Sketch of an anti-solipsit "proof" of the self

[Aranfan]

I'm still working on it, but here goes:


Perception seems to be happening. It appears that seeing, hearing, feeling, thinking, etc are all happening. It appears therefore that I exist, otherwise there would not be a perceiver which is required for perception to happen. Likewise, it appears that what I perceive, be they sights, sounds, tastes, or concepts also exist, or my perception would have nothing to perceive.

Is what I perceive real? Do my perceptions appertain to an objective factual world, or might I be a brain in a vat, might I be trapped in my own dreamscape, might I be an immortal soul who perceives false things because omnipotent god is fucking with me, might I be a figment of some other imagination like Kierkegaard's pseudonyms? I cannot know. The data required to distinguish these scenarios is, of necessity, not available to my perception, which is all I have.

Since I cannot know, I do not care. I will act as if my perception of my self and my thoughts were factual and not a figment of some imagination, as if my senses perceive an objective factual world and not the clever deceptions of a daemon, as if the Principle of Non Contradiction were true, because to do otherwise would utterly paralyze me. Yet I do not hold them as true, rather they are too useful not to be treated as such, were a new assertion that did everything the PNC did and also handled the Liar Paradox to show up I would drop the PNC in favor of the new assertion, because it would be more useful.

Speak to me not of Solipsism, to argue that the dreamscape is The Truth is useless to me. Empiricism and Rationalism I will entertain, not because of their Truth, for I have been presented with no convincing evidence of their Truth, but because of their apparent usefulness.

Likewise with Morality. Speak not to me of Objective Right and Wrong, a cat and a mouse with have very different moral valuations of the cat pouncing on the mouse, and I, being subjective, cannot decide which of them is objectively right. I can evaluate which I subjectively agree with, but that is all. To say that the mouse is objectively right means that the cat is objectively wrong, and if rightness is to be prized over wrongness, then it follows that the cat should be punished for its wrongness in order to steer it towards rightness. The cat, like the homosexual couple who gets married and Hitler who ordered the death of tons of dudes, will assert that they did nothing wrong, and in their subjectivity they are right. I evaluate the homosexuals as good and Hitler as bad, yet these are my evaluations in my subjectivity, and they hold no warrant to objectivity. If many others agree with me, then we agree, but 100,000,000 Bon Jovi fans can be wrong and Truth is not decided by majority vote.

I should also point out that my utility/dis-utility criteria is not Benthamite pleasure/pain. People who are beating the crap out of each other can be having great fun, and pleasure can be fundamentally unsatisfying. Monetary profit is a type of gain, yet it is a fundamentally different type of gain than that of friendship or calm relaxation, and he who sacrifices friendship and/or relaxation on the alter of lucre is impoverishing themselves (in my view). Likewise with he who sacrifices everything on the alter of friendship. But I digress, my criteria for utility is that which increases my enjoyment and/or satisfaction, or increases the likelihood thereof, and dis-utility is that which increases my dissatisfaction and/or boredom.

[Bakustra]

Why do we need to prove the existence of the self? Why can't it simply be taken as axiomatic?

[Aranfan]

Why do we need to prove the existence of the self? Why can't it simply be taken as axiomatic?

To accept axioms is to abandon a search for truth. Axioms are circular, they are believed "because".

[Bakustra]

Why do we need to prove the existence of the self? Why can't it simply be taken as axiomatic?

To accept axioms is to abandon a search for truth. Axioms are circular, they are believed "because".

Why do we need an absolute truth?

[Aranfan]

Why do we need to prove the existence of the self? Why can't it simply be taken as axiomatic?

To accept axioms is to abandon a search for truth. Axioms are circular, they are believed "because".

Why do we need an absolute truth?

did you even read my sketch?

[Sinewmire]

I giggled a little when you switched from stuffed shirt professor speak

"Speak to me not of Solipsism, to argue that the dreamscape is The Truth is useless to me. Empiricism and Rationalism I will entertain, not because of their Truth, for I have been presented with no convincing evidence of their Truth, but because of their apparent usefulness."

to randomly trailing off, like an impressionist who has got bored of his sketch

Hitler who ordered the death of tons of dudes,

But anyway, you're basically asserting the scientific principle here, that you'll be 99.9% sure of your Perceptions, thanks to their usefulness in describing what you think you witness, but remain willing to adapt that should new evidence surface? Sounds sensible enough.

