Whatever constitutes evidence (for me) must be within my experience. These truths trump (for me) everything that everyone says to me about the other side of the world, the other side of the wall, the certainty of my death, the time before I was born, etc.. I am solipsistic and idealistic in this way.

The reason I say it's not an argument, but an assertion, is because it doesn't strike me at all as being self-evident or even arguable, that there are not many things that exist, that are of much greater age than oneself. Anything which you know existed before you were born - your parents would constitute an excellent example - certainly constitutes 'evidence'. If you say 'that's not evidence', then first you have to make the case for why it doesn't, or what would constitute 'evidence', or what, in fact, you are trying to say.

Now, granted, when you come to know of things external to yourself, then in some sense you 'assimilate them into consciousness' - that is what knowledge means, in some sense - but I think that the bald assertion that 'the universe exists within my experience of it', amounts to an assertion that when the writer of that sentence dies, then the world will no longer exist, that the Universe is wholly dependent upon an individual's experience of it.

So speaking of that person, if they were to die, you can say 'well, it no longer exists for him', but that is not really saying anything of significance.

If you look at the Dialogues of Berkeley, for example, he goes to great pains to argue his case, as do other idealist philosophers.

Dominic Osborn: If there is something other than experience then there are two things, my experience and that which is not my experience.

That doesn't seem problematical to me - I know there is a vast universe of stuff I have never experienced. And I learn things every day.

As for there being 'only experience', as i have said, 'experience' is a transitive verb, i.e. 'I experience it'. It presupposes a subject of experience in a domain of objects. That is, if you like, the plight of existence! I think the way that non-dualist philosophies transcend that is indeed by de-constructing that sense of self-and-other, or self-and-world as separate realities; hence their emphasis on meditative absorption, states in which that instinctive sense of separateness is overcome.

Again, well written, but I think there is something pretty fundamental that you're not getting yet. But kudos for being up for debating it.

Thrilled to be examined in this way, but it's going to take me a week or so to respond.

Quoting Wayfarer

I suppose when I experience pain there is still the awareness of pain as an object of experience; ...

I don't think one's awareness could appear as an object in any experience.

Being aware of having pain is not identical to having pain although in both cases there is awareness of pain. The former is a belif about the state you're in (and as such possibly true or false) while the latter is the state you're in: the fact.

Reply to Dominic Osborn I had unintentionally ommited a qualifier in my above post, which I have subsequently added in bold, which changes the meaning of the paragraph in which it appears.

Reply to jkop 'There is an awareness of pain' means that the pain is the 'object of awareness'.
And how could you believe you had a pain, when you didn't?

Reply to apokrisis

My head does not somehow appear in a headache. It does, however, appear in experiences characterized by intentionality, such as seeing or touching.

Reply to Wayfarer
Sure, in some sense the pain is the object of its awareness. But the word 'awareness' is ambiguous here, for, as I tried to explain, there are two different senses in which you can be aware of pain: 1) as a belief about the state you're in, and 2) as the state you're in.

Beliefs are not perceptions, and therefore it is possible to believe sincerely, that you feel pain, and behave as if you were in pain, regardless of what you perceive, or even evoke and sustain pains by the belief or entrenched behaviour from past experiences of pains etc

Reply to jkop But how could I have 'a belief I have a pain'. You either have a pain, or you don't. Even if your pain is entirely psycho-somatic, it appears as pain, not as a belief. Belief doesn't enter into it.

Reply to Wayfarer It ain't that simple, your report of pain is not the pain. And although pain is sufficient for awareness of pain, awareness of pain is not necessarily pain.

Reply to jkop no, but this conversation is, so I'll leave it for now.

So why is everyone so deluded? Why do people think that there is a world beyond their experience?

Likely it’s so everyone can use the experiences of others to predict personal consequences, without getting nose to nose with a rattlesnake, a rabid racoon or personally view the results of philosophers leaping off mountaintops to "prove" there is no world beyond their own experiences.

Reply to Dominic Osborn
If solipsism was true there would be no way to know it or no way to falsify it.
There would be no way to know or falsify anything at all in fact.
Solipsism leads to an ill defined infinite regress.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

A solipsist’s conception of Reality is indeed incommunicable, but so is a (true) non-solipsist conception of Reality. It is not just the solipsist that has this problem, but everyone.

This is simply not true.
Solipsism insists that reality exists such that not self is not independent of or distinct from self.
Non-Solipsist's note that this leads to an ill defined infinite regress and that it is not a logically consistent foundation.
Since it is possible to define the term self and the term not self such that they are distinct and independent, non-solipsist's suggest that doing so allows one to form logically consistent theories of knowledge.

We know for a fact that solipsism, by definition, cannot be logically consistent.
So non-solipsis's insist, that by definition, the term not self is distinct and independent from the term not self.

Reply to apokrisis

I am grateful for your analysis of my thinking. Your thoughts are well-articulated, educational and clear. And they gave me a lot to think about.


1. “There’s no getting outside my own mental creations”.

Why aren’t you just saying this:? My experience is about something else. (Our mentality is pure symbolism.) Therefore there must be something else.

And why isn’t this just an assertion of duality? You’re saying, simply, that that there are two things, I, or mentality, or the play of symbols, on one side, and something that they are about, perhaps a material world, on the other.


2. “I 'know' – as a reasonable belief derived from scientific investigation – that even when I see
colours, or shapes, or motions, such perceptions are indirect constructions.”

Why do you believe that experience is “pure symbolism”? Why do you “know” that colours, etc. are indirect constructions? Why can’t my seeing green or my seeing blue, the action of seeing, be Reality itself?

I don’t think “scientific investigation” will help you. That is: how do you know, when the scientist is explaining to you that red is in fact light waves of such and such a frequency, how do you know the observation was really made? How do you know he is talking about something? Why isn’t it just another load of shapes and sounds, without reference? However reasonable the explanations sound, however habituated we are to accepting them, how do we in fact justify our faith in an elaborate structure very different in nature from the play of shapes and sounds that make up our experience?

“But we know that if you run the frames of a strip of film through a projector then - at the right rate - you experience an unbroken flow of imagery. Or if we introspect on dreams with accuracy, we discover each is in fact a "still", just a still with a psychological sense of swirling, camera-tracking, motion in which nothing actually changes in the momentary snapshot "view".

So there is abundant evidence - both empirical and even phenomenological - that we can be fooled by the general assumption experience has no composite structure, no "bitty" complexity”

Again, how do you know that a strip of film through a projector is an analogue of experience? How do we “introspect on dreams with accuracy”? Even if it appeared to me that I had this skill, how would I be able to depend on the accuracy of my introspection? How too do I know that when I am introspecting on some aspect of my experience that there is any identity between that which I am introspecting on, in the present, and that which I did experience, in the past?


3. Are you ruthlessly sceptical, like Kant, knowing nothing beyond the play of symbols except that there is something there? Do you indeed apply your epistemic solipsism to primary as well as secondary qualities? Do you indeed go into pansemiotic metaphysics?

Or do you in fact claim to know a lot about what is beyond your experience? You say, “as a reasonable belief derived from scientific investigation”. You say experience is like frames of a film.


4. You are calling Experience Mind or the Play of Symbols. I am calling Experience Reality. Aren’t we just getting our signals crossed here?

This is my position.

I am asserting that the “play of symbols” is Reality itself. That it is not about anything, that it is not in fact a play of symbols at all, that it is an illusion that it is about anything, and an illusion that there is something that it is about.

This assertion is a rejection of the noumenon. It is a rejection of the material world. It is a rejection of anything outside my mind.

The slightly less obvious point, but a point of exactly equal importance, and asserted with equal force––is that it is a rejection of the self too. It is a rejection of the mind, conceived as something distinct from the world. It is saying, “There is no play of symbols. Your imagining that there was a world out there was equally an imagining that this was a play of symbols, that this was in here.”

To put it metaphorically, though in a bit of a pen-proud way: the play of symbols (what you are calling “the play of symbols”) is the world, though there is nothing looking at it; the play of symbols is the self, though it is not looking at anything.

It is the invention of a not-directly-known world beyond the self which is in fact the invention of the self. "There is a world beyond your experience” says: your experience is confined, local, distinct from something else.

But your experience is Apeiron; your experience is undefined and indefinable. It is not different from anything because it isn’t anything, or rather isn’t anything determined. My experience is all there is because it is the same as your experience.

“...an actual traditional solipsist - as an end game idealist."

