So why are you acting as if that keyboard you typed this on, the forum you posted it on, and the people you’re speaking to, also exists? Why are you acting as if the words you’re using have meaning, and will be understood by anyone? You are defeating your own position.
Perhaps it just amuses me too. People can fantasize about all sorts of things and dervie enjoyment from it. Make up stories, imagine keyboards to type on and talk to fictions of their own mind who write back quite entertainingly. Perhaps that is why I’m doing.
Or perhaps I have a faith that the things my senses tell me actually have an objective (dictionary sense) presence in reality, but my philosophy leaves open the possiblity that it’s wrong. So few do. When others have faith about things, I am more sympathetic in my understanding of their position as I have to have faith that they exist at all, and if they do perhaps the things that they have faith in and can’t prove are also true.
For instance to prove a being which can alter all my thoughts and change reality on a whim doesn’t exist, is impossible for me to do. Thus I’m an agnostic open to the slim possibility rather than an atheist, for which I’d need definite proof which is unobtainable.
Perception and sensation are not the same thing. Sensations are the components of perceptions. Perceptions are the result of a group of related sensations automatically integrated (and retained into memory) by our brains.
But you cannot “prove”, by some outside method, that perception is what it is, because there is no outside method. The concept of proof means to reduce something to direct perception. There is no other kind of proof, that could be relied upon to “prove” perception right.
However, the fact that perception of reality is undeniable (in any manner that is even remotely consistent with the message being conveyed), is an excellent reason to treat it as given. The only logically consistent alternative to that acceptance is total silence and inaction. Anything else automatically undermines the claim.
I’ll grant you that there is a reality, it’s just whether your senses are actually interacting with it that’s the hitch. Maybe you don’t have senses, maybe you only think you do.
So I think in a way we’re saying the same thing. You have to say to yourself that it’s likely you’re dealing with real things and not being decieved. But ones philosophy then should take into account this assumption and the possibility that it’s wrong. we’ll call our assumed relayed via our potentially decieved senses, guessality then? We also can’t make statements in our philsophies that say our methods work when we apply them to reality, we have to say when we apply them to what we have faith or hope is actually a reality or some such thing.
You say the only logical alternative to your senses accurately reflecting an objective reality is to undertake total silence and innaction. I don’t believe this is the case. If I am in fact simply decieved by my senses, or say dreaming, and yet it’s a fantastic enough dream to provide hours of enjoyment and intrigue and development of myself as a rational being, then why shouldn’t I just get over it and start interacting? Is it more moral to not interact in the neuro interactive simulation to which you are subjected?
That is why, in Objectivism, perception of reality is accepted as self-evident (not individual instances of perception, but the abstract concept, mind you). Objectivism does acknowledge hallucinations and crazy people.
But I’ve given you a perfectly logical way that one could deny one has any interaction with reality. So it’s not self-evident at all. It’s a matter of faith that your right, but it’s not self-evident. Perhaps it is self-evident that you need to make this assumption in order to proceed with objectivist philsophy, but that’s an appeal to consequence. There are ways you could proceed if what you take as self-evident is not in fact the case, and so using the ultimate appeal to consequence that nothing would make sense if it weren’t the case that I were right, is also flawed. There are numerous ways to explain your sensory interactions with a supposed world around you that have nothing to do with those senses being right.
I’m sorry they poisoned your mind with such nonsense in primary school. Denying perception of reality by means of words, concepts, and other tools based on precisely that perception, is not a valid point.
You miss my point, perhaps I’m denying it based on the perceptions that come from the sensory hoax that was played on me and the logic of my reasoning mind. Either reality or it’s sensory faximile could give rise to the ability to do this, and that’s the point.
If you wish to deny our notions of reality, ignore everything we accepted and built on to help us live in it, first. Then try to deny it, using nothing but whatever you think exists.
I don’t ignore everything you’ve accepted, I just accept our ignorance in the matter for what you seem to take as an absolute. Why would I bother trying to deny it, I am willing to accept either possibility, I just insist that my philosophies do as well.
The only thing teaching that nonsense to children accomplishes is that it undermines the significance of words and concepts in their minds.
Questioing for oneself one’s own existence and the essential premisses and assumptions one has about one’s understanding of the world around them does a lot more than what you suggest. For instance let’s say that I seriously doubt my existence for a bit, and have to work through why I do in fact exist. The affirmation of this fact and the process through which it achieve is of significant value to ones understanding of oneself. This is far more valuable than someone telling me, that I must or I should take my toys and go home.
By using concepts outside the context they were created in (a context in which perception of reality is treated as self evident),
It is the nature of that “reality” that’s at question. I agree I exist and thus there is a reality, whether my senses impart any interaction with it, or wheter I even really have senses is what’s up for grabs. Still I have generated these concepts within reality. I’m not arguing that there isn’t a reality, I’m arguing that maybe you and I aren’t interacting with it the way we think we are.
it confuses them about what words and concepts are. It makes them think words and concepts are somehow divorced from reality and our perception of it, that they exist in a void, and that they should be taken as self evident, instead of our perception of reality.
It may do this, or it may do something completely different. Perhaps it liberates them to think more objectively about their assumptions (dictionary sense).
Or say the reassurance these trappings give the cabin crew whom believe in these things and thus perform better with them?