Hedge,Hedge90 wrote: ↑Tue Dec 28, 2021 2:09 pmLet me copy my next answer at reddit, which also explains why solipsism brings up more problems than it solves.Eugene I. wrote: ↑Tue Dec 28, 2021 1:54 pm I don't think it's a good answer. Your subjective perspective of your space of experience is not imagined, it's a fact of experience. If we assume that Lucy has her own space of experience with experiences different from yours (and we need to assume it if we don't want to be solipsists), then that is another fact that her space of experience and subjective perspective is different from yours. No amount of philosophising can prove these facts wrong. Imagining that there is another unified perspective in which both Joe's and Lucy's perspectives are experienced in a unified way does not solve the problem of why in your perspective you are still experiencing only Joe's experience and not Lucy's. This problem is unresolvable and intractable in both materialism and idealism. It belongs to deep mysteries together with the question of "why there is something rather than nothing". And unfortunately the only metaphysics where it is fully resolved is solipsism (where there is no "someone else" so the problem does not even exist in the first place).
To the Cleric's answer: this problem has nothing to do with "identity" or imagined "separate experiencer" (which are indeed both illusions). I find that most people don't really understand what the problem is actually about.
'This is only true if you assume that your [MAL's] attention is finite, and therefore you can only posit yourself in the point of view of one of them. And this is not logical, because if you couldn't maintain your attention at every level simultaneously (i.e. imagining yourself to be both Joe and Lucy, and also being aware of the level above), then as soon as you entered, for example, the POV of Joe, it would all crumble, since you'd forget to maintain the things "outside" Joe.
What I posit is that the attention of infinite consciousness is also infinite, so it is simultaneously looking out through the POV of every illusiory ego-me. Basically, it imagines not remembering what it really is, if you get my meaning. You are an idea that is imagined to feel like it is not just an idea.
"regardless of how many levels of illusions we posit; the answer is still that it is axiomatic/indexical"
That's true. A number of things cannot be explained beyond noting them as facts. You can also not make a logical case for why there is existence instead of non-existence. You just experience something and it's a given that existence IS.'
So the fact that external reality is (or at least, acts as if it is) logical presumes that there is something that holds it together, whether it be laws of nature or an aware mind that maintains it.
I just want to say here, we should not allow our understanding of experience be dictated by which labels we like or dislike, as Eugene says we should do to "avoid solipsism". This is apparently how he goes about about thinking of reality - adding on assumptions wherever it is felt something he dislikes needs to be avoided (which to be fair is very common) - and it's easy to see the profound lack of logical reasoning in such an approach to the world content. Such assumptions steer our thinking only towards the conclusions we desired from the outset, rather than what naturally unfolds from logical consideration of the phenomena at issue. When those desired conclusions are reached, the logical reasoning stops because, unsurprisingly, the person feels their curiosity satisfied.
As was discussed by myself and Cleric in my essay on solipsism, it is actually the abstract fragmented 'hard boundary' and 'impenetrable veil' view which leads to what people fear the most about solipsism. It leads to people mistaking the current boundaries of their own cognition and meaningful experience for the boundaries of the Cosmos at large, thereby atomizing, objectifying, and commodifying all that is beyond their own localized boundary. Cleric has already addressed the reasons why there is no warrant for such a reification of our own localized boundaries, and why the givens of experience positively show the opposite is more harmonious of our experience once we reason through them carefully (which is not to say individuality doesn't exist, but simply that there is always some integration of meaningful perspectives occurring and there is always room for much more integration).
The core problem here is hyper-abstraction of these concepts from immanent experience - some people, actually most people, find it extremely difficult to conceive of what is being written here as anything other than inert intellectual abstractions which float around and have almost zero practical significance for our lives. We should really try to recover a living experience of the ecology of ideas we always exist in with our thoughts, feelings, desires, and actions. Then the fallacy of the "alter" and "dissociative boundary" and "veil", as those concepts are frequently employed here, will naturally be revealed to our Thinking.