Proof Mind is Fundamental and Matter Doesn't Exist

[Redbeard The Pink]

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You're conflating "evident" with "immediately evident." For something to be "evident," there just has to be evidence of it. It doesn't actually matter how that evidence turns up, so long as it is repeatable and/or observable.

again, Webster disagrees. it says it has to be 'clear to the sight or mind' or 'clear to the vision or understanding.' though when I said evident, I meant more clearly 'self evident' which means 'not needing to be demonstrated or explained; obvious.' thus the nature of brain producing mind is not evident in the same way 'the mind exists' is.

And I'm saying that's completely irrelevant and non-meritorious because it can be applied to any damn thing someone could make up, so long as they pick something that is not testable.

if something that is 'testable' includes things that can be demonstrated by logic and reason, then almost nothing is 'not testable.' as for the topic on hand, I really can't think of any things other than the origin of mind that can't be known by conflict of epistemic limitations. so if there are no other topics your objection can be voiced to, then it's not logical fallacy... you're just special pleading.

It is impossible to falsify the existence of Santa Claus and his workshop at the North Pole.

now this clearly can be falsified... because it's a claim about the world we experience. so experience in conflict with the claim (such as going to the North Pole) can falsify it. you're gonna have to come up with a better example than that. there's a fundamental difference between a claim involving the contents of the world you experience and a claim involving an explanation for your experience itself.

Ok, maybe it is, but that's not an "epistemic limitation" so much as a logical irrelevance. It's simply not how problems are solved.

because your examples are false... the fact that they aren't epistemic limitations is exactly the point. the only reason I constructed premise 1 into the argument is because of the epistemic limitation. and even if you are right in all of your examples, at best you can conclude it's 'possible' santa claus exists. or it's 'possible' a tea pot is orbiting the sun... but I don't know what you can do to make any stronger claim to build from those.

Looking at your conclusion, what you're basically doing is circling around to applying premise #1 to Monistic Idealism.

for the argument to be circular, the first premise would have to assume monistic idealism is true... but at best you can say i'm assuming solipsism is possible in the first premise. that's still not a circular argument.

The reason I haven't touched premises 2-5 is that they follow from premise 1 (problematic for the aforementioned reasons), and 5 is basically a bunch of word salad.

translation: you don't understand it. look up problems of substance dualism and get back to me. though since you're a materialist, you shouldn't object to the premise anyways.

Nothing in that list leads to the definite conclusion presented in 6.

if mind doesn't reduce to matter, then mind must be its own substance. if there can only be one fundamental substance, then mind must be it since matter can't be.

I didn't say the definition was "invalid," really. I think the exact word I used was "shitty."

I know you didn't... which is why I asked are you going to? or are you going to keep using ad hominem?

Yes, you've done a clever job of constructing a scenario in which you can ignore everyone's evidence as being merely a part of Simulation Land and you don't have to present any evidence yourself because...

first, I didn't ignore your 'evidence.' I actually directly addressed it by saying your evidence is question begging... but no!! keep ignoring that statement and hash out the same garbage instead of listening to the criticisms. that's what reasonable people do, right?

If our reality is a metaphysically solipsistic world

and you're already wrong... I never said our reality is metaphysically solipsistic. I said it's possible, but that's it.

So yeah, you state that such a world can't be proven false and go on to conclude that such a world must, in fact, be true.

no.. I didn't. I went from 'solipsism is possible' to 'all is mind.' the whole 'all of reality is dreamed by an all encompassing mind' (not my words but close enough) was extra explanation of how an idealistic world 'could' work, but it wasn't in my premises or conclusion. I could have presented an argument why idealism implies theism, but I didn't do that here. and I certainly didn't do it in the OP.

Premise #1 implies that reality is all dreamed up by a mind-thing

so you're saying 'solipsism is possible' implies idealism is true? if so that's not circular. the two statements are clearly different. the implication would be by virtue of logical implication, not ontological equivalence of the two statements.

The ghost particle is not a simulation of a ghost, though. It's named that to get an idea across about it's nature.

right, it's named to explain its nature of 'likeness' to a ghost. if you have a problem with the word simulation I can use the word likeness in the exact same way it's used in this example.

Furthermore, a ghost isn't physical reality. Physical reality, by definition, has to physically exist. To simulate physical reality, there has to be at least one example of physical reality to simulate, and that example by definition has to physically exist.

irrelevant.. the point, as I clearly said, is a neutrino is called the ghost particle because it exhibits behavior in likeness of a ghost. if I took your 'in order for this world to have likeness to material, there has to be material for it to be like' statement seriously; I would likewise have a point in saying 'neutrinos can't be called ghosts particles, because in order for it to be ghost like, there has to be a ghost for it to be like.' so why don't you tell the physicists that?