OK. Traditional solipsism is idealist. I am not an idealist and I am not a solipsist. I am a neutral monist. It is true that in a previous post (on the other, defunct website) I said I was sympathetic towards idealism, and I am, but that is only because the mental world, in its ungraspability, seems closer to Reality that most material conceptions of Reality––not because I believe Reality is mental.

What should I call what I am calling “experience”? Would Dasein be a better word? Would apeiron?


5. What is right about solipsism?

We know that the solipsist can’t (without involving himself in contradiction) point to his experience and say, “This is the only thing that there is” because “This” can only be meaningful if contrasted with something, because there must be something that is different from “this” that is doing the pointing or the saying, because in speaking at all he is accepting that there is an ear somewhere.

So we know there is something wrong with solipsism.

But there is something right with it too: that is what I am saying. And the thing that is right about it is the following. How can anyone affirm the existence of something beyond their experience? In gesturing towards such a thing in any way at all, in pointing to it, referencing it, conceiving it––they bring it into the realm of their experience.

Solipsism can’t be expressed but neither can the opposite of solipsism.


6. It’s not just solipsism and non-solipsism that can’t be expressed, but Reality that can’t be expressed.

I think I completely agree with you when you say that in an important technical way, what I am calling Experience can’t be talked about, or indeed even identified. If it were the only thing, what would identify it? What would the finger that pointed towards it, even if there were one, be pointing away from? It seems my only resource in trying to identify it is to point to something else and say “It is not that”, but then my pointing is only meaningful if there is something I am pointing to. So I am also asserting that “that” exists.

I agree. I don’t think I can talk about what I called “experience”. In so doing either I have to admit to the existence of other things to contrast it with, or I talk in tautologies: “Experience is infinite. Experience is without characteristics.” Etc..

You say that I try––and succeed (“That’s fine. It’s good logic”)––in sidesteppping this difficulty. I disagree. I think, technically, I fail. There is the same sort of problem. In order that I be able to assert the dissolving together of two things (self and world) I must first of all assert their difference. But then, am I not contradicting myself? The conclusion of my argument is that self and world do not exist as separate entities, but my premise is that they do exist as separate entities.

Why does it “make(s) dialectical sense that such a mutually exclusive and jointly exhaustive pair such as self and world could exist” ? Why does that make sense any more than, say, an undivided existence? It’s not that it necessarily makes any sense, it’s just that we are all––prephilosophically ––dualists.

The best we can do in philosophy, in trying to get at the the ultimate nature of Reality, is to identify the inevitably-present either contradictory or tautologous nature of any characterisation of it.

The structure of communication is the structure of Dualism. In communicating at all, Duality appears in all these forms: Mouth and Ear (mind and mind); Thought and Word; Subject and Predicate (within each proposition).

There can’t even be a notion of Reality, for surely “Reality” is only meaningful if it is possible to contrast it with something else, such as, say, illusion. But then you are conceding that there is something other than Reality.

I think this communication problem, and even communication with oneself––thinking––is a fundamental characteristic of philosophy as, say, it is practised on this forum. (What is the way forward? Not talking? Religion (though not necessarily with a god)? Endless attempts at clarification, endless disputation? I love talking about this stuff, but I am not convinced I am being virtuous in doing so.)


7. “Or if we introspect on dreams with accuracy, …”

As I said earlier, I don’t think you can introspect on your dreams. Indeed, given my understanding of experience, as expressed above (as Reality itself) and even possibly your notion of experience (the play of symbols), I don’t think you can introspect on experience of whatever kind.

Experience (according to my understanding) is seeing itself. It is not something that is seen. If something is able to be seen, or introspected on, or known, in the classic sense, then there must be something that sees, that intropects, that knows. If you think that experience can be introspected on, you are accepting dualism. If Experience is something that is seen, then there is something, a self, inside experience, looking at it. Or, if something is seen, then it is the world, and experience is the play of symbols about that world.

“So there is abundant evidence - both empirical and even phenomenological - that we can be fooled by the general assumption experience has no composite structure, no "bitty" complexity.”

Experience, subjective experience, is not something that is susceptible of empirical examination. You can’t see your seeing, and no-one else can either (a subject can’t see into the subjective experience of another subject).


8. “That makes no sense to me. If I am deaf and blind, …?”

I am not going to address here your particular counter-example. Though I know that it does indeed need addressing.

Here is a better analogy (I think): any experience is like a spatial coordinate. It is at once distinct from all other spatial coordinates but implies them too. This is like Buddhist dependent arising. Each part of experience is not excisable from the rest of it. It is not independent of the rest. But it is not identical to any other experience either. (And, if I can here appeal to your agreeing with me about parts and wholes: two experiences of the same person are not related to one another as two parts are related to one another in a whole.)

As a matter of fact I remain very puzzled about the complexity and non-complexity of experience. I think it is (metaphorically) between the two. I don’t think it is many things. If it were many things it would have to have breaks in it (according to my philosophical position). On the other hand I don’t think it is simple either; I don’t think it is one thing. The Buddhist notion of “dependent arising” expresses this ambivalence, though it too is opaque. Somehow––and I wish I could be clearer––each experience is at once separate from every other experience and implies it (every other) too. Or somehow each experience is at once distinguished from all others but, because at its heart it is nothing at all, or everything, it is also not distinguished from all others. Look at something for a long enough time, or say a word over and over again, and it melts away, or morphs into other things.

Experience is the name I am giving Reality, for the minute, and so my struggle to characterise experience is my struggle to characterise Reality. I can’t characterise it, and nor, I believe, can anyone. I can only say what it is not. And I say that it is not many things and that it is not one thing. I say it is neither complex nor simple.


9. “But what warrants you treating the pain as real, the rock as illusion?”

Didn’t understand your question here.

I think the pain is real and the seeing of the rock is real. I don’t think there is a rock independent of me. That is the illusion. We, as incorrigible though misguided believers in the complexity of our experience, believe in the complexity of our experience because we believe that our experience is of something (the world) and because we believe that that something is complex. I believe (falsely) that my seeing of the rock and my seeing of the tree are distinct experiences because I believe (falsely) that there is such a thing as the rock, independent of me, and such a thing as the tree, independent of me, and that the rock and the tree are independent of one another. With your example it goes like this: I believe (falsely) that my having the pain and my seeing the rock are experiences that are distinct from one another because I believe (falsely) that the pain is of the foot and the seeing is of the rock and that the foot and the rock are distinct from one another.


10. Your second post (of that day) I really have no understanding of. If you can be bothered I would be interested in hearing more.

I suppose you are not claiming that you are here precisely demonstrating how a complex world gets started; you are just trying to give me an idea of how it gets started, but I still don’t understand at all.

How was the world formed?

God divided the heavens from the earth, then he divided the earth up into sea and land, etc..

Yes but how did God get separated from His creation in the first place, in order to start making those divisions? I can understand how the cake gets cut up if you have a cake and a knife to begin with, but what I want to know is how did the knife get separated from the cake?

That’s what I am asking Aristotle, Hegel, Peirce and you.

“you have the division”

Why? How?

“…[a] thing moving apart from itself…”

How?

I have been so busy answering Apokrisis that I haven't got to the other posts yet. Thank you for your replies: I shall get to them.

If you have nothing but your own experiences to predict the consequences of your encounters with reality than how did you survive your encounters with such things as traffic, poisonous plants, snakes, rabid animals, disease, cold weather, deep water, etc., to write this question. You must be an amazingly lucky person.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

However reasonable the explanations sound, however habituated we are to accepting them, how do we in fact justify our faith in an elaborate structure very different in nature from the play of shapes and sounds that make up our experience?

You are reverting to a demand for absolute knowledge when I am describing what can be justifiably believed as the result of accepting a particular epistemic process - pragmatic reasoning.

So it will always be the case that scepticism wins against claims of absolute certainty. I accept that.

But then I shrug my shoulders and get on with life in the most well-founded way possible. And that is to follow a process of empirical reasoning based on hypothesis and test. Even "stuck inside experience", we can divide our experience into the ideas we hold and the impressions that result. I can have a theory about physics and then I can read the numbers off a dial. It is all "just experience". But it has now a structure in which what I think is causally tied to what I see.

So it is not just that the explanations sound reasonable. They look reasonable. I can directly experience the consistency of the connection between my ideas and impressions.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I am asserting that the “play of symbols” is Reality itself. That it is not about anything, that it is not in fact a play of symbols at all, that it is an illusion that it is about anything, and an illusion that there is something that it is about.

This assertion is a rejection of the noumenon. It is a rejection of the material world. It is a rejection of anything outside my mind.

