Popular criticisms for idealism:
NO, THOSE DO NOT COMPUTE.
Can anybody come up with some good criticisms? I've been trying for years.
WTF?
...
Idealism- Theory that there is no proof of an external world.
Solipsism- Theory that only one's own mind exists; all else, including every other person, is a creation of that mind.
Google- An aid to those with common sense, ignored by those without.
Or, if that's all too much, I ask you the following: do slugs think? If so, prove it. If not, prove it.
Idealism: BS, try banging your head into a brick wall. If the wall doesn't exist, it wont hurt.
Solipsism: Also BS. If every other person was a creation of one's own mind everyone would live in a Utopia of their own making.
Me: Probably an idiot who misunderstands the question.
How do you know that the sensation of pain is not your own creation? Can you prove that the source is external?
You write under the assumption that the true goal of the human mind is happiness. What if our unconcious has a different purpose? Alternatively, why must one's mind be sensible in its acts? What if it behaves in a random fashion?
this is heavy stuff. how about this then:
"Nothing is true, everything is permitted".
If only telepathy were real, these would be much easier to argue against.
@6- 'Discipline precedes freedom'. (This is the problem with limiting a reply to an irrelevant quote; there is generally another equally irrelevant quote that contradicts it.)
@Lupa- Indeed. That said, I suppose we would have no way of being certain of the truth of telepathy.
>>5 Fair enough. If nothing is indeed real, am I talking to myself here? Or am I then a figment of your imagination?
Were you a solipsist, you would argue the former. Were I a solipsist, I would argue the latter. As a sceptic, I must answer that there is no way of knowing.
Surely the proof against solipsism is that if I/you were the only person to exist, then no one could know anything I/you don't? Since this is obviously not the case, then I/you can't be the only person to exist. Or an I just being dense?
>>11 I think the argument they'd use against that is that your subconscious mind knows a lot more than your cnoscious mind.
I'm talking about a situation where you can't know something but someone else can.
For example:
I get a friend to roll a dice, look at it, cover it with a cup and write the number it landed on down. I then guess the number myself and look at my friends answer before reveling the dice. I have no way of knowing, even subconsciously, what the number is so five in six of my guesses will be wrong. My friend on the other hand will always be right and therefor must know something I don't. Right?
I'm talking about a situation where you can't know something but someone else can.
For example:
I get a friend to roll a dice, look at it, cover it with a cup and write the number it landed on down. I then guess the number myself and look at my friends answer before reveling the dice. I have no way of knowing, even subconsciously, what the number is so five in six of my guesses will be wrong. My friend on the other hand will always be right and therefor must know something I don't. Right?
I'm talking about a situation where you can't know something but someone else can.
For example:
I get a friend to roll a dice, look at it, cover it with a cup and write the number it landed on down. I then guess the number myself and look at my friends answer before reveling the dice. I have no way of knowing, even subconsciously, what the number is so five in six of my guesses will be wrong. My friend on the other hand will always be right and therefor must know something I don't. Right?
I'm talking about a situation where you can't know something but someone else can.
For example:
I get a friend to roll a dice, look at it, cover it with a cup and write the number it landed on down. I then guess the number myself and look at my friends answer before reveling the dice. I have no way of knowing, even subconsciously, what the number is so five in six of my guesses will be wrong. My friend on the other hand will always be right and therefor must know something I don't. Right?
I'm talking about a situation where you can't know something but someone else can.
For example:
I get a friend to roll a dice, look at it, cover it with a cup and write the number it landed on down. I then guess the number myself and look at my friends answer before reveling the dice. I have no way of knowing, even subconsciously, what the number is so five in six of my guesses will be wrong. My friend on the other hand will always be right and therefor must know something I don't. Right?
Erm, sorry about that, my computer totally screwed up.
>>13 I think you're right, actually. While many experts say that the subconscious mind knows a great deal more than our conscious mind does, I don't think even it would know something so trivial, especially since it indeed has no way of knowing.
But of course, that's just me. Maybe Ellipses knows something we don't. Would that be an argument against solipsism too? This thread is confusing(A)
@11- The problem with that argument is that you may well know things you don't think you know. For example, imagine you are having a dream, and someone within that dream tells you a new piece of information that affects the way you act within the dream. Unless your dream's a lucid one, you're not aware that you're dreaming or that the 'new' information was created by your own consciousness. Who's to say that real life isn't the same in this respect?
Fascinating, my good man, fascinating.
>>20 True, but what Anon says about a friend rolling a dice seems valid. How could one's subconsciousness know what number came out on top? The theory is that our subconsciuousness can piece together things that we, while awake, miss. However, if there's nothing to piece together like with aforementioned example, wouldn't even it come up empty?
It's possible from a solipsist perspective that things <i>only begin to exist when you receive information about them</i>. For instance, when your friend tells you what the number on the die is, all the information you have is that someone has given you a number. Until you see that number for yourself, you have no information as to whether your friend is telling you the truth or not, which depends on how trustworthy your subconscious has deemed them to be.
To use Ellipsis's dream example, suppose that you are dreaming that you're running down an endless corridor, only to be surprised when the floor opens beneath your feet. Does this mean that the sudden pitfall existed before that moment?
Personally, I dislike solipsism. Non-falsifiable theories really aren't very useful.
That's the thing; I'd say I'm really a Pyrrhonist, but it does take the fun out of things. Better to pursue theories that allow argument. OTOH, if a theory is false, it should be falsifiable; it's just a question of working out how...
Not true - it's actually quite possible to create an unfalsifiable theory. It's just that they tend to get ignored because whilst they're impossible to disprove, they also happen to be impossible to prove.
Example: Freud's theories of psychology, which could explain pretty much anything in terms of repression, reaction formation, and so on, making it impossible to tell what might be caused by what.
We don't have a way of disproving such theories at present, but I like to stay optimistic about future possibilities. I'd bet that there were some 'unfalsifiable' theories a few hundred years ago that have since been proven false.