Quote:
Originally Posted by mysterygal  He claims that subjective reality is completely distinct from solipsism, but I fail to see the difference. |
Subjective reality is the opposite of solipsism, I'll explain why.
Most of the time when I hear people talk about solipsism, the people who believe it only care about themseleves. Nobody else matters because they don't exist. You can hurt other people and there won't be any consequence because you're the only one that matters. Now, with this mentality you'd think that solipists define themselves as their physical bodies.
Now with subjective reality, everyone and everything is an indispensible part of your reality. You wouldn't be reckless around other people because they are in your life, and you'll have to pay the consequeces. Weither you like it or not, everything you do and everything everyone else does will have an affect on you personally because our universe is not made up of separate and distint people, we're all part of one whole. When you think you yourself you don't think you are a walking object, you think of your consiousness.
The universe as I percive it is this; there is one or more objective reality that our physical bodies exist in. (I have no idea how many exactly there are) In this realm the laws of physics are enforced with perfect mathematical percision. It's like a big simulation constantly running, like The Matrix.
Of course, if all it is is logic then we'd have no free will. We'd be like computers, not even able to think. We'd only react. That's why I believe that the mind is an entirely different entity than the kind that exists in the objective reality. Your body is the bridge between YOU as in your consiousness and the physical universe. Everything we know about this physical world was learned only by input and output via the brain. So, what we think the universe is is not what it truly is, we'd need an ernomous amout of data for that, but the model in out mind of what the universe is. All the people you've ever met, you can only prove that they exist in your own mind, your model of the universe.
Now your model of the universe is your subjective reality. Nothing is good or bad in the phyiscal world, but your subjective reality is because you define it as good or bad. That's why everyone and everything is indispensible, because they exist in your life. If there is a war or disease and you feel bad about it, it's your fault. The hard data of disease is not bad, you choose to make it bad. To a computer which is objective disease is nothing but another string of binary digits.
Now that doesn't mean that we're the only consiousness, of course not. No we can't exactly prove that there is another consiousness connected to other people's bodies, because you can only detect your own consiouness. But for me believing that I was the only consiousness would be way to lonely, even though I'd think other people are myself. I believe is that there are other consiousnesses, but we only communicate by outputting information into the physical world, and the other person collects it as input.