Fine. But if we can achieve a tight causal connection between our ideas and our impressions by presuming that there really is a world out there acting as the third thing of a constraint on our acts of interpretance, then why would we have any good ground for disbelieving in such a vital prop of our state of experience?

So your inconsistency would be in depending on the noumenon to justify the game having a consistent structure, and then - for no other reason than that absolutism entails scepticism - turning around and rejecting the noumenon.

You see the self-defeating paradox in what you argue? The noumenon is required to get you to the point that it is sufficiently established that you can then "meaningfully" reject it.

If you don't really have any strong thoughts about the noumenon, its existence is neither here nor there. To accept it, or to reject it, makes little meaningful difference.

It is only after you have strong reason to believe in it, that you can meaningfully talk about turning around and not believing it.

So sure, scepticism just comes for free with strong belief as a crisp rational possibility. If you can say yes, the very meaning of "yes" is that you could have said "no". But just because you could have said "no" doesn't mean no is now the right answer - what you ought to be saying instead.

Thus there is always the formal possibility that the noumenon is not the case. But you would be arguing now for a belief in the logical alternative that completely lacks any supporting evidence, and against the logical alternative built around the existence of all the supporting evidence.

In the end, that doesn't sound like sound reasoning does it? The proper use of scepticism surely is just to discover unexplored alternatives - gaps in our current explanatory beliefs - and not to simply disbelieve our beliefs.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

1. “There’s no getting outside my own mental creations”.

If you only had access to self this would lead to an ill defined infinite regress such that you could be sure of nothing.
Not the existence of your self and not the existence of anything which is not self.

If you are sure of the existence of self the only logical way of achieving that is by reference to some not self which is distinct and independent of self.

If you are sure of existence self, this logically entails the existence a distinct and independent not self.

Not only is it unnecessary to doubt that existence of self and therefor not self,
It is logically impossible to demonstrate that it is necessary to doubt the existence of self and not self, because of infinite regress.

Solipsism cannot, with logical consistently claim..
"We can only be sure of the self and nothing else."
In reality being sure of the existence of self logically entails the existence of a distinct and independent not self.

In reality if such a distinction were not possible we would be stuck in an infinite loop of self referencing self referencing self.
We are not stuck in such a loop, we do have a clear and distinct impression of the existence of self therefor we can conclude that in reality solopsism is not the case...and cannot logically be the case.

Solipsism is not only unnecessary doubt, it is logically impossible to prove that it would be a necessary doubt.

Those that claim to be sure that the self exists are not solipsists, as this logically entails the existence of an independent and distinct not self.

Only those that claim...
"We can be sure of nothing including the existence of self."
Are consistent.
But because we can not be sure if they are right, or rather if we are sure they are right then we are not sure they are right.

Claiming we cannot be sure of anything at all is not a claim we can be sure of, and it is not logically possible to prove it correct because it would be self refuting.

Quoting apokrisis

In the end, that doesn't sound like sound reasoning does it? The proper use of scepticism surely is just to discover unexplored alternatives - gaps in our current explanatory beliefs - and not to simply disbelieve our beliefs.

Those arguing for the case of solipsism don't seem to realize that not only is such skepticism unnecessary.
It is logically impossible to even prove that it would be necessary if in reality solipsism was true.

Most of them argue that we can only be sure of the existence of self without realizing that to aviod infinite regress the terms self and not self must be defined such that they are distinct and independent.
If these terms are indistinct it creates an infinite loop of self reference which allows no conclusion about the existence of self or anything.

I have been trying in vain to explain this but people don't realize that they are being inconsistent and contradictory.

Reply to jkop I am not familiar with Putnam and I am not sure that I understand what you are saying (not that that is your fault).

Perhaps if I, rather boringly, restate my philosophical stance, you’ll be able to identify for me what I am not understanding.

I have been calling Reality “experience”. That might not be a good word. As I say, it implies something that is experienced and something that experiences, a world and a self, both of which (I am asserting) are illusory. A better word might be Anaximander’s “apeiron”, which means, roughly, that which is not determined, that which (as it were) has all qualities and no qualities. Apeiron or experience, according to my philosophical stance, is all that there is. Apeiron is not about anything and neither is there anything that is about apeiron. Apeiron does not mean anything and neither does anything mean apeiron. Indeed, according to this admittedly absolutist stance, there isn’t such a thing as meaning. For there to be such a thing as meaning there have to things that mean and things that are meant, words and objects, or thoughts and objects. Any theory about meaning, whilst the purveyor of it might not be a traditional Cartesian dualist, presupposes this sort of duality.

Reply to Wayfarer Quoting Wayfarer

The reason I say it's not an argument, but an assertion, is because it doesn't strike me at all as being self-evident or even arguable, that there are not many things that exist, that are of much greater age than oneself. Anything which you know existed before you were born - your parents would constitute an excellent example - certainly constitutes 'evidence'. If you say 'that's not evidence', then first you have to make the case for why it doesn't, or what would constitute 'evidence', or what, in fact, you are trying to say.

Fair point. I should have warned the reader that I begin from a place of extreme scepticism. This tendency is not common out there in the world, but amongst philosophers it is at least familiar. I, like Descartes, like Berkeley, like Hume and like Kant, think that––in trying to ascertain the ultimate nature of Reality, or perhaps in trying merely to ascertain the limits of what can be known about it––that is the proper place to begin.

This is that place: Everything that I experience must pass through the bottleneck of my consciousness. All I really directly know are the contents of my mind. I can make no assumptions about the nature of the things that are responsible for these contents. Nor even can I assume that there is anything at all outside my mind. My parents do indeed seem older than me, but how do I know that they are even there when I turn my back on them? (etc. etc.).

This is not however the end point of the discussion, but the beginning. This sceptical position can of course can be criticised, in the way that, for example, Apokrisis and others have criticised it.

"As for there being 'only experience', as i have said, 'experience' is a transitive verb, i.e. 'I experience it'. It presupposes a subject of experience in a domain of objects."

Absolutely. The word “experience” presupposes something that experiences and something that is experienced. It might have been an unfortunate choice of word. What I wanted to express, by choosing that particular word, was that there was no part of existence that was outside the ambit of my experience. That is the idealist side of my thinking. And this is the side that you object too. What I also wanted to express, but this did not come through strongly (judging by the responses) was that there was nothing that was having that experience. That is the physicalist side of my thinking.

So, what I am saying is that there is nothing on the far side of experience (no world independent of it) and nothing on the near side of experience either (no self independent of it). If the word “experience” cannot be understood without implying these things, then I shouldn’t have chosen it. Should I have chosen the word “apeiron” (from Anaximander)? “Dasein”?

“I think the way that non-dualist philosophies transcend that is indeed by de-constructing that sense of self-and-other, or self-and-world as separate realities.”

I believe, as these non-dualist philosophies believe, that there aren’t these separate realities: self and other, or self and world. I don’t believe that the “plight of existence” is “a subject of experience in a domain of objects”.

Reply to JayAre

Quoting JayAre

So why is everyone so deluded? Why do people think that there is a world beyond their experience?

Likely it’s so everyone can use the experiences of others to predict personal consequences, without getting nose to nose with a rattlesnake, a rabid racoon or personally view the results of philosophers leaping off mountaintops to "prove" there is no world beyond their own experiences.

I agree with this. People think there is a world beyond their experience 1. Because they fear that there is and 2. Because they hope that there is. That is: what makes people believe that there is something other than experience is their will that there is. (This is what I say towards the end of the OP in the paragraph beginnning “Because of Desire.”)

I would argue that––if we only had the courage––we would be able to accept death without fear. We would recognise that being dead is no worse than being alive. I know that that is an extreme view, but I still hold it.

Quoting JayAre

If you have nothing but your own experiences to predict the consequences of your encounters with reality than how did you survive your encounters with such things as traffic, poisonous plants, snakes, rabid animals, disease, cold weather, deep water, etc., to write this question. You must be an amazingly lucky person.

I ought to explain; I did explain; but perhaps I should explain again. My philosophical stance is one that, in my ordinary, everyday life, I aspire to. I behave (more or less) just like everyone else. I have the same fears and the same hopes. I believe, in my everyday life, prephilosophically, that there are other people, and other minds. I strive however (though I always fail) to recognise that these hopes and these fears are without objects. I strive to recognise that these objects are delusionary. I have managed to escape death on the roads so far because it is this everyday self that is in charge.

I strive also to recognise that my self is illusory. (It has been (incidentically) instructional for me to note that of the two pillars that form the basis of my thinking (no world independent of experience and no self independent of experience) the first of these pillars is the only one that anyone has had any interest in. It reveals the physicalist bias of these forums (fora?).

