Count Lucanor:
I can understand it might not be so obvious to you if you have never debated a solipsist.
I've spoken to some people on here who have taken solipsistic positions. I've never noticed anyone doing it to defend religion. It usually just seems to be a bit of fun. An intellectual exercise.
In the context of our previous discussion, this particular statement of yours appeared to resort to solipsism:
"The only way we can ever know of the existence of this horse is via our subjective sensations."
The "only way" seemed to imply that nothing else but our subjective mind is involved in the experience that leads to our knowledge of things. It appeared as if you were minimizing the physical reality of the senses and the things of the world in themselves. Maybe that's not what you intended to say or I jumped too far into an interpretation
It would be solipsism if I had said:
"There is no horse. Only the sensations of a horse."
I didn't say that. Note: I said "know of the existence".
You are contradicting yourself here. When you say that "we test our subjective experiences against other subjective experiences...other people's...and other people's memories", you cannot pretend to treat these experiences as "subjective", as they are not yours.
They are the experiences of subjects. So they are subjective. The only way I know about them is by my subjective experience of them. So during my lifetime I have learned through numerous subjective experiences of other people how best to interpret my subjective experience of hearing them talk and watching them move. If I have the experience of hearing one of them say "there is a horse" along with the experience of seeing them point a finger and if those experiences correlate with my own experiences of seeing a horse then I am putting together various experiences to conclude that a horse objectively exists.
So I don't think there's a contradiction. I think it should be clear that we gain evidence of other people's alleged subjective experiences by our own subjective experiences of them.
Note again: I am not denying the existence of an objective world in any of this. I am saying that we infer the
existence of that world via various experiences. Obviously this involves memories of past experiences and the ability to spot patterns, make logical deductions and use logical Induction.
Also note: Some of our reactions to the world are not based on any experiences that we have had during our own lifetimes. They are due to the way we're made; our DNA; our instincts. For example, (I think I'm right in saying) babies are born with a built-in ability in the brain's visual system to fixate on pairs of eyes. But even this ability must have evolved due to the collective subjective experiences of numerous generations of our ancestors.
I never said that you said it literally, but that you portrayed it that way. I stand by that perception.
OK. Fair enough. All I can say is that it wasn't the message that I intended. "Ideal" would to me be associated with "Idealism". I certainly wouldn't call myself an idealist. If any label was appropriate, maybe it would be pragmatist. And "fresh and new". Well I don't know what that means, but it seems to imply that I'm claiming our sensations are experienced like a new-born baby, without the benefit of (many) memories of previous experiences in a brain shaped by experiences. Clearly I don't think that. I don't claim that we have no memories.
Again, you're not taking into account the accumulative effect of subjective experience, which through constant iterations since we are born, leads us to grasp the objective reality of the world.
Yes, I
explicitly am taking into account the accumulative effect of subjective experience in that sentence that you actually quoted. I said this:
"We think it more and more likely that it does the more it correlates with other subjective sensations."
Perhaps it's not explicit enough. What I mean by that is that we use such things as Inductive Reasoning (hence "more and more likely") to relate the results of all the subjective experiences. That includes the memories of past experiences and the experiences of others, as described earlier.
Something unifies them and is not the sense organs themselves. Concepts arise from the stimulus provided by the sense organs, but they are not "built" by the sense organs.
Yes, the thing that unifies them is the patterns in them, as interpreted by the capabilities of the brain. The patterns that link all of these present and past experiences causes our brains to conclude that by far the most likely explanation for those patterns is that the sensations are caused by an objectively existing world. It's so likely that, from a very early age, we don't just see it as likely. We see it as certain. That's Inductive Reasoning for you. That's why if this pattern is ever broken (by such things as ghostly floating daggers as in my earlier example) we are very surprised.
Incidentally, I think this approach is also
essential when dealing with some of the experimental findings of modern physics.
But perhaps more on that later.
You're just hypostatizing subjective experiences, "moving" them from the subject and putting them in the world as some "subjective thing".
I disagree that that is what I am doing. I'm simply describing how I think we make sense of the world.
As I explained before, once you have invited someone to describe their own subjective experiences,...
i.e. once you've decided that you want to have the experience of hearing them describe their experiences, to add to your own remembered stock of experiences.
...their own senses functioning, these things will be occurring in a realm independent of one's own consciousness, for which they also will be part of one's assesment of the objective world
Which things will be happening in that realm? Not sure I understand what this part means.
You cannot "point at something" introspectively, or at least it doesn't make sense.
I agree. I never said you could. When somebody points at something I experience them doing that, via my eyes, subjectively and, just like any other experience, I add it to my vast accumulated stock of memories of previous experiences and use my brain, trained by years of experience and some innate evolved abilities (as discussed above) to conclude that a real, objectively existing person is pointing at something. That seems to me by far the most likely explanation for what I'm seeing. So much so that I don't normally question it.