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Originally posted by Ustwo
A corollary of that is also that you are the most important thing in the world and all was created solely for your benefit.
A dangerous corollary don't you think?
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If it were obvious that I created the world to my benefit, then you would be right, that would be dangerous. However, I look about me and find that many of the demons of my mind that I would rather have exorcised are out there in my world playing about most infelicitously. You have read my take on things on Tilted Politics and know I am not best pleased with the tenor of domestic and global events.
So what I am getting at is that I create the world of the possible. I know what happened yesterday, and - and here is where the lack of imagination you postulate enters - I lack the imagination and force of will to stringently impose upon the continuity of creation from one day to the next too radical a change in direction. Just you wait til November, though.
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Originally posted by filtherton
There is a difference between creating a perception and creating a universe. I can "perceive" that everybody i interact with on the tfp is actually a really advanced a.i. program. That doesn't mean that you all are in reality computer programs. I can also "destroy the world" when i go to sleep, but i'm pretty sure that the world still exists for my more nocturnal friends. I think that that perspective on reality leads only to crazy mumbling and unshaven wandering through downtown america.
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Sure the world exists for your nocturnal friends; they create it every afternoon. Willbjammin has it right: The act of perception is indistinguishable from the act of creation. I merely deny that there is such a thing as an objective reality. All is subjective. Even physics enshrines this in the Heisenberg uncertainty principle,which, to put it as broadly as possible while maintaining the gist states that the simple act of observation has an effect on the observed. (Of course, it also has an effect on the observer, but he either hadn't fully appreciated wht he had come up with, or he felt it was too obvious or, more likely, too mathematically challenging even for one of the great mathematical geniuses of all time, to state that.)
Now, it may seem I am leaving myself open to a charge of soplipsism. I am not. I said at the beginning that each of you also creates the world. And here's where a Catholic up bringing is handy. If Three can be one, well then why not 3 billion (or whatever the global population is these days.) Coextant yet distinct worlds, and each of us lives primarily in the one we create, but is influenced by all of them.
The more one talks about it the more trivial it becomes. There is an empowering shift of perception to be had here if one is prepared to grasp it.