Reply to m-theory Quoting m-theory

I have been trying in vain to explain this but people don't realize that they are being inconsistent and contradictory.

I enjoyed that link you posted.

I think you have much more support than you realise. I certainly agree with you. Other replies on this thread have too.

But:

1. You are using the word “self” to mean what I am meaning by “my experience”. So what you are saying is that I cannot assert that only my experience exists (a statement I agree with).

2. Is it unquestionably the case that in order that something be true it must be uttered?

3. The charge against solipsism hits home. But why does the Berkeleyan argument (I am unable to express a belief in anything outside my experience, without its becoming part of my experience) not also hit home? Why are you preferring one of these killer arguments over the other?

DominicOsborne:I believe, as these non-dualist philosophies believe, that there aren’t these separate realities: self and other, or self and world.

You have to walk the walk, and I don't think you're doing it.

Reply to m-theory I can't see how solipsism is inconsistent and contradictory. Perhaps an absolute solipsism is, but that's not what solipsists are proposing as far as I can see. But rather a local solipsism, which is quite reasonable.

Reply to Wayfarer I readily and absolutely concede that.

Reply to Dominic Osborn I think what you're attempting to articulate is a non-dualist perspective. The difficulty is that such expressions are situated within a particular 'domain of discourse', owing to the fact that the non-dual traditions are essentially dialectical, comprising dialogues and discussions about religious ideas concerning mok?a or spiritual liberation. In that respect, the ancient Indian texts which are the sources of non-dualism are somewhat similar, in form if not content, to Platonic dialogues, in that the conversants often represent particular perspectives or points of view about the question at hand.

I think the key point is, however, that that kind of non-dualist perspective is generally articulated by the archetypical sage who has gone beyond the sense of individuated personality. So when the archetypical sage speaks of experience, he isn't speaking in terms of 'my experience' so much as perspective beyond the personal (which is why in sentences spoken by them, the first-person pronoun is often capitalised, i.e. My, Mine.) So I think the issue with your post is that you are attempting to articulate that transpersonal perspective, as a philosophical argument, but it's not really conveying the point, possibly because you have not yet realised it yourself, in that you're not really seeing it from such a perspective. (I'm not intending that as a slight.)

So as far as putting such an argument, philosophically, it might be a useful exercise to see if you can articulate it in the terms of the Western philosophical tradition itself, although that would be quite a challenging undertaking. But you might find this blog post useful.

Reply to apokrisis I feel that this thread––if it is my input that determines it––is either coming to an end or is changing direction. You and Wayfarer both have a hand in this.

I read the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy piece on Pragmatism and the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy piece on Contemporary Skepticism. Not all of either piece I could understand, but I understood enough to recognise that you are taking the pragmatist side of the argument and I am taking the scepticist side, and that further debate would necessitate further reading on my part, something that I might not be inclined to do. If however I were to make the effort, it would a) take some time and b) shift the focus of discussion away from the Theory of Everything theme of the OP, meaning that further discussion might more appropriately take place in a new thread.

Nevertheless, for what it’s worth, I might mention a couple of things that you said that I didn’t agree with.

Quoting apokrisis

You are reverting to a demand for absolute knowledge

Trivial point, but this suggests I previously moved to a position of requiring less than absolute knowledge. I don’t remember moving to such a position.

Incidentally I do––yes––“demand absolute knowledge” though to put in this way makes me sound hysterically unreasonable (!) All it really means is that I don’t think there are two realms, a realm of knowledge, here perhaps, and a realm of the Unknown, elsewhere.

Quoting apokrisis

Even "stuck inside experience", we can divide our experience into the ideas we hold and the impressions that result.

I don’t believe––as I have said––that experience is something that may be introspected on, let alone then divided up into different categories. I shan’t defend this assertion here. I tried earlier in this thread and I would only be repeating myself.

Quoting apokrisis

You see the self-defeating paradox in what you argue? The noumenon is required to get you to the point that it is sufficiently established that you can then "meaningfully" reject it.

Yes, in order to reject something, there has to be something to reject. I see the point. But then you are asserting that in rejecting something you are accepting it, which is just as absurd, indeed less subtly so. I think it depends on what is meant by “rejection”. When I say “I reject the noumenon”, it indeed suggests that I have turned the thing over in my mind, and so have at least provisionally acceded to its having a kind of reality, but what I really mean (and now I tread more circumspectly) is that I do not accept the noumenon. Do I in this way avoid the self-contradiction?

The debate between pragmatism and skepticism seems to presuppose:

1. The sceptical position is a kind of hellish prison which must be found a way out of.

2. We know that the sceptical position is false, in advance of the discussion of it; it is just that we can’t quite find the conclusive argument with which to dispatch it.

What do you think of this comparison of Pragmatism and my philosophical stance (which has a strong sceptical bent)?

Pragmatism is explicitly allied with scientific thinking and methods. This thinking presupposes something that you know (your experience) and something that you don’t (what is outside it). It presupposes a scientist and a world that that scientist finds out about. It says that how we prephilosophically think about things is more or less how things are: we are subjects inside a world of objects, knowing bits and pieces about those objects but with much more to find out, etc..

Pragmatism belongs to that perennial strain in philosophy: the back to common sense strain. It seeks not to overturn the conceptions that we have about Reality or about things in general, or to radically alter them, but to sharpen them, refine them, clarify them, etc..

Pragmatism is on the side of the status quo. It is non-extremist. It wants to bolster the society that we already have rather than to overturn that society. It wishes to help society to continue doing what it does, but with more circumspection.

Pragmatism, perhaps more so than many other “-isms”, sits particularly comfortably within contemporary Western philosophy. It is measured, moderate and reasonable, and it has modest ambitions. It does not seek out the edges of philosophy, or at least these edges: literature, religion, action. Why would it? ––It thinks philosophy is virtuous.

I am really wholly on the other side. (This is just a declaration of allegiance, for what it’s worth. I shan’t here justify anything.)

I think that we are all (including myself) habituated (as I say) to dualistic thinking (in so many ways) but that Reality is not two things or many things.

I think common sense is really common ignorance. I think Reality is more wild and more strange than we can even imagine.

I am as it were instinctively hostile towards the world and towards our society (though also, fortunately for everyone else, completely powerless).

I am at the religious pole of philosophy rather than the scientific. I think philosophy is virtuous in so far as it seeks an end to debate rather than a perpetuation of it, in so far as it seeks to translate words into practise, in so far as it recognises that Reality is ultimately unspeakable.

Reply to Wayfarer You have genuine insight into my philosophical stance and into what has been my philosophical project. Perhaps you can advise me further.

“The difficulty is that such expressions are situated within a particular 'domain of discourse', …”

“…that kind of non-dualist perspective is generally articulated by the archetypical sage …”

“the issue with your post is that you are attempting to articulate that transpersonal perspective, as a philosophical argument, …”

“[To] articulate it in the terms of the Western philosophical tradition itself […] would be quite a challenging undertaking.”

There is a common point across each of these excepts from your post: that my philosophical stance needs to be articulated in a particular form. Why is this so? This is not a rhetorical question.

Also, I am not clear on why I am not articulating my philosophical stance in terms of the Western philosophical tradition. Again, this is not a rhetorical question.

If indeed, as you say, I am not articulating in terms of the Western philosophical tradition, what would such an articulation (in broad outline) look like?

Quoting Wayfarer

So I think the issue with your post is that you are attempting to articulate that transpersonal perspective, as a philosophical argument, but it's not really conveying the point, possibly because you have not yet realised it yourself, in that you're not really seeing it from such a perspective.

You may very well be right that this post comes across as solipsist rather than anti-self, even though it tries to explicitly state that it is against solipsism, for the reason that I am (so deeply) spiritually unenlightened.

Thanks for pointing out that blog to me: very useful indeed and very interesting.

Reply to Dominic OsbornIf indeed, as you say, I am not articulating in terms of the Western philosophical tradition, what would such an articulation (in broad outline) look like?

In regards to Western philosophy, one obvious comparison with your OP is with Berkeley's esse est percipe, so it might be helpful if you were to think about your similarities and differences to Berkeley, then to consider the objections to Berkeley. That would be like writing a term paper on the subject, so if you're not enrolled in a philosophy degree, you may not be able to do that. (It's something I went through, though, insofar as I did do two years of undergraduate studies in Western philosophy). As I said at the outset, your writing is very clear, it might be very helpful to go through such a process to see if or where your thinking fits into it. (Incidentally, bookmark Early Modern Texts, it's a useful resource comprising a large number of early modern philosophers edited into contemporary English.)

