Well, I hate to correct someone who has just called my post excellent, but I was not intending to describe the process of knowing our world as an illusion.
“Illusion”, at least as I use the term, does not mean “something that appears to be THIS but may not in fact be quite what it appears”, but rather means “something that flat-out is NOT what it appears to be”.
Like most people, I like to think my interior model of the world is decently, reasonably accurate, at least within the constraints and limitations of things I have the apparatus to sense about the world at all, etc… therefore not an illusion.
When you dream (during those dreams where you are unaware that you are dreaming), you have the same issues
[ul]
[li]You both generate and experience the illusion without yourself knowing that you indeed were doing so (at least for a brief amount of time)[/li][li]There would have to be a part of you to which you have no access, of which you have no knowledge, which you can’t control, which, apparently, has a mind of its own[/li][li]How could this entity then in any meaningful way be said to be you?[/li][/ul]
So, when you dream (during those dreams where you are unaware that you are dreaming and are surprised by the sequence of events), are you claiming that some other entity is generating the storyline? Obviously, it’s still “you”.
IMO, an illusion is anything that seems to exist independently of the mind once the mind’s thought processes are recognized as self-referential. No amount of “reference” to the seeming of the senses can change that. After all, the lens of the eye focuses an inverted image which eventually is *interpreted *by the mind based on reference to past self-reference. You covered it well in the first part of your post and I regret not quoting it. Let me remedy that.
It is my contention that that is in fact the case with everyone. Whether you believe that or not does not change the fact that you accurately described the problem to be solved. I could have easily written the above. I merely would have dropped the word “could” in the first sentence.
It’s useful as a philosophic position since it’s pretty much immume from argument by evidence. In my opinion it’s of no practical use, except as a device to show that you can construct world views that explain nothing yet still are consistent.
Oh dear heaven…well, I’ll merely argue on semantic grounds and state my definition of “illusion” as something which is not created by your mind, but a false perspective imposed upon your senses by someone else. An example would be a sleight-of-hand trick performed by a magician, or a cold reader who deceives people into believing they have clairvoyant powers. A faulty reference point created within your own mind I would define as a hallucination, or a delusion – not an illusion.
Back on topic, I believe that perspective plays a major role in the solipsistic mind-set. Our brains are designed to filter out excess information that does not apply to our needs and desires – a gay man would notice a hot young stud in the crowd, while his straight friend would focus on the bodacious young babe instead. Or, if I’m driving down an unfamiliar road looking for a gas station, I won’t notice the McDonald’s on the corner…unless I’m hungry, as well as low on fuel. To my perspective, that hot young stud standing outside McDonald’s does not exist, according to MY reality.
But that doesn’t necessarily mean they don’t exist at all. It only means they may as well not exist, as far as my own needs and desires are concerned.
Hey, adhay! So, you really are a “soft solipsist”, then? You believe it at least as likely that I (and everyone else who does not happen to be you) do not exist as that we do? (And perhaps considerably more likely that we do not?) You actively disbelieve your own mental model of reality and believe it to be an entirely illusory concoction?
More to the point, I believe that you exist neither as I perceive you nor (since we are all in the same boat) as you perceive yourself. I make no distinction between projection and perception. This means that what I perceive as “you”, I necessarily believe is “true” of “me” although I may be in deep denial about it. Mundanely put, “It takes one to know one.”
I recognize that it is a product of the inherently faulty process of capricious selection. As Paul Simon (again, mundanely) put it, “A man hears what he wants to hear and disregards the rest.” Any doubts as to the truth of this can be easily resolved by checking out a few of the “debates” on these boards.
Certainly no one who mistakes self-image for reality.
You (and other people arguing the same way) make a mistake in analogizing from the familiar, every-day case and concept of ‘self’, I believe. In what we hold to be our every-day world, ‘you’ refers to a somewhat ambiguous compound entity: your mind, your thoughts, your brain, your body, all of these things get somehow muddled together. But, in the solipsist case, we have a fairly clearly delineated ‘you’: the thing that famously thinks, and therefore is. You are your stream of consciousness. If that’s the case, then, there is no good way (or at least, I can’t see one) in which the creator of the illusion can be identified with this ‘thinker’ – as I’ve implied, it is separate in every salient feature of conscious experience; the same separation that exists between my mind and a different one, for instance, yours, so that to say that it and I are the same thing essentially is equal to saying you and me are the same thing. That ‘in the real world’ we are beings that are actually a collection of different strands of mental experience on one and the same substrate can’t be taken to imply that that’s the case in a solipsist ontology, as well; for instance, there is no concept of an appropriate substrate, and if we eliminate that and think only about a sort of disembodied mind, it appears reasonably clear to me that all that belongs to this mind – or is a part of it – is the sum of its conscious experience.
I don’t dispute that there is no way to tell whether or not our mental model of the world is accurate; however, the more parsimonious explanation is that it is: in that case, the total sum of information that exists is what we can obtain of the external world; if that world was an illusion, the total amount would be that plus all the information about whatever it is that creates the illusion.
