Meleagar wrote:Santini wrote:
You do know, don't you, that things which exist must exist either in your mind or not?
Nope. That's like saying an photon
must either be a particle or a wave.
Nope. It's like saying that a photon must be either a wave or not a wave.
It's like saying that a photon must be either a particle or not a particle.
It's the difference between a contradictory and a contrary. If two propositions are contradictory then one is necessarily true and the other necessarily false. If two propositions are merely contrary, then one of them is necessarily false, but neither is necessarily true.
Particles and waves are contraries, not contradictories. "Only in the mind" and "not only in the mind" are contradictory terms, therefore "Anything that exists, exists only in one's mind or not" is absolutely true.
It's not necessarily either, but could rather be something that isn't understood, and may not even be understandable.
No, it actually
is necessarily one or the other, as I've shown.
Which it is, however, probably cannot be known.
I'm not obligated to believe one or the other; I can simply remain neutrally skeptical about both.
Not only are you not obligated to believe one or the other, you cannot justifiably do so, imo.
The distinction between the "internal world" and the "external world" is nothing more than the distinction that is drawn between dream states, hallucinatory states, imaginative states, etc. and non-dream, non-hallucinatory, non-imaginative, non-etc. states.
It's the difference between a rock that you might imagine lying on the ground in front of you and a rock that you visually see lying on the ground in front of you.
We ("we" here being an abreviated version of "the vast majority of people including me") assume that other people don't see the rock that we might imagine lying on the ground in front of us. But we assume that other normally fuctioning people can see the rock that we visually see lying on the ground in front of us.
We might point to a unusually shaped rock that we assume exists in external reality and say to a friend standing nearby, "Look at that rock!"
We would never point to an only imagined unusually shaped rock that we only imagine to be lying on the ground and say to a friend standing nearby, "Look at that rock!"
You're perfectly free to say that this is only a convention that you've consciously adopted so that other people won't assume that you're nuts. You may even convince yourself that this is what you're doing. But I say that it's more likely to be the result of your recognition of the differences in the various subjective experiences that you have.