🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct13.192715.60894@Cookie.secapl.com>, frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes...
>In article <7667@skye.ed.ac.uk> jeff@aiai.ed.ac.uk (Jeff Dalton) writes:
>>In article <1992Sep16.225422.128824@Cookie.secapl.com> 
>>frank@Cookie.secapl.com (Frank Adams) writes:
>>
>>>I see plenty of room here for solipsism, but none for idealism.  If I don't
>>>accept that my sensations are the result of the physical world, I don't see
>>>how to get anywhere.
>>
>>Maybe there's no matter, only ideas, `a la Berkeley.
> 
>But *whose* ideas?  If they are just your ideas, you're back at solispism.
>If you want to assert that *other* people also have ideas, you have to
>justify your belief in the existence of other people.  And the only evidence
>we have for that belief is from our sensory impressions -- impressions we
>must interpret as being of the world *before* we can interpret some of them
>as being from "other" people.

  In Berkeley's original conception, the ideas ultimately belonged to god,
with some portion of them being shared by him/her/it with each individual.

Whether the idealism you consider is yourself, god, and ideas, or yourself,
other individuals, god, and ideas, or even yourself, other individuals,
a neutral bookkeeper and ideas, the criticism still applies that it's
not clear how to get anywhere. The illusion of a physical world and its
laws must exist under the licence of the idea generating - or 'realizing' -
mechanism, whose true parameters must be apprehensible only by some form
of introspection (if at all). 

   But still, it's the only viewpoint that neatly solves the problem
of the emergence of consciousness, by positing that consciousness is
the antecedent.


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..And in the dream I saw Dan Quayle   :    Pete Vincent
sitting before the Great Lookup Table  :
eating baked space potatoes, and lo!   :  Disclaimer: all I know I learned
he was wearing Heavy Boots.            :  from reading Usenet.