The nature of reality
Technical, Theology ·Saturday January 9, 2010 @ 23:36 EST (link)
My wife's in a philosophy class this quarter, and I've been reading various philosophers (mostly in regard to politics, but politics doesn't exist in a vacuum; Peikoff reasonably claims it is a subset of ethics) fairly continuously anyway. Today I was helping her with a philosophy reading and we diverged a bit into the nature of reality. Her text touched on mentalism and phenomenalism (the idea that everything exist solely in the mind, as, perhaps, a shared hallucinatory experience).
I argued that it doesn't matter if we're in a shared hallucination, an extremely good Holodeck, or a "real" physical world, if we can't tell the difference. One might as well presume whatever's easiest to work with (for convenience) and employ Occam's razor in seeking the simplest explanation: we are physical, and physical things exist. Solipsism is similarly unimportant: we might as well act as if other people exist, because either they do or they're sufficiently good imitations (and there may be unpleasant consequences to assuming people aren't real; of course you may not mind if convinced those are all in your head too).
Furthermore (avert your eyes if "God" confuses you), there is no difference and perhaps no distinction between the existence of a physical universe and us solely existing in God's mind (conception) and partaking in a shared experience. No difference, since we can't detect one; no distinction because the idea of matter itself must be God's creation; it cannot exist independently of him, and he is not bound by it; what does it even mean to say there "is" a physical world (it depends on what the meaning of "is" is)? This does not serve to reduce God in the slightest; in fact it illustrates that not only must he create things, but metaphysically the very concept of matter. Whether gravity, for example, "exists" anywhere or we share a perception of consistent gravitational forces acting on matter is indistinguishable and irrelevant. It's not as if God was standing around in empty space (there was no space to stand around in) and "just" created a few objects within it; he created the space too, and everything that allows us to think and reason about it.