Even there, one could argue that one runs into a problem for the existence of a unified self: when you think, in some language, this is in fact some form of communication – you’re telling yourself something. However, if your mind was one unified consciousness, then why would you need to? You would already know, wouldn’t you? In other words, what ‘I think, therefore I am’ actually implies is that there is something that can generate that sentence, and something that can perceive it; that these two things are one and the same, and that they’re whatever exactly it is that is commonly referred to as ‘I’, is actually an additional assumption. However, I recognize that it might be the case that that assumption holds; my reasoning for why I don’t consider the thing that creates the illusion to be identified with the thing that thinks is what I’ve given above.
There’s actually a somewhat deep question hidden here: can you dream without (ever having received) external input? Obviously, if you get some manner of data from the outside, it is easy to explain how dreams are created by you, through reinterpretation, reorganization, and restructurization of that data. However, if that data is absent, and something generates it out of nothing without your conscious awareness, separately from your volition, etc., then yes, I would hold that it has to be considered a separate entity.
Yes, cogito ergo sum is convincing as far as “this consciousness is not illusory”, but it doesn’t establish much of anything with regards to “where is this consciousness located? here or there? singular or plural?”
I do, in fact, think that by far the major chunk of what we consider to be “ourselves” and “our own thoughts” are the thoughts of our culture and our species, which has been mulling some things over for many generations, manifested locally in individual heads but not originating there. Very little originates there, actually.
So a lot of what passes for “I” is actually “we”.
But conscious and volitional nonetheless for all that.
Once again you’ve outdone yourself. A little tightening was all that was required[see above]. As a matter of interest, what do you see as an alternative? Or do you?
Why are you talking to yourself?
We don’t exist.
Can I get to shag Jennifer Aniston totally rigid as a character in your imaginary universe?
You’ll get to watch!
Sorry, poorly asked. You left yourself some wiggle room which I closed with 's. For example, where would you have “originate” what exists outside of “much of” anything?
OK after reading your “tightening” I see that you are taking a social determinist position on the contents of the individual mind.
IN VERY CONDENSED DESCRIP: I believe that the same pattern-recognition process that enables the individual to acquire language and make sufficient sense of spoken word, written word, body language, and other aspects of other people’s behavior so as to acquire anything of cultural values and belief systems in the first place also operates so as to allow each individual to make independent assessments of things as they actuallly personally experience them and to compare and contrast that with what they have been socialized to. I believe that language-based cognitions are only a subset of cognitive processes, that emotion- and sensation-informed processes are the larger set and are in fact necessary in a “building blocks” sort of way for language-based intellectual thought to take place; and because of this I do reject formulations that would have it that individuals can only “think” in terms that were put into their heads along with the language of the surrounding culture, etc.
And yet at the same time, while this is stressing (necessarily, given the turf you are apparently staking out) the real existence of independent individual cognitive processes, and therefore negating any TOTALIZING theory claiming that ALL of what goes on in the mind of the individual is caused IN ITS ENTIRETY by socialization (good old Durkheim and orthodox sociology and its tabula rasa), I also want to go on record that I think most of what is going on in any given individual’s head is a local manifestation of the thinking of the culture or the species; rather than a head full of entirely original thought, the typical person chooses between some perspectives on some subject matter, both of which perspectives are “out there” already, and furthermore makes that choice based on a selection between several batches of thoughts about those perspectives, wherein those arguments and thought-batches and discussions, et. al, are also all “out there” as part of the ongoing discussion. Perhaps the individual has some insights that could be written up as a defense and elaboration of one strand of one argument in favor of one portion of one perspective over the other. Even then, 99% of the reasoning behind and defense for those insights will be composed of things that are already “out there”. This is in no way to be read as an indictment of the lack of originality or creativity of this person —if it were not so, hardly anyone would be able to read it and follow it and make sense of it. It is still an actual contribution by the individual, miniscule though it is in comparison with how we generally think of individual thoughts and the originality thereof.
BECAUSE individuals do engage in something other than the mindless sponging up and repeating of existing content — miniscule though it may be — the things that individuals do write and say creates a modifying force, a perpetual ongoing critique and corrective of a huge body of thought that the culture and species is collectively entertaining. And BECAUSE this is so, the culture and species IS CONSCIOUS, the contents of its collective thought-patterns undergoing change not at random but as a consequence of things being considered, mulled over, compared with actual felt experiences, and so on.
Therefore the answer to “where is the self” is multilayered: there IS an individual locus, such that the everyday belief that one is one’s individual self is not ENTIRELY misplaced or TOTALLY wrong; but that “I” exists in context and a vastly larger portion of self is actually the “we” than we tend to think it is. NOT ALL, but a huge portion nonetheless.
There’s a more metaphysical extension of this that pertains more to the origins and meaning of the conscious and volitional species and where ITS consciousness actually lies, given the context of what many would hold to be a deterministic physical-temporal world of causal processes and reactions and so forth, but I don’t think that’s necessary for peeling apart the social determinism versus individual “I” portion of the question.
Nope. Of course I synthesize experience to fit my individual “needs” as I perceive them. In that sense I am an “individual” with my own “lifestyle” and belief system, totally unique and totally subjective] . I’m saying that this image is ultimately TOTALLY self-referential and therefore meaningless/illusionary.
Thanks for your response. I getting out of the house for a while, but I shall return to wrestle with the rest of your post.