With regards to Eastern philosophy, what I am saying is that when 'the enlightened' speak of 'experience', they do so from a different perspective than that of the ordinary person. So the words they use have particular nuances and meanings which may take us a lot of study to understand. I wouldn't be too hung up on being unenlightened - we all are! That's the human condition. But it might help to seek instruction in Buddhist meditation.

Have a look at this title, it is co-authored by the author of the blog post I mentioned. Emptiness and Joyful Freedom by Greg Goode et al. https://amzn.com/1908664363

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Incidentally I do––yes––“demand absolute knowledge” though to put in this way makes me sound hysterically unreasonable (!)

The problem is that "knowledge" requires the two definite things of the knower and the known. So it is inherently dualistic. And yet you want to claim a monism that is simply "experience".

So talking about absolute knowledge of your experience (or even like Descartes, claiming the certainty of I think, therefore I am) is to have already divided or structured that state of experiencing in a more particular fashion.

We do have an idea of what "just experiencing" is like - when "we" are lost in the flow of events or actions in unselfconscious fashion. But to then reflect on the fact that that is what "experience is like" is what introduces a counterfactual level of thinking that we call "knowing". That is, it is now logically entailed that there is something which experiencing is not. And how can we be sure that absolutely is the case - except pragmatically, as a belief supported by adequate doubting and testing?

Quoting Dominic Osborn

The debate between pragmatism and skepticism seems to presuppose:

1. The sceptical position is a kind of hellish prison which must be found a way out of.

2. We know that the sceptical position is false, in advance of the discussion of it; it is just that we can’t quite find the conclusive argument with which to dispatch it.

I don't accept that characterisation.

First, pragmatism values scepticism. But also points out that in practice it is self limited to the differences that could actually make a difference. So in regard to solipsism, if it makes no difference in practice to how you act in the world, then your indifference in that regard shows that you are simply pointing out a difference that you believe makes no difference.

The world could be real, the world could be an idealistic illusion. But if you carry on regardless, that proves the distinction is moot and lacking in meaning. It's just something you are saying for the sake of argument.

Second, pragmatism doesn't need to find a conclusive rational argument. It just needs to show that in the end, it makes no difference to the way you decide to act. Again, you don't really doubt unless that doubting makes some kind of difference to what you do.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

This thinking presupposes something that you know (your experience) and something that you don’t (what is outside it).

Well really it supposes three things. It is not dualistic but triadic. So there is "you", your "experiences" and "the world".

Except - in the Peircean semiotic original understanding of pragmatism - the "you" becomes a state of interpretance, the "experiences" become the signs that mediate interpretation, and "the world" becomes the noumenal.

So the notion of the self rather dissolves into a habit of interpretance - that we end up itself naming as the egoistic "I", taking it as a sign of a thing. That thing being a noumenal "self". It is because "I-ness" seems such a regular feature of our structure of experience that we come to believe there is this actor just beyond experiential reach behind the scenes.

So you see that you are taking a Cartesian view of the mind as a perceiving soul. Peirce strips that right down to a general structuring relation.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Pragmatism belongs to that perennial strain in philosophy: the back to common sense strain.

That is the popular notion of pragmatism - the one that William James bastardised. Peirce had to start calling his philosophy pragmaticism because of that.

This quotation seems relevant to the OP:

There is, Maritain writes, an intuition that is awakened in persons when they are engaged in thought — that is, that it seems impossible that they, as thinking beings, should at some time have not been. As a thinking being, one seems to be free from the vicissitudes of time and space; there is no coming to be or ceasing to be — I cannot think what it is "not to be". Nevertheless, we all know very well that we were born — we came into existence. We are confronted, then, with a contradiction — not a logical contradiction, but a lived contradiction. The only solution to this is that one has always existed, but not through oneself, but within "a Being of transcendent personality" and from whom "the self which is thinking now proceeded into temporal existence" (Approches de Dieu, in Oeuvres complètes, p. 64). This being "must contain all things in itself in an eminent mode and be itself — in an absolutely transcendent way — being, thought and personality. This implies that the first existence is the infinite plenitude of being, separate by essence from all diversity of existents." (p. 66).

From the SEP entry on Jacques Maritain (a noted neo-Thomist philosopher).

I also know of a comparitive study of Maritain and Zen Buddhism - God, Zen and the Intuition of Being, James Arraj.

Apokrisis and Wayfarer: might take a few days to come back to you --- something wrong with my computer --- don't go away.

Reply to apokrisis I concede that many of the things I say are mere statements of position. You are interpreting them through a Peircian (or Kantian) lens, and are in the process revealing the Peircian structure of your world-picture. At this stage I think we are two separate and unengaged gears whirring around. I can’t see that my armour is yet Peirced, and I am certainly not getting through to you. There may have to be some more to-ing and fro-ing before we reach a biting point.

Quoting apokrisis

That is, it is now logically entailed that there is something which experiencing is not. And how can we be sure that absolutely is the case - except pragmatically, as a belief supported by adequate doubting and testing?

Not quite sure what you mean here. If it is “logically entailed that there is something which experiencing is not” why are we therefore not sure that that is absolutely the case? Where is the room for doubt? What is the point of testing?

Quoting apokrisis

Well really it supposes three things. It is not dualistic but triadic. So there is "you", your "experiences" and "the world".

I think it can be seen as triadic but it need not be seen so. The belief in a world beyond your experiences can be seen as ultimately the same belief as the belief that there is a self. Each (the world beyond your experience and the self “inside” your experience) is merely a different version of the Noumenon. The belief in a world beyond your experience is simultaneously the belief that your experience has the character of “I-ness” about it (and, as I have previously said, each of these beliefs is as false as the other). The belief in a self beyond your experience (or, as I suppose we all imagine it: the belief in a self inside experience or on this side of experience) is simultaneously the belief that your experience has the character of “world-ness” about it. (Apologies for these awkward expressions.) There are two versions of duality here, not three things.

Quoting apokrisis

I don't accept that characterisation.

[of the debate between pragmatism and skepticism].

Point taken. I should have said not, “The debate between pragmatism and scepticism seems to presuppose: …” but simply, “The debate about scepticism seems to presuppose: … ”

I do understand that everything we apprehend is––ultimately––the form of our apprehension. That is Kant’s and Peirce’s point. What you think I am saying is, roughly: Either a) Reality has a certain character or b) Indeterminacy, Vagueness––is without qualities. The first you will say, correctly, is untrue, and the second you will say, correctly, is a tautology. What I think I am saying is that Reality is Indeterminacy, Vagueness. Or, what I am saying, to put it another way, is: you can’t say anything about Reality. I then go on to say that all you can say is what Reality is not. So I then say, Reality is not many things, Reality is not one thing; Reality is not the Physical World; Reality is not the Mind; Reality is not this, Reality is not that, etc..

I don’t think Knowledge is inherently dualistic. I think being “lost in the flow of events or actions in unselfconscious fashion” is knowledge (of those events or actions). I don’t consider Knowledge and Being to be separate. I think your definition of Knowledge mirrors your (dualistic) conception of existence: an existence essentially consisting of a knower and a known, a self and its experience (with the possibility of a third thing too, the Noumenon). I think Knowledge is non-dual and Being is non-dual.

What is inherently dualistic is saying. And this extends to thinking too, in the sense of talking to oneself (without moving one’s lips). If you say something: 1. There is something that that says and something that is said, 2. There is something that is said and something that is the meaning of what is said.

You think the situation is like this: there is a Reality that we are familiar with. This Reality may or may not exhaust existence. There may or may not be something other than this Reality. You, and Kant, and Peirce, and many others, think this is––almost beyond argument. I think you, and Kant, and Peirce have swallowed an absurdity, an absurdity however that is so widely and deeply felt and held that it almost passed into the realm of fact.

The positing of a Noumenon is an absurdity: something that exists but is not felt. If whether something is perceived or not has no bearing on whether or not it exists, why are there not not spooks and pixies dancing on my desk here? The positing of the Noumenon is the conceiving of Ignorance. But the conceiving of two realms, the Known and the Unknown simply proposes Duality again. Why do you accept the notion of "Ignorance" uncritically?

The positing of the Noumenon is the conceiving of possibility. This that I am experiencing definitely exists. What I am not experiencing possibly exists. The conceiving of the Definite and the Possible simply proposes Duality again. Why do you accept the notion of "Possibility" uncritically?

If there is a Noumenon (and we don’t believe there is anything that is experiencing it), Esse ist percipe (a principle I accept) is contravened.