If the reality we experience is nothing more than a dream, then our reality is conceptual, not physical. If there is no physical world upon which it is based, then it is not a simulation of a physical world. It is merely a conceptual world, populated with objects and rules conceptualized by the Conceiver.

ok then, we'll go with that. does that satisfy your simulation objections?

All evidence indicates that our Universe is natural and material, and yes, some of the evidence from that Universe helps us understand how our brains and senses work, which gives us an idea of "why" we experience and perceive things the way we do and what minds actually are.

nice non-answer... let me try again. can we use information from our experience to explain why we are able to experience?

Aaand that doesn't matter because it's also impossible to prove that it's true, and until you do there is no reason to believe that it is.

let me try again... if experience can't be used to disprove solipsism (because that's begging the question) and there is no reason outside experience, then the first premise is true. it is impossible to prove solipsism is false. that would be what you call... proving it true...

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I'm gonna start condensing these down because going paragraph by paragraph is just inflating the length of both our posts, plus there are a lot of repeat points that we've gone back and forth on several times now.


We'll start with Santa Claus, since that's the most amusing can of worms you decided to pop open. No, you cannot disprove the existence of Santa Claus or his workshop. No, going to the North Pole will not help. I used to be one of Santa's elves, you see, and I have first-hand knowledge of the security features in his shop. For one thing, it's surrounded by a magnetic field that fucks with people's compasses and other navigational equipment, causing them to constantly circle the North Pole any time they try to get there; the shop is also surrounded by several "false poles," which are designed to prevent human suspicions about why they can't find the North Pole. Humans have never been to the "real" North Pole, only these false ones.


Even if a human did wander close enough to risk seeing the shop, it's hidden by a magic field of invisibility. If they get close enough that they might touch it, the whole shop is silently lowered to the floor of the Arctic Ocean, directly on the Earth's crust beneath tons of ice. If someone goes looking for it there, the whole shop teleports to the South Pole using Santa's magic. If anyone goes looking for the shop at both poles, then it's moved somewhere else, and I'm not allowed to tell you where because I'm sworn to secrecy. Santa's shop is specifically designed to magically evade human senses and equipment by various means. If it seems like it isn't there, that's just because you haven't found it yet.


The only other point from this that's even remotely worth addressing is that stupid question-begging thing you keep bringing up, and all I have to say to that is this: it should be obvious to everyone reading this that you have attempted to deliberately construct your argument so that any time someone brings up evidence from the physical Universe, you can cry "question begging!" and move on. That is a painfully obvious cop-out and an intellectually dishonest ploy. What's really more likely: that you (whoever the hell you are) have somehow figured out some unassailable Truth about the basic underpinnings of reality, or that you have constructed a childishly evasive argument that allows you to cop out by name-dropping a fallacy?


Besides, even your false fallacy is fallacious in the reasoning by which you arrive at it. The question is whether we can use information from our experience to explain why we experience things, and the answer is that as long as the Universe behaves according to consistent rules, yes we can. Regardless of whether reality is physical or conceptual, it still behaves according to apparent rules that allow us to glean information about how it works and what goes on in it. We have evidence of how we came to be the life forms we are with the systems that allow us to sense and process the world around us, so in a sense we do understand "why" our brains exist as they do and why they have minds in them. As long as the alleged Dreamer doesn't change any of the rules, we can learn things about the reality it's dreaming up by studying that reality, including how and why our bodies and minds behave the way they do. That doesn't answer questions of metaphysical meaning, but then again neither does your whole argument.


This is also another instance where you've deliberately chosen shitty wording to meet your ends. You've chosen the word "experience" because of its subjectivity. A more appropriate way to word this question might be, "Is it possible to use evidence from reality to learn about how our brains generate our minds?" By throwing the word "experience" around and asking if it's possible to prove experience from experience, you try to make it sound like your opponent is always begging the question any time evidence comes up. This is nothing more than a cheap trick. There is no reason to believe the things you propose unless you can somehow show them with evidence. The fact that you have deliberately constructed a premise that supposedly can't be proven with evidence is your problem, not mine, because it means that you just can't prove what you're saying and therefore can't convince anyone to believe you. That which can be asserted without evidence can be dismissed without evidence.