Proving What We Already "Know"

[The Grand Nudger]

Well, we once talked about that-- how would you go from solipsism to anything beyond it?  It's not easy to do.

I have no rational reason for accepting you or anyone else as real.  I've grown up feeling and believing that people are real, and that makes life meaningful in some sense.  So right off the bat, literally everything I believe is limited by that context: "In a world where anything is real beyond my experience of it, TGN is this and that kind of person who expresses ideas in this or that way."

And this is not a trivial nitpick.  Once I've decided that senses are intrinsically untrustworthy as a method of sourcing themselves, then I'm never really sure if I'm a BIaJ, or in a sim, or the Matrix, of the Mind of God, or a material monism.

I don't think it's accurate to say that you have no rational reason for accepting me or anyone else as real.  Whether or not you accept any of them is another story.  

My ignorance of your life and of the various branches of plant science notwithstanding, I think this is a pretty fair place to examine the idea of context.  Let's say that all those things are separate bodies of knowledge-- certain truths are specific to say botany, agronomy, neurology, or physics.

If you say, "Science is the best tool for learning about things," and all those things are branches of science, then that implies that there's a main branch, big-S science, which provides a context for all those various branches.

I suppose a material monist view, then could be that bigger context-- it is the one ring which binds them all.  But I'm not so sure that there IS such a big-S science, or that there really IS any context which allows QM to say useful things about botany-- or agronomy-- let alone the nature of what-things-are-like, or of moral or artistic truths.

My attempt to provide that bigger context is to define Science and the material world as a subset of experience-- they are unlike dreams, unlike abstract thoughts, but they certainly are things which can be experienced.

Your attempt, I think, is to define mind as a natural feature of material, specifically of brains and possibly anything that acts sufficiently like a brain.  But "mind as material" is an assertion that's hard to prove, while "material as experience" is true by definition (as literally everything I can know about must be known through experience)-- with the weakness of my view being that it doesn't even really draw useful inferences about where experiences come from.

You believe that this assertion is true by definition, in addition to believing that you have no rational reason to accept anyone else as real? In addition to believing that your senses are intrinsically untrustworthy as a method of sourcing themselves?

The combination of these beliefs seems..what, more rational than the belief that I'm real? I feel like if any argument for something so specific as whether or not things like humans have (or should have) human rights dissolves into one sided solipsism then there is no specific objection to the item at hand. Fine as far as it goes, I suppose - but you haven't been a very consistent solipsist, and I recall you mentioning earlier in thread that was a pet peeve of yours. I'm personally content with the evidence that you are real, and the inferences I can make to that effect...though I often find myself wondering just wtf you are, or think you are. In the end, none of that threatens your rights, or the rights of anything like you, so far as I'm concerned. I wouldn't want to put you through simulated suffering either, as opposed to real suffering, assuming there's a difference, and even if I'm a bot. Guess it's just the kind of bot I am - thinking about the kind of bot you are?

You could end run the whole bit, couldn't you? Because so long as you maintain that you, at least, are real, then we're only considering what rights that a thing like you would have, if it existed - and we still have at least one real thing like you to consider.. don't we? That's ignoring that we can and do..and even have been considering the rights of hypothetical entities that are absolutely not real, which you seemed to believe would be some real disaster....but I digress.