If there is a Noumenon, the Identity of Indiscernables (another principle I accept) is contravened. I am talking about this bit: “The world could be real, the world could be an idealistic illusion. But if you carry on regardless, that proves the distinction is moot and lacking in meaning.” What I am saying is that if it looks the same then it is the same. It can’t be the case that there are two different things, an existence in which the world is real and an existence in which the world is idealistic illusion, but each looks the same to me.

Duality divides the Noumenon into two parts: the part that is its name and the part that is named. The name is within consciousness and the named is is outside it. The Noumenon may be thus conceived (named) and not conceived, in the sense that what is named is not itself conceived. (Another trick, that is to say: “conceive” has two meanings.)

There’s another reason I don’t think there is a Noumenon.

Either the two parts (Phenomenon and Noumenon) are in some way joined, in which case they are not really two after all, or they are not joined, in which case there must be a thing, nothingness, between them, which is at once an existing thing, and must be, in order to hold the two things apart, and also a non-existing thing because, were it to exist, it would join the two things up. But there cannot be a thing that both exists and does not exist.

Reply to Wayfarer Spiritual enlightenment and arguing about the nature of Reality seem to be, for me, different worlds. That of course shouldn’t be. My life should inform my philosophy and my philosophy should inform my life: of course.

How do I bring these things together? It’s something I should work on: you’re right. I say that, and I say it periodically to myself, but nothing ever happens.

I shall definitely look at the links you posted. And I like that big quote you posted. Maritain: not a name I know, but I shall find out about him.

Dominic Osborn:Spiritual enlightenment and arguing about the nature of Reality seem to be, for me, different worlds.

That's the dilemma of Western civilization in a few words. It ought not to be like that, but there's a reason why it is. You seem to be trying to bridge that gap, but I can't tell whether you know that is what you're doing, or whether you're simply 'feeling your way into it'. I suspect it's the latter. But in any case, it is really an important matter.

Dominic:I shall definitely look at the links you posted.

Having posted those links I hope they're relevant. Maritain is a respected Catholic philosopher. I discovered him through that second link I posted, which is cross-cultural comparison of elements of Maritain's philosophy with Zen Buddhism. I picked that up in printed form at the Adyar bookshop years ago. But then, I've been a 'book omnivore' for decades, about these kinds of questions. What I take from them might be very much dependent on my particular perspective.

The vital thing about Thomism, generally, and Maritain, in particular, is that it still has a conception of the hierarchy of being (a.k.a. 'the great chain of being'). This understanding is that there are higher and lower levels of reality, being and knowing. Materialist philosophy (an oxymoron) is based on the lowest level, and denies the others (parodied as 'the flatland' or by Marcuse as 'the one-dimensional man'.) Thomistic philosophy is almost the last outpost of an hierarchical ontology in Western culture, and Maritain one of it's spokesmen (others being Etienne Gilson and the contemporary philosopher Edward Feser.)

Anyway, I happened to find out that Maritain has a book on the 'degrees of knowing' so was a little familiar with him (although a dense and difficult work, 'don't read it at home', the first reader review contains a decent synopsis). From that, I noticed that quotation I provided which is very similar to the OP. So, I think you're actually grappling with a spiritual question. But again, I don't want to send you off on wild goose chases. In these matters, intuition is the only guide.

Dominic Osborn: Reality is not this, Reality is not that

Is this a conscious allusion to a phrase from Indian philosophy? If it is, you will know the phrase I mean.

Dominic: The positing of a Noumenon is an absurdity: something that exists but is not felt.

I think you've misinterpreted the idea. Also I think the way you're conflating Kant and Pierce means you're probably reading things into them that aren't there; they're worlds apart in most ways. (Mind you I'm no expert.)

But there is a precise definition of 'noumenon' in Wikipedia. The word is derived from 'nous', that seminal word now weakly translated as 'mind'. The 'noumenal object' is something that may be perfectly known, i.e., it is an 'intelligible object', like a figure, number, or geometric form, with which the mind is perfectly united in the knowing of it; unlike sensory knowledge, which is always mediated by the sensory organs. 'Noumenon' means literally a 'mental object'. This reflects the ancient division in Western, specifically Platonist, philosophy, between reality and appearance. The phenomenal domain, the realm of appearance, 'the world', is taken by the masses, including many of what are now called 'philosophers', as the real, but is actually mere appearance, reflecting only a semblance of the domain of intelligible forms which alone are real, and of which the mere objects are simply instances.

That is reflected in Kant, in saying that by sensory knowledge, we know only appearances. We don't know the essence of things, or what is ultimately real (if anything). Knowledge is dependent on the intuitions, categories of understanding, and so on, which constitute the apparatus of our understanding. Kant was not a Pyrrhonian sceptic, but he was a sceptic, in the true sense, which is radically different to a scientific sceptic, who takes empirical domain as normative.

Quoting Wayfarer

I think you've misinterpreted the idea. Also I think the way you're conflating Kant and Pierce means you're probably reading things into them that aren't there; they're worlds apart in most ways. (Mind you I'm no expert.)

Having read through some of that thread “Living with the Noumenon” I shall give that word a wide berth from now on.

Quoting Wayfarer

Is this a conscious allusion to a phrase from Indian philosophy? If it is, you will know the phrase I mean.

No it’s not. And no I don’t know the phrase you mean. Unless you’re talking about something the sense of which is, roughly: Reality is not appearance, but nor is Reality what is behind Appearance.

Quoting Wayfarer

You seem to be trying to bridge that gap, but I can't tell whether you know that is what you're doing, or whether you're simply 'feeling your way into it'. I suspect it's the latter.

I suppose what I was unaware of was that what I was doing would be seen as something unfamiliar or even peculiar, or eccentric. I’m repeating myself here––but it seems to me the obvious thing to do. Wouldn’t every philosopher have as his ultimate aim to work out a self-consistent and exhaustive explanation of things? And wouldn’t that then be a religion? And wouldn’t the quest to live life in the right way inevitably presuppose, or be founded on, or generate––an ontology, a description of things, an account of how things are and why they are as they are, etc.?

Quoting Wayfarer

The vital thing about Thomism, generally, and Maritain, in particular, is that it still has a conception of the hierarchy of being (a.k.a. 'the great chain of being'). This understanding is that there are higher and lower levels of reality, being and knowing. Materialist philosophy (an oxymoron) is based on the lowest level, and denies the others (parodied as 'the flatland' or by Marcuse as 'the one-dimensional man'.) Thomistic philosophy is almost the last outpost of an hierarchical ontology in Western culture, and Maritain one of it's spokesmen (others being Etienne Gilson and the contemporary philosopher Edward Feser.)

Materialism is anathema to me, so I like that bit, but otherwise I am––initially––repelled by these ideas. That doesn’t mean I shan’t have look at them.

Dominic Osborn:Reality is not this. Reality is not that

Neti-neti is a Sanskrit expression that translates to "neither this, nor that." This expression is used in Hinduism, mainly in Jñ?na yoga and in Advaita Vedanta. Neti-neti is a form of analytical meditation that helps the individual understand the nature of brahman (absolute reality) by first understanding what is not Brahman.

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Dominic Osborn:Reality is not appearance, but nor is Reality what is behind Appearance.

'The world is not as it appears, nor is it otherwise' ~ La?k?vat?ra S?tra.

Dominic Osborn:Wouldn’t every philosopher have as his ultimate aim to work out a self-consistent and exhaustive explanation of things? And wouldn’t that then be a religion? And wouldn’t the quest to live life in the right way inevitably presuppose, or be founded on, or generate––an ontology, a description of things, an account of how things are and why they are as they are, etc.?

Yes, yes, and yes.

Dominic Osborn:I am––initially––repelled by these ideas.

If it's because they're Catholic, then I should let you know, I am not. It's because I believe the idea of an 'hierarchical order' is essential, and they're one of the culturally Western sources of such ideas.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I think it can be seen as triadic but it need not be seen so. The belief in a world beyond your experiences can be seen as ultimately the same belief as the belief that there is a self. Each (the world beyond your experience and the self “inside” your experience) is merely a different version of the Noumenon. The belief in a world beyond your experience is simultaneously the belief that your experience has the character of “I-ness” about it

That's still a triadic move. My point was that to speak about "pure experience" is already to have leapt from the monadic position of "just experiencing" to talking triadically about the I-ness of being a self having experience of a world.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

The belief in a self beyond your experience (or, as I suppose we all imagine it: the belief in a self inside experience or on this side of experience) is simultaneously the belief that your experience has the character of “world-ness” about it. (Apologies for these awkward expressions.) There are two versions of duality here, not three things.

