Hello, Anyone interested in a debate?

[Cato]

As such, under Atheism, any reference to the self, sentience, the conscience, or your person either directly or indirectly would be assertions that are not based on objective observations and thereby largely imaginary .

Funny how the person that gets kicked in the nuts is the one that writhes in pain and not someone walking two blocks away. Care to guess which one recalls being kicked in the nuts the next day?

The Matrix 'what ifs' are no more sophisticated than the what if d-o-g really spelled cat nonsense in Revenge of the Nerds II. It's not philosophy, it's inanity parading as profundity. Imagining some super-reality in order to deny the reality of our experience is fiction. Our experience is reality. It's probably clear by now that I'm fond of Hume's bundled experience definition of self. Until we discover evidence of some super-reality that properly categorizes our universe as illusion, our universe and the means we have of engaging it is reality and objective.

Benny will hate to hear this, but if we're to believe The Matrix, it proves monism. The world in which we would then live would be artificial, but that reality being contingent on manipulation of sensory input to the brain makes the ruse possible.

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Let's take an ordinary pencil, dipped partly into a bowl of water.  From the side, it looks like the pencil is bent.  Viewed from overhead, it appears straight.  Viewed from directly behind it, it appears to be little more than a dot of eraser.  All three perspectives yield perceptions of an objective fact, yet there is no way to create an objective view that is merely a summation of the independent views.  That all three are perceiving the same object does not remove the obstacle of the independence of each perception.  Postulating realism simply asserts that there is a fact of the matter as to which is the 'real' object being perceived; it does nothing to reconcile the divergent subjectivities.

I love this analogy. There is only a problem if any observer assumes that his/her observation is complete (a problem with most religions). The pencil analogy is resolved when the participants communicate and shift positions to gain further perspective. By individuals sharing, a more complete assessment of what reality is can be ascertained. The critical part here is the communication loop between participants leading to shared perspectives illuminating a closer approximation to reality.