[Bakustra]

Why do we need an absolute truth?

did you even read my sketch?

You're not really proving anything, you're simply saying that in lieu of anything else, you'll act as though you exist. That is fundamentally axiomatic. Any logical proof has certain fundamental assumptions. In the case of many, "the world exists" and "I exist" are too fundamental to be worth mentioning, mainly because you can't really prove their existence satisfactorily. So looking for proofs of the two is ultimately faulty.

But you do mention "Truth", which I assume is an absolute truth. So why do we need such a thing?

[Thanas]

The cat, like the homosexual couple who gets married and Hitler who ordered the death of tons of dudes, will assert that they did nothing wrong, and in their subjectivity they are right. I evaluate the homosexuals as good and Hitler as bad, yet these are my evaluations in my subjectivity, and they hold no warrant to objectivity.

Are you kidding me?

Dudes? What are you, a stoner fratboy?

[Aranfan]

But you do mention "Truth", which I assume is an absolute truth. So why do we need such a thing?

I'm saying that absolute truth doesn't matter, since even if we got it we probably wouldn't be able to justify our belief in it as the truth.

The cat, like the homosexual couple who gets married and Hitler who ordered the death of tons of dudes, will assert that they did nothing wrong, and in their subjectivity they are right. I evaluate the homosexuals as good and Hitler as bad, yet these are my evaluations in my subjectivity, and they hold no warrant to objectivity.

Are you kidding me?

Dudes? What are you, a stoner fratboy?

I wrote this after watching some Zero Punctuation. And what of the term "dudes"? If it is understood that I mean "people" then my point has been communicated, which is the entire purpose of language.

[Surlethe]

Absolute truth is not just irrelevant, it's vacuous. What is truth? It's the correspondence between reality and propositions. But no proposition can ever be established "true" --- i.e., in total correspondence with reality --- because such establishment relies upon the empirical process, which is a matter not of proving truth but of reducing uncertainty regarding truth values of proposition. Therefore, no proposition can ever be shown absolutely true or false; we may as well, then, discard the notions of absolute truth and falsehood and treat truth itself as not binary but as uncertain.

In a more general sense, by going looking for truth and falsehood and logical arguments to defeat solipsism, you're chasing your own tail. Truth and falsehood are concepts we've made up to help explain the world around us, which our senses relate to us. They are subservient to the assumption of consistent external reality, not independent of it: without models to build, logic is a vacuous pursuit, because, in a sense, logic (more generally, mathematics) is itself the study of the mechanics of model-building.

[Aranfan]

Surlethe, when I read this I first got very worked up about your dismissal of Truth. Then I realized that if I were to be consistent in my positions, I had to agree with you. You are correct.

Thank you for helping me with this, if not for you putting it so bluntly, I might not have escaped the dominion of truth as a fixed idea.

[Surlethe]

Hah, arguing is almost always fun. Especially when it's armchair philosophy and you don't have to do any real research

Seriously, though, I'd amend your statement: I don't dismiss truth, I dismiss absolute truth. The former is completely necessary to any understanding. The latter is a pipe dream.

[Aranfan]

Hah, arguing is almost always fun. Especially when it's armchair philosophy and you don't have to do any real research

Seriously, though, I'd amend your statement: I don't dismiss truth, I dismiss absolute truth. The former is completely necessary to any understanding. The latter is a pipe dream.

I was using Truth as the Platonic Form of truth.

Although, counterfactuals do pose a problem for your correspondence definition of truth. Do you hold "if Edison hadn't invented the lightbulb, then someone else would have" as true? The statement has no correspondence to reality, since Edison did invent it and someone else didn't.

[Thanas]

I wrote this after watching some Zero Punctuation. And what of the term "dudes"? If it is understood that I mean "people" then my point has been communicated, which is the entire purpose of language.

I thought this was an essay you might want to have taken seriously. Dude just scream "amateur".