Yes, speaking about experience as itself a "thing" is to claim - triadically - that the experience has world-ness along with the I-ness. The whole point is that we are now thinking about experience in this meta-fashion where it is something distinctive - a state of mind, a field of qualia, a mental representation - that mediates between a witnessing self and a material world.

So in reality we jump straight from one to three in talking about "just experience". It has this complex structure that involves both I-ness and world-ness as its basic division - and hence, potential relation.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

What I think I am saying is that Reality is Indeterminacy, Vagueness. Or, what I am saying, to put it another way, is: you can’t say anything about Reality. I then go on to say that all you can say is what Reality is not. So I then say, Reality is not many things, Reality is not one thing; Reality is not the Physical World; Reality is not the Mind; Reality is not this, Reality is not that, etc..

I'm not sure on what basis you are claiming to say these things. It doesn't seem to be on the basis of either rational argument or probable evidence. It involves the awkward epistemic manoeuvre of first believing we are in a triadic modelling relation with reality - recognising qualia as a mediating level of sign - and then dropping the modelling part to then claim that the mediating signs might be all that exist.

My approach is the consistent one. It accepts that we are in a modelling relation with reality and, from there, draws the practical conclusion that dreams of absolute knowledge are an epistemic pipedream. We can only hope to minimise our uncertainty in regard to the noumenal.

So you want to doubt the world. I only want to doubt our knowledge of the world.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I think being “lost in the flow of events or actions in unselfconscious fashion” is knowledge (of those events or actions). I don’t consider Knowledge and Being to be separate. I think your definition of Knowledge mirrors your (dualistic) conception of existence: an existence essentially consisting of a knower and a known, a self and its experience (with the possibility of a third thing too, the Noumenon). I think Knowledge is non-dual and Being is non-dual.

If they are so non-dual, why do you call Knowledge and Being by different names? (Yes, I realise you will now call them two aspects of experience - and so we circle back to the necessarily triadic structure that betrays the discursive nature of idealism.)

Quoting Dominic Osborn

I think you, and Kant, and Peirce have swallowed an absurdity, an absurdity however that is so widely and deeply felt and held that it almost passed into the realm of fact.

For an absurdity, it is unreasonably effective wouldn't you say. Science is founded on it for a start.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

The positing of a Noumenon is an absurdity: something that exists but is not felt. If whether something is perceived or not has no bearing on whether or not it exists, why are there not not spooks and pixies dancing on my desk here? The positing of the Noumenon is the conceiving of Ignorance. But the conceiving of two realms, the Known and the Unknown simply proposes Duality again. Why do you accept the notion of "Ignorance" uncritically?

There might be spooks and pixies dancing on your desk. All you can know is that you have minimised your uncertainty about that to the extent that that seems possible.

So the positing of the noumenal is simply the rational acceptance that perceptual experience has its limits. One shouldn't claim absolute knowledge about reality even if we seem to have a pretty damn useful handle on this thing we call reality.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

The conceiving of the Definite and the Possible simply proposes Duality again. Why do you accept the notion of "Possibility" uncritically?

But my point was that all categorisation has to proceed dichotomously. You have to have an intelligible division into a this vs a that to play the game.

So it is not dualism - a division lacking a bridge. It is a dichotomy - a division that is self-defining in that each half defines its "other".

Knowledge is a lack of ignorance - a minimisation of uncertainty, as I say. And ignorance it the opposite - a maximisation of uncertainty or a lack of knowledge. Likewise, the definite is that which lacks indeterminancy, and vice versa.

So it is hardly uncritical. A dichotomy is the definition of critical thinking - the sharp division that renders the world generally intelligible.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

It can’t be the case that there are two different things, an existence in which the world is real and an existence in which the world is idealistic illusion, but each looks the same to me.

But that is the possibility which your idealism requires.

My pragmatism can see the bent stick in the water as a straight stick that only looks bent because of the water. I accept that there is a phenomenal vs noumenal distinction which is a difference that can make a difference.

But you are arguing that a stick that looks bent is always a bent stick. Appearances are all there are to reality.

Quoting Dominic Osborn

Either the two parts (Phenomenon and Noumenon) are in some way joined, in which case they are not really two after all, or they are not joined, in which case there must be a thing, nothingness, between them, which is at once an existing thing, and must be, in order to hold the two things apart, and also a non-existing thing because, were it to exist, it would join the two things up. But there cannot be a thing that both exists and does not exist.

Again, my ontology is based on things needing to be first separated in order that they then can interact. So it is irreducibly triadic and doesn't fall into the paradoxes inherent in dualism.

There can't be an interaction without a difference. Thus you need at least two different things. And furthermore, for such a state of being to persist (and thus be said to "exist"), the interaction must serve to maintain the difference that is the basis of the interaction. The interaction can't be a passing fluke. It must develop into a systematic habit.

Triadic semiosis in a nutshell.

Reply to apokrisis Your Theory:
So you think, presumably, Reality proceeds (conceptually) from Apeiron, via a process of dichotomy, into Multiplicity. Is that right? Is it the case that the first dichotomy is self and world? Does the world then divide into two? Does the self then divide into two? How does it work?

Is the structure of Reality, in so far as there is one, the same as the structure of our categorisation of it? That is, is its structure just how we (the Mind) categorise it? Or does the world have a hand in how we caterorise it? Does it constrain our choices of how it is to be categorised? That is: is Reality the interplay between Mind and World, and is the structure of Reality the consequence of a collaboration between Mind and World?

In a previous post you said,

“You have the apeiron. And it divides in logical fashion. Part of it, by concentrating the possibility of warmness, leaves another part that is subsequently a concentration of the cooler. And if such a separation is possible, what is to stop it proceeding to its limits. Coupled to a further consequent separation - the dry and the damp - you then get all four basic elemental categories, fire, air, water and earth. Or in modern physical parlance, plasma, gas, liquid and solid.

Thus systems thinking supports an ontology that is triadically developmental. You start with an unformed potential (that is no kind of substantial state - mental or material). And then all you need is the rational possibility of some "this" which then, in its very becoming, must produce its matching "that"."

I don’t know whether you saw my questions about this. I understand very well that you see things as developing triadically. But what is it that is developing triadically? Is this a natural process? Is this the process by which the natural world becomes as it is (developing first into plasma, gas, liquid and solid)? Or is it the process of thought? Or is it both of these together, somehow?

I understand than an act of categorisation, a mental act, is one in which a mother divides into two daughters. For example, if nothing is said, then nothing is determined: there is only Apeiron. If I then say, “That is the world”, I imply a “This” and a self. So Apeiron, the mother, gives birth to two daughters (variously named, “This” and “That” and “Self” and “World”).

But what I want to know is:

Why is that which is the case determined by my saying “This” and “That”? Labelling things doesn’t alter their natures. Why aren’t we still at the stage of there being only Apeiron?

Why is the change unidirectional? Why doesn’t any dichotomous development not immediately go into reverse, as soon as it happens?

What is the cause of the dichotomous, triadic development? Why does it happen? How does it happen? I really don’t understand what you mean here:

“Part of it, by concentrating the possibility of warmness, leaves another part that is subsequently a concentration of the cooler.”

So a part of Apeiron “concentrates the possibility of warmness”. It sounds like you’re saying something like “Things divide”. Why “possibility” of warmness? Why do you phrase it in this peculiar way? Why don’t you just say, “Part of Apeiron is warm; part is cool”? Or are you quoting from Anaximander?

Nor do I understand what you mean here:

“It is a dichotomy - a division that is self-defining in that each half defines its "other".”
Either two things are distinct from one another, in nature, like night and day, or an arbitrary line is drawn across Apeiron, dividing it into two. I can’t understand this “self-defining”.

I can’t see how the dichotomous development that you are talking about is not just a linguistic or conceptual thing.

My Theory:

I know that everyone thinks there is a triadic structure at the base of things: Experience, Self and World. My claim however is that it is developed from an earlier or more basic division. My claim is that it is you who has leapt from the monadic position to the triadic.

You halve an orange. You are saying that there are three things because there is 1. The whole orange, 2. The right half and 3. The left half. But it can also be said that at no point either in time or in space are there three things. Either there is the whole orange or there are the two halves. That’s what I mean when I say that the division can be seen as dualistic.

I think there is first a division into Experience and Not Experience. (This first division may also be seen as the division of Experience into two, one of which is conceived as Experience and the other as Not Experience.) Then there is a division of Not Experience into Self and World.

