GENIUS FORUMS

clyde wrote:I do understand the feeling . . . .

Dan Rowden wrote:Clyde,

Does "No Harm", mean to everyone what it means to you?

clyde wrote:Describe what you experience when you feel that you may be the only person who exists.

Kevin Solway wrote:

clyde wrote:Describe what you experience when you feel that you may be the only person who exists.

I experience the logical knowledge that I may be the only person.

Your mode of thinking is too divorced from mine for this conversation to continue. No communication is possible.

clyde wrote:

Dan Rowden wrote:Clyde,

Does "No Harm", mean to everyone what it means to you?

Dan, What does "no harm" mean to you?

Kevin; I do understand the feeling. It seems natural for some (myself included) to sometimes feel that the universe is sustained by our awareness alone.

Dan Rowden wrote:

clyde wrote:Kevin; I do understand the feeling. It seems natural for some (myself included) to sometimes feel that the universe is sustained by our awareness alone.

Funny that you interpreted what Kevin said as solipsism. There are a few ways his view could be interpreted. That one didn't occur to me at all.

Note that we never experience the "outside world" in any shape or form. The entire scope of our experiences is confined to what the brain happens to create. The people we love and hate, the large solid buildings in which they live, the distant mountains, the stars and galaxies in the sky - all of them are constructions of the brain. In a very real sense, the brain is all we ever experience.

Dan Rowden wrote:Also, you didn't seem to get my Pat Malone pun :(

Dan Rowden wrote:Oh, ok. My notion of Solipsism is more extreme than that, in that it doesn't just mean that differentiation of things occurs due to the brain, but that reality itself is a product of it. That can't work, obviously, because it would mean the causes of oneself were also a product of the brain. i.e. one would be self-caused. Could it be that all the things I experience are a product of my own brain? Sure, that's possible, but given the existence of rap music and Victor it would also necessitate that I really fuckin' hate myself! :)

Also, you didn't seem to get my Pat Malone pun :(

Dan Rowden wrote:What if you're a slow thinker?

Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:

Kevin Solway wrote:

clyde wrote:Describe what you experience when you feel that you may be the only person who exists.

I experience the logical knowledge that I may be the only person.

Your mode of thinking is too divorced from mine for this conversation to continue. No communication is possible.

Interpretation:

It is not a feeling, but a recognition of one of many possibilities. A rough illustration would be that Kevin recognizes that all this could just be a dream, and he is dreaming all of us - therefore we might not actually be people, but mere figments of his imagination. He is not saying that this is definitely how it is, or even putting a measure of true likelihood on it, but merely acknowledging that this option is within the realm of possibility.

Mate,it's holocaust!

Elizabeth Isabelle wrote:You never read WOTI? Chapter 6, under Brain Constructions reads:

Note that we never experience the "outside world" in any shape or form. The entire scope of our experiences is confined to what the brain happens to create. The people we love and hate, the large solid buildings in which they live, the distant mountains, the stars and galaxies in the sky - all of them are constructions of the brain. In a very real sense, the brain is all we ever experience.

That seems like a straight-forward interpretation of David's words to me.

Other People’s Consciousnesses

Having established that everything exists within the construction created by consciousness, I will now briefly address the issue of other people’s consciousnesses. Needless to say, the constructed universe in which I live is something that I experience within my own consciousness and nowhere else. I do not live in other constructed universes in other people’s consciousnesses. Each person’s constructed universe is unique and isolated from everyone else’s.

I do not really know, of course, if these other constructed universes actually exist. It could well be they are an illusion created within my own consciousness. Other people certainly appear to be conscious, but I have no way of establishing that they really are. After all, they could be like the people that I meet in my dreams at night. Dream people can walk and talk and perform complex tasks and do anything that "real life" people can do, even though they are nothing more than unconscious automatons directed by my dreaming mind. Perhaps a similar situation occurs in my wakeful life? Perhaps everyone I meet is an unconscious automaton? It is impossible to judge. I will never be able to reach a final conclusion about this because any evidence I might wish to call upon to decide the matter, one way or the other, will always be part of my own construction and therefore will always be fundamentally unreliable.

Since it is essentially an unsolvable problem, the only rational course of action is treat it as though it were any other empirical issue - namely, treat the evidence supporting the existence of other people’s consciousness at face value and make the provisional assumption that they are indeed conscious. I can reason that because other people look and behave like me, and because I already know that I am conscious, I can conclude that they are conscious as well. The evidence, circumstantial though it may be, generally seems to support this point of view. Although I am uncertain about it, I am happy enough to accept it for the time being, at least until compelling new evidence comes along and forces me to have a rethink.

When I speak of "the construction", then, I am referring to the totality of all constructions and not just my own. Things can certainly exist beyond my own consciousness, but only if there are other consciousnesses to support their existence. When I die and my own construction vanishes, the observable universe will live on in the minds of others. And should the human race and all conscious life on earth become extinct, well then, existence will have to wait until new sentient beings evolve - keeping in mind, of course, that concepts such as "waiting" and "time elapsing" and "existence" and "nothingness" have no meaning outside of consciousness.

At the moment, there are nearly six billion people on this planet, each of them existing inside their own construction. We can think of these constructions as separate dimensions, all happily coexisting side by side, with no interaction between them. The universe is like a multitude of bubbles, each bubble an isolated construction of consciousness, each somehow making room for the rest. It is an interesting picture of the Universe, but is it really true? Or is it simply a construct of my own consciousness, one that lacks any kind of objective reality? I will let the reader decide that one for himself.

Dan Rowden wrote:What if you're a slow thinker?