[Aranfan]

I wrote this after watching some Zero Punctuation. And what of the term "dudes"? If it is understood that I mean "people" then my point has been communicated, which is the entire purpose of language.

I thought this was an essay you might want to have taken seriously. Dude just scream "amateur".

It's a sketch, a draft. I actually plan on writing a "stuff" and a "vernacular" version.

[Surlethe]

Hah, arguing is almost always fun. Especially when it's armchair philosophy and you don't have to do any real research

Seriously, though, I'd amend your statement: I don't dismiss truth, I dismiss absolute truth. The former is completely necessary to any understanding. The latter is a pipe dream.

I was using Truth as the Platonic Form of truth.

Although, counterfactuals do pose a problem for your correspondence definition of truth. Do you hold "if Edison hadn't invented the lightbulb, then someone else would have" as true? The statement has no correspondence to reality, since Edison did invent it and someone else didn't.

Why does the statement have no correspondence to reality?

[Aranfan]

Hah, arguing is almost always fun. Especially when it's armchair philosophy and you don't have to do any real research

Seriously, though, I'd amend your statement: I don't dismiss truth, I dismiss absolute truth. The former is completely necessary to any understanding. The latter is a pipe dream.

I was using Truth as the Platonic Form of truth.

Although, counterfactuals do pose a problem for your correspondence definition of truth. Do you hold "if Edison hadn't invented the lightbulb, then someone else would have" as true? The statement has no correspondence to reality, since Edison did invent it and someone else didn't.

Why does the statement have no correspondence to reality?

Because the premise, "if something happened otherwise than it really did", does not correspond to reality. As a model, counterfactuals are fundamentally disconnected from reality.

[Formless]

If you want to get pedantic about it you could just amend that statement to say "if Edison hadn't invented the lightbulb someone else PROBABLY would have". Again, if you stop seeing the world in black and white absolutes you're halfway towards understanding epistemology.

Also, what if we could show you someone who was working on that same invention? Edison gets credit for a lot of stuff, but the reality is that he had a laboratory full of people devoted towards research and development. Who knows how many of his ideas were actually his and how many were stolen? Evidence is another key you are missing here, the one that ties truth back to reality.

[Simon_Jester]

I was using Truth as the Platonic Form of truth.

And what, pray tell, are Platonic forms worth? They're based on the notion that the "real" reality is not the one we can observe, which pretty much torpedoes any notion of ever really getting things down properly right at the start.

We can bicker about the ideal essence of the whichness of what all day long, without getting anywhere. I would argue that preoccupation with this kind of "whoa, it's not just real, it's more real than real" philosophical truth is a great way to accomplish nothing. It is instructive to consider how poor a track record philosophy has at tackling its own really fundamental questions, even the self-posed ones, compared to how good a track record more empirical, disciplined fields of investigation have. It's arguably true that competent philosophy can refute a great many of the truly bad ideas people used to hold, but it has achieved relatively little in terms of actually answering the kinds of questions the ancient Greeks and such would pose.

Except, of course, for demonstrating that some of the questions were bloody stupid.

[Surlethe]

Because the premise, "if something happened otherwise than it really did", does not correspond to reality. As a model, counterfactuals are fundamentally disconnected from reality.

Why not? It is perfectly legitimate to claim "if X had occurred, then Y would have occurred" --- the correspondence is not to what actually happened but to what might have happened. (I think we are delving into arguments which would be better phrased with modal logic.)

[Surlethe]

If you want to get pedantic about it you could just amend that statement to say "if Edison hadn't invented the lightbulb someone else PROBABLY would have". Again, if you stop seeing the world in black and white absolutes you're halfway towards understanding epistemology.

Also, what if we could show you someone who was working on that same invention? Edison gets credit for a lot of stuff, but the reality is that he had a laboratory full of people devoted towards research and development. Who knows how many of his ideas were actually his and how many were stolen? Evidence is another key you are missing here, the one that ties truth back to reality.

Don't be a douchecock. The entire point of the thread is that he's trying to make sense of an empirical epistemology. He's not missing "evidence" or seeing the world in "black and white absolutes", he's wondering why "if X then Y" is a meaningful statement.

