Originally posted by Lifegazer
As I keep trying to tell you: the only reality you experience is an inner-reality. You've never experienced an out-of-your-awareness experience before. You've only had inner awareness of anything. So, your assumption is not justified, on those grounds.
Your position, philosophically, is untenable. And belief in an external-reality is purely religious. You have nothing rationally-solid to build it upon. Nothing.
Despite the fact the the only reality that is
experienced in oneself is the inner reality, this does not mean that that is all of reality. I have for instance no idea what it means to be you, but this does not mean that you therefore have no reality of your own.
I am not a sun, and therefore I do not know what it is to be a sun, and as far as I can make sense of it, neither the sun knows that, cause it misses an "I" that can have sense of itself. Nevertheless the sun is part of reality, according to my mind.
Idealists claim that reality is made up of this subjective reality only. We - in our ordinary case - know that that is not the case. How else does one explain that even an idealist tries not to be droven over by a bus, for instance? Yet this is something, one can experience, and therefore should also be taken account of, when mentioning our sources of knowledge about the world.
The fact is that materialism can be the only solid basis for reality.
Idealists are being caged in their own created fixation of mind, which must be caused by a partial understanding of how the mind really works, and how it understands things. For people who do not understand this, let us for one moment try to assume that the claim, there is no outer reality (only the mindfull perception of it) would be true. What would that mean to us? How would "I" feel about that?
Our mind must be thought of to be able to function, because we have brains. Different parts of our brain perform different functions. For example one part of the brain is connected to the eyes, and transform the incoming data from the eyes into data that are meaningfull for the brain itself. And there are other parts that do this for hearing, and the other perceptory organs, and other mental and cognitive functions that are performed within the brain.
However, from the way and as far as we understand our own mind, it must be the case that somewhere in our brain, the awareness, not only of "external" data and "internal" data (your emotions, for instance, and inner thoughts) takes place, but also a central awareness of "I" comes into existence. This is of course crucial. Without it, you would not be aware of the fact that you are aware of things. Your brain would project your eye-sight and hearing experience into recognizable form, but if there would not be an "I" being aware of that data, this would be all utterly meaningfull.
The question which arisis is where this feeling of "I" arises. Is it a part of the brain, that shapes this awareness of "I". Or is it a function that is not really located in a part of the brain, but for which the brain is able of locating it's center of awareness around different parts of the brain. From own experience it can be know that you are able of concentration. For example when listening to music, you are able of concentrating on the hearing awareness completely.
Or any other cognitive activity in which you are involved. Does your center of awareness shift with the cognitive functione being performed?
In your mind you can create your own perceptions. This happens when sleeping for instance, but then the waking awareness is on a minimum, and some spontanious awarenesses occur in parts of the sleep. But it can also happen at will. The mind has of course (partial) knowledge about the outside world. This knowledge of outside objects is stored in some form in the brain. They can be called up from memory at will, and the brain can do transformations with it. For instance, think about a table. In your imagination an image of the table arises. Now you can try to change the image, by imagining different shapes, size, colours, design and material. Our brain can perform that perfectly for us. In short, the brain can portray us every possible image we might want to have of the outside world, without any bother if that corresponds to reality or not. But there are limitations to this, which are in itself quite logical.
For instance you can not look directly into your own eye. You can only do that using a mirror. You can lift things with your arms, yet you can not lift your own arm or body (only baron von Munchausen can do that). And so on.
For the brain for instance it would not be able to imagine itself not being there, cause this would imply that it has awareness of not having awareness, which is self contradicationary, in more or less the same way as the other examples of physical impossibilities of other organs.
So when you are very desperately trying to portray in your brain a picture of itself not being there, your mind will still come up with an image of reality, in which whatever minimal it can be that you are aware of, you are still aware of one-self, necessarily. If you stop have self-awareness... well then you are dead, but that you will not notice, since then you are no longer there or anywhere.
What we discussed here is that the "inner" workings of our mind, is some different as the working of the real world. For the real world, at some day, it will come true that you will no longer be there, and there was a time, in which you were not born. Internally, you do not have any representation for that (one never has, or can have, an actual experience of "not being there"), and belongs to the "impossibilities". In the real world, you can not take things in or out of existence. Internally however, this is done on the spot. You can imagine of anything that lacks existence in the real world, and can imagine of something not having existence, that in the real world definitately does have existence.
What do we define the world to be? Only our "inner" world of perceptions, although we know there is an "outside" world too?
This sounds suspicious, why limit the world to only the experience that exist in the brain? TRhe realioty means all of reality, and all that has existence. The inner world is subjective, but not entirely subjective. Suppose for example we dream. An outside observer can however detect in our eyemovement that we must be dreaming, although this observer does not know what we are dreaming about.
All of the claims that idealist make, are entirely limited to the "inner" world. In that "inner" world, it is entirely justified to say that all images, or projections we have of material things, are "created" by the "I", that by the way, cannot think about itself not existing. If we name this "I" God, then we have a perfect description of what the Idealist philosophy is about. It is entirely refrained to the inner workings of the brain, the inner world. Despite the fact that it is because of the brain that we can know the world, we know that the world is larger then our own brain.
Idealism is a philosophy that refrains and limits itself entirely to this inner world. It defines the world to be that of what we percieve within our brain. We know on perfeclty rational and solid grounds that not only "thoughts", "emotions", which belong to the inner world exist, but that also stars, bodies, and busses exist.
Materialism is not limiting itself to this "inner" world, although science can only deal to some extend with that, but to all of reality.
If you take the Idealist philosophy out of scope and context, and take their claims for real (God created matter, for instance) then you are completely lost. Cause idealism is not even referring to an outside world. It is talking only within the realms of inner experience, which are up to a certain extend of course real (that is: material) phenomena that are happening within one's brain.
Nowhere you can state that some God/mind that exists outside matter, "created" the world. It just can be stated the the central awareness one has in ones own brain (that function within the brain that makes it possible that the awarenesses that are created in different places of the brain) we can come aware of, or in other words it is the "I" that creates this awareness.
The problems arise however that the idealist philosophy is not just referring to itself as being a theory or concept of our internal functioning within our brain, it makes the false claim that apart from the awareness that exists in one's brain, which are of course part of reality, there really isn't something else.
We know from reality that things do not come and go into and out of existence "just like that". From our thoughts we know however, that we can create and delete images of reality, without any problem.
From reality we know, there was a time, we were not there, and there will be a time, we are no longer there.
Form our thoughts however, we can never find any clue regarding a time in which we were not there. All we are ever able to find, is the awareness that "I am there", and not a clue of data that concerns the state in which "I am not there". Quitte logical, cause it would be really strange if the opposite was true.
If you follow this line of thought, it explains that "God" (the self-wareness of "I") is eternal (or even timeless, and not bound to space), and the awareness themselves were not, but were "created" one time. From reality, we know however that the world wasn't created, but exists in time and changes in time, and is endless.
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