Yak wrote:An excellent observation. IMO. Except for one detail :
Consider George Orwell explaining Doublethink, long and deeply : “To know and to not know, to be conscious of complete truthfulness while telling carefully constructed lies, to hold simultaneously two opinions which cancelled out, knowing them to be contradictory and believing in both of them, to use logic against logic, to repudiate morality while laying claim to it, to believe that democracy is impossible and that the Party was the guardian of democracy. To forget whatever it was necessary to forget, then to draw it back into memory again at the moment when it was needed, and then promptly to forget it again, and above all, to apply the same process to the process itself.”
I knew an actor once who pursued his medium through