#solipsism

andreas_geisler@diaspora.glasswings.com

Dualism is correct, but not in the way dualists think

When you get right down to it, there seems to be an external world.
You know, a physical, material world.
We don't know it, because all we have is a mind-internal model, that we have based off percepts, which we have good reason to believe is highly inaccurate.
We built our internal models for utility, not truthfulness.

So, monism is essentially the same thing as solipsism. The only way monists can get only one world, is by equating the internal world with the external world, and that's exactly the same as claiming that the external world is a product of your own mind, i.e. solipsism the most hated of all philosophical stances.

But in-depth examination of experiments like Mary's Room will inform a dualism that differentiates "what is" from "what it's like", where "what it's like" is experience.
The experienced world is the internal world.
It is different from the external world, even if it's somehow generated by objects in the external world.
Thereby avoiding solipsism by allowing a dualism.

But it's a very secular form of dualism.

It is the physical that is ephemeral and unmeasurable. A strange unknowable world, not of souls but of objects.

The mind-internal is what we actually have access to. It's the boring old everyday stuff we know so well - not real, as such, but still it is what we base our idea of "real" on.

Summary of what I got out of some preceding discussions with @Rhysy @John Hummel @John Wehrle @Will and more.

#philosophy
#dualism
#solipsism
#thethingisnotthething