[Formless]

Don't be a douchecock. The entire point of the thread is that he's trying to make sense of an empirical epistemology. He's not missing "evidence" or seeing the world in "black and white absolutes", he's wondering why "if X then Y" is a meaningful statement.

I'm not being a douche, I'm saying that strictly speaking he's right; that statement does not have a positive truth value as phrased. We cannot say with certainty that someone else would have invented the lightbulb because we have no evidence that can give us that level of certainty. But we can say with some certainty that someone probably would have. "Counterfactuals" is just another way of saying "this statement is false." They therefore aren't a problem with the correspondence theory of truth, they are actually a part of it.

[Psawhn]

Funnily enough, in the case of lightbulbs, the proposed counterfactual does have a lot of supporting evidence:
http://www.ideafinder.com/history/inven ... htbulb.htm.

Edison wasn't the only one to work on the lightbulb, and Joseph W. Swann actually successfully sued Edison for patent infringement. In addition, Henry Woodward and Matthew Evans (from Toronto) patented a nitrogen-filled bulb with a carbon element in 1874, and sold part of the patent to Edison in 1875. One could make the case that Edison didn't even invent the light bulb, but improved upon it.

[Aranfan]

I was using Truth as the Platonic Form of truth.

And what, pray tell, are Platonic forms worth?

Depends. Not much to me, at best they give me something to divert myself with if I have nothing else to do, but they're just a heuristic.

Because the premise, "if something happened otherwise than it really did", does not correspond to reality. As a model, counterfactuals are fundamentally disconnected from reality.

Why not? It is perfectly legitimate to claim "if X had occurred, then Y would have occurred" --- the correspondence is not to what actually happened but to what might have happened. (I think we are delving into arguments which would be better phrased with modal logic.)

What "might" have happened. Yet what might have happened does not correspond with what really happened, because it didn't really happen. Further, the only access we have to what "might" have happened is through theoretical models with more or less correspondence to the real world, not that other possible world that didn't happen.

Don't be a douchecock. The entire point of the thread is that he's trying to make sense of an empirical epistemology. He's not missing "evidence" or seeing the world in "black and white absolutes", he's wondering why "if X then Y" is a meaningful statement.

I'm not being a douche, I'm saying that strictly speaking he's right; that statement does not have a positive truth value as phrased. We cannot say with certainty that someone else would have invented the lightbulb because we have no evidence that can give us that level of certainty. But we can say with some certainty that someone probably would have. "Counterfactuals" is just another way of saying "this statement is false." They therefore aren't a problem with the correspondence theory of truth, they are actually a part of it.

As a frequenter of an Alternate History forum, I feel that I have enough experience with counterfactuals to say you are full of shit right here Formless. Counterfactuals are counter to fact (by definition), yet all the time people evaluate counterfactuals as "true". "If Hitler had died before WWII then Goring or a Junta would take control of Germany" and "If the Central Powers win WWI then France would be finished as a Great Power" are two counterfactuals that are widely ascribed a T value in the truth tables. This happening, in fact having at least one large community dedicated to it, shows that "a measure of correspondence to empirical reality" does not fully capture what is intuitively meant by "truth".

[Formless]

As a frequenter of an Alternate History forum, I feel that I have enough experience with counterfactuals to say you are full of shit right here Formless. Counterfactuals are counter to fact (by definition), yet all the time people evaluate counterfactuals as "true". "If Hitler had died before WWII then Goring or a Junta would take control of Germany" and "If the Central Powers win WWI then France would be finished as a Great Power" are two counterfactuals that are widely ascribed a T value in the truth tables. This happening, in fact having at least one large community dedicated to it, shows that "a measure of correspondence to empirical reality" does not fully capture what is intuitively meant by "truth".

And if I were presented with such claims, I would ask for evidence. I seriously don't think you understand what a counterfactual statement is. If something is contrary to the facts, it means it is contrary to the evidence, and thus we cannot say that it follows. What you're arguing for is true, but its not actually a flaw in empirical epistemologies. Its an assumption of them.

Just because some people say something is true doesn't mean it is.