Quote:
|
Originally Posted by pennywise121
i am in the mood for a good mind fuck.
there have been several threads dealing with the qualities of reality, and the "reality" of people and/or objects in our world. my problem with this is a presupposition of an objective reality to be guessed about. what if this is simply not the case (and yes csfilm, we could take the solipsistic route and suggest that if all this is a dream, you guys and gals "could not possibly tell [me] anything [I] do not already know."  )? |
yeay! I have earned a reputation for being cranky!
Quote:
at the moderate risk of turning this into a Cartesian philosophy debate, what if we are at the mercy of an evil demon (later made more PC as an evil genius) that can control our perceptions? (the Matrix in print only a few hundred years before the movies )
Can anyone disprove the idea that there is no objective reality? if so, please tell.......
|
When Neo remarked that "a cat just walked past the doorway", what did this statement mean? Did it mean anything at all? Would it have meant something different if it had been uttered by a 'blue pill' human?
Let's imagine for a minute that Neo is actually a 'blue pill' person, or that he is saying this before his encounter with Morpheus.
What then does the word 'cat' mean other than - 'that type of thing...the class of objects which are somewhat similar to whatever it is that passed by the doorway there'. It seems quite clear Neo's utterance is a true and meaningful sentance.
What about if blue pill Neo said something about 'the external world' - what could this possibly mean. Just like in the situation with the cat, 'the external world' is a meaningful phrase. What the word refers to is defined by how it is used. It is used to refer to things like tables and chairs and so forth as opposed to thoughts and feelings and ideas.
What are the 'qualities' of the external world? We can only talk of these by contrasting them to the qualities of something other than the external world - presumably the 'internal world'. This should be quite clear - if everything was coloured red, we wouldn't have a word for it.
But what are the
real qualities of the world, other than what empirical investigation reveals to us? What are the absolutes? What is really the really real reality?
To attempt to answer these questions would assume that they are actually meaningful. I suggest that they are not.
"That which can be said, can be said clearly, everything else we must pass over in silence"
-Wittgenstein