RE: Existential Import
April 4, 2015 at 10:13 pm
(This post was last modified: April 4, 2015 at 10:26 pm by bennyboy.)
Idealism ftw. All those things you are talking about are demonstrably real only as ideas. Put your ball under the microscope, and poof! it disappears. It was only ever really "a thing" in your mind to begin with. That this non-thing is highly coherent and behaves consistently through time and space means that all those QM particles are just down with the program of supporting the ideas of things. 
Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas. But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology. Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space. There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist. Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye. You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.
So in my opinion, you don't have to justify anything. Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self. But by the time you get around to perceiving it, it's not qualitatively different than a vivid dream, which of course comes fom the self anyway.
Morality and mythology clearly can exist only as ideas. But there's something important to consider: your view of the people around you is ALSO a mythology. Mom is "actually" a collection of wave functions vibrating in space. There's no objective "beauty" for her to have, or kindness, or love, or her sense of what is right: NONE of the qualities by which you define a person actually exist. Even the curves of her face are ideas: the brain organizing the general distribution of light into descriptive shapes, when in fact there is nothing there but a gazillion individual photons travelling in a straight line from an emitter to your eye. You experience not the existent entity, but a mythological interface between your ego and the idea of "Mom-ness," which you believe you perceive but in fact have created as a kind of "best fit" for the collection of random perceptual memories you've stored and tried to relate to each other in as simple a way as possible.
So in my opinion, you don't have to justify anything. Your so-called perceptive existence is just that part of your conceptual existence which is dependent on input coming (unless solipsism) from outside the self. But by the time you get around to perceiving it, it's not qualitatively different than a vivid dream, which of course comes fom the self anyway.