What I am saying is that you either conceive Experience and the World (in which case Experience is conceived as the Self) or you conceive Experience and the Self (in which case Experience is conceived as the World). You don’t conceive three things all at once. You either imagine (falsely) that there is world beyond and outside your experience (in which case you conceive experience as your self (perhaps you think of it as your mind) or you imagine (falsely) that there is a self beyond or outside your experience (in which case you conceive experience as the world). Neither of these dualities (Experience-and-World and Experience-and-Self) implies the other. Each can stand on its own. You could go around thinking, “Everything that makes up my experience is just my mind. There is however a World outside it”. Or you could go around thinking, “Everything that makes up my experience is the World. There is however a Self that is doing the experiencing that can never itself be experienced”. You (Apokrisis) build your triadic structure from these dualistic elements.

As I said in the OP, this dualistic structure, (which is at the base of false picture that we have of Reality) is related to Value in the following way. We desire or we are repelled. In so doing it seems to us (without the closest analysis) that there are three things: Experience, that which we desire (or are repelled by) and––ourselves. These things however, that which we desire (or that which we are repelled by) and that which desires––and of course this seems to be the exact opposite of the truth––are one and the same thing.

I think that whatever is not Apeiron has no existence whatsoever. Since neither the world (conceived as something distinct from Apeiron) nor the self (likewise conceived) has any existence at all, they are identical. In just the same way I might say that, for example, a round square and a triangular pentagon are identical.

You will perhaps agree with this, at least: your triadic Reality of Self (or that which interprets symbols), play of symbols, and possible Noumenon says that there is such a thing as Ignorance, that there is such a thing as the Unknown. That there is such a thing is that there is also such a thing as a Knower and a Known. Therefore my denying there is such a thing as Ignorance is also my denying your (and everyone else’s) triadic structure. My arguing that there is only Apeiron and your arguing that there is a triadic structure is the same argument as this argument: you think there is such a thing as the Unknown; I don’t.

Of course, I am aware that this claim (that there is no Unknown) is a grand one. And that it overturns everything.

You think the identification of experience (or indeed of anything) necessarily begins the dichotomous development of everything. I too think that the identification of experience (or of anything) is to allow that there are two things. But here is where yours and my conceptions of reality differ, and indeed, are opposites: You think this dichotomous process is real; you think the daughters of this dichotomous process are real; you think the dichotomous development continues to proceed: once begun, it continues. You think the dichotomous branching is legitimate; you think it is to be accepted. I for my part reject the entire process, right at the beginning. I think we begin with Apeiron and end with Apeiron. I think everything that is built on it is false.

You think that––because the dichotomous beginning is real––I can only get to my claim that there is only Experience by having the daughters of that dichotomous process fall away or wither. I say I can get there because the dichotomous beginning is false in the first place.

Quoting apokrisis

I'm not sure on what basis you are claiming to say these things. It doesn't seem to be on the basis of either rational argument or probable evidence.

The remarks that you are referring to here assume Experience is Reality. If Experience is Indeterminacy, Vagueness, then so is Reality.

There are no breaks in experience. There is nothing that it is not. I have never experienced a break nor have I every experienced anything beyond it. That is my evidential base. Not probable evidence incidentally, but absolute evidence.

There can only be a number of things if there is nothingness between those things. Nothingness is an incoherent notion. That is my rational base.

Experience is infinite and unbroken. There is nothing that it is not. Therefore there is nothing that it is either. Hence it is Indeterminacy, Vagueness.

Quoting apokrisis

If they are so non-dual, why do you call Knowledge and Being by different names?

I agree that these identity propositions are problematical. This strikes me as a question that goes down a Phosphorous and Hesperus path. I don’t know whether we want to take it.

Quoting apokrisis

(Yes, I realise you will now call them two aspects of experience - and so we circle back to the necessarily triadic structure that betrays the discursive nature of idealism.)

I am aware of the obfuscatory nature of words like “aspect”. “X has two aspects, a and b” really means, when you dissect it down to its bones: X is one thing and X is two things.

Quoting apokrisis

For an absurdity, it is unreasonably effective wouldn't you say. Science is founded on it for a start.

Effective for what? Certainly not for Redemption. Certainly indeed for carrying on as before. Science is certainly founded on it. And, of course, my claims are also the claims that science is nonsense. You think Science is, at base, a man finding out about the world. I think Science is at base the proposition: there is a man finding out about the world.

Something else:

I have said that Reality is unspeakable. I think that all we can do, in philosophy, to describe its nature, is to say what it is not. But perhaps we can express it in the same way that we can express numerical infinity: Whatever number you have, add one to it. So you can say: Reality is at the end of a certain process. Not this, not that, not that, not that … It is down that road there. (Isn’t this like one of the proofs for the existence of God? That which is greater than whatever you conceive. Can’t remember what it’s called.)

Sorry for the delay.

Reply to Wayfarer Thank you for your comments and I am very sorry to be so long in replying.

Quoting Wayfarer

If it's because they're Catholic, then I should let you know, I am not. It's because I believe the idea of an 'hierarchical order' is essential, and they're one of the culturally Western sources of such ideas.

I am not repelled because of the Catholic origin. But tell me what you mean about a hierachical order.

Quoting Wayfarer

'The world is not as it appears, nor is it otherwise' ~ La?k?vat?ra S?tra.

Ravishing.

Reply to Dominic Osborn The hierarchical order is an idea which was represented as 'the great chain of being', the title of a 1936 book by an Arthur Lovejoy. The import is that the great chain of being is a cosmology that can be traced to Plato and Aristotle (and beyond). It begins with the supposition that being is superior to non-being (the latter being a mere absence or deprivation and therefore not a good). A good God, Plato argued, would cause any possible being to exist and thus created a Universe full of all possible things. This Lovejoy calls the principle of plenitude, the maximally full World (also known as the Pleroma, represented in the image of the 'cornucopia', the Horn of Plenty, held by the Goddess Fortuna).

Eventually, philsophers would postulate a vast chain of Being(s) stretching from the perfect (God) to the lifeless matter. Mankind was somewhere in the middle of the chain - above the animals but below the Angels.


Woodblock representation from here

which was the conceptual background of virtually all Western philosophy up until the dissolution of the 'medieval synthesis'.

The key point in all of these is that the source of everything is Being beyond the vicissitudes of existence or non-existence, from which everything emanates through a process of cascading down through the hierarchy to give rise to the manifest forms that we see with the sensory eyes. In all of these traditional cosmologies, there are "levels of being" such that the more real is also the more valuable; these levels appear in both the "external" and the "internal" worlds, "higher" levels of reality without corresponding to "deeper" levels of reality within. On the lowest level is the material/physical world, which depends for its existence on the higher levels; on the very highest/deepest level is the Infinite or Absolute (God, in the Abrahamic traditions, Brahman, in the Vedic traditions, arguably also the Dharmakaya of the Mah?y?na).

These ideas are generally very unfashionable in the Western academies nowadays, you'll only find them in various comparative religion and mythology departments and also amongst the 'perennialists' who believe there is a 'sophia perennis', a perennial philosophy, of which the various spiritual traditions are aspects. Whereas, materialism by definition seeks to understand everything in terms of what all of these traditions understand as the least real aspect of the whole (although in fairness that approach has yielded considerable scientific power and utility.)

Reply to Terrapin Station However, OP clearly showed why the concept of another person is inconsistent.

Quoting maplestreet

However, OP clearly showed why the concept of another person is inconsistent.

I'm not sure what comment of mine you're responding to, but the initial post of the thread claimed there is a problem with this based on ideas such as "I only experience my own experience" where I'd bet anything that he actually experiences things like other people, and he's really just noting that his experience is his (well, duh) while making the infantile conflation of his experience per se with what the experience is of. "I experience x" is what the experience is of.

Take a sentence like "The cat is on the mat."

That sentence is about a cat being on a mat. It's not about the sentence itself. To be about the sentence itself, we'd need to make it something such as "This sentence is about the cat being on the mat."

Now, the sentence in question can only be the sentence in question. It can't literally be something else. It can't literally be the cat on the mat. But that doesn't affect that it's about a cat on a mat. It's not about the sentence itself. So saying that sentences can only be about sentences would suggest that someone has serious cognitive problems when it comes to a basic understanding of what language is/how it works.

That's the same sort of thing that's going on in his "I only experience my own experience."

Reply to bassplayer In regards to your comment "I am starting to believe we all might be part of one big consciousness", you might be interested in the paper: "If Materialism Is True, the United States Is Probably Conscious" http://www.faculty.ucr.edu/~eschwitz/SchwitzPapers/USAconscious-140721.pdf

Reply to Michael Gagnon Interesting article.