--- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "Hugo" <richardhughes103@> > wrote: > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "authfriend" <jstein@> wrote: > > > > > > --- In FairfieldLife@yahoogroups.com, "curtisdeltablues" > > > <curtisdeltablues@> wrote: > > > <snip> > > > > Are you taking the position of solipsism? > > > > > > Just out of curiosity, how would you refute solipsism? > > > > This is from one of my favourite books, The Fabric of Reality > > by David Deutsch. He puts it better than I ever could. > > > > http://www.freivald.org/~jake/deutschOnSolipsism.html > > He draws a logical conclusion: > > "How exactly does solipsism, taken seriously, differ from its > common-sense rival, realism? The difference is based on no more > than a renaming scheme." > > Which is similar to what I said to Curtis in a > subsequent post: Solipsism doesn't have to change > anything about how you interact with the world; > it just changes your understanding of the meaning > of "interact with the world" (what Deutsch calls > a "renaming scheme"). > > But then he says: > > "Thus solipsism, far from being a world-view stripped to its > essentials, is actually just realism disguised and weighed > down by additional unnecessary assumptions -- worthless > baggage, introduced only to be explained away." > > He's essentially demostrated that there's no way > to tell whether realism or solipsism is "true," and > he concludes that it's therefore a meaningless > question, because everything looks and behaves the > same either way. >
Actually he demonstrates that solipsism self destructs as an idea through adding so much complexity: "Solipsism insists on referring to objectively different things (such as external reality and my unconscious mind, or introspection and scientific observation) by the same names. But then it has to reintroduce the distinction through explanations in terms of something like the 'outer part of myself'. But no such extra explanations would be necessary without its insistence on an inexplicable renaming scheme." > But that's what's so interesting to me--not *whether* > one or the other is true, but the fact that we can't > tell, that we can never know the most fundamental > fact of ontology. > I think we can tell which view is true. Occams Razor, why weigh down observable reality with an invented version of reality far more complex than it needs to be? Same with God, I can't see that it's up to anyone to disprove it but for the believers to prove the rest of us are wrong. I'm a realist so I'll stick with assuming you and everyone else is actually here and not part of my daydreams.
