Solipsism a moot concept?

[GrandMasterK]

It seems to me that to support the idea of Solipsism, you assume your own conscious awareness is a viable tool for discerning the validity of your experiences. To me, there seems to be enough evidence to contradict this idea.

 

1. First of all, nothing can be considered truly true no matter how many times it's demonstrated and predicted. No matter what, it's still a choice and therefore a degree of faith is required to believe in anything you see or anything your told no matter the extent of it's verification.

 

2. There have been recent studies done clearly demonstrating that the brain makes decisions long before your consciously aware you've made them. In some cases up to 6 seconds. Include that with the fact that our brains move at a relatively slow pace (a couple hundred miles per hour and in frames of milliseconds) so that we are way behind when it comes to processing events in real-time, even the ones that happen immediately around us. So not only are we living in the past, we are always trying to catch up to our brains.

 

 

I don't see how one can argue from examples like this that their mental states are the only mental states that exist from a verification standpoint because the true essence of the idea prays on the very tools we would use to discern such a thing. In other words, can you really argue your consciousness is some single point of awareness that is isolated and unrelatable to the "exterior" world and other consciousnesses that exist in it when not only are not present in your own field of awareness, but you exist in a universe where it's physically impossible for anything to be truly isolated from something else?

 

 

Thoughts?

[Phi for All]

1. First of all, nothing can be considered truly true no matter how many times it's demonstrated and predicted. No matter what, it's still a choice and therefore a degree of faith is required to believe in anything you see or anything your told no matter the extent of it's verification.

 

I don't like the term "faith" as applied here. To me, faith is a strong belief with little or no support for it, basically claiming to know something you can't possibly know. While it's correct that in science we work with theories instead of proofs, and avoid saying something is "true", a theory is hardly unsupported, something you'd need faith in order to believe.

 

I think a degree of trust develops as you learn how something you were told was observed and tested, and the trust becomes stronger as you learn the methods used to reach any conclusions. Skeptics don't distrust everything, they withhold judgement until they know how conclusions were reached, then they support the explanation if they find the methodology sound. They don't stay skeptical forever.

[dimreepr]

 

They don't stay skeptical forever.

 

 

Indeed but some take longer than others.

[GrandMasterK]

"faith is a strong belief with little or no support for it, basically claiming to know something you can't possibly know."

 

Truer by definition. However, when I contemplate the word I have a hard time subscribing to that stricter application. It doesn't seem to rain true with the scope of what "faith" is. It implies you can't have a little faith. I am not able to conjure ideas that support that implication, though I am also unable to come up with a synonym that properly replaces it. To each his own though.

 

Regardless, truth is subjective no matter what as long as it's perceived by the human mind and most likely any life form that exists within the sphere of everything. Because of that, it seems to me that no matter what, there is a step inbetween what is and what is believed to be, and within that step is where faith exists. We can reach out to the veil, and knowingly unknowingly (not a typo) touch it's boundaries, but we are simply not capable of drawing back the curtain and look from the outside within. I'm sure unpredictability has something to do with that as well but I don't want to wander too far off topic here.

[Phi for All]

Truer by definition. However, when I contemplate the word I have a hard time subscribing to that stricter application. It doesn't seem to rain true with the scope of what "faith" is. It implies you can't have a little faith. I am not able to conjure ideas that support that implication, though I am also unable to come up with a synonym that properly replaces it.

 

I use "wish". When I want something to be true, but I realize there's very little chance of it happening, or that what I want to be true has nothing to support it, believing a little is like wishing it were true. Or hopeful thinking. Faith is supposed to be stronger, by every definition I've found. I think faith in religious circles is defined differently than the kind of faith you can "have a little" of. Perhaps faith is as misused a term as "theory" and "logic".

 

If trust is at one end of the spectrum, with all its supportive evidence and rational thought, and faith is at the other end, a form of belief that persists strongly in spite of a lack of evidence, then it would seem that the more trustworthy something is, the less faith is needed to believe in it. So your point #1 is unclear to me. I don't think faith is required if you have a decent amount of trust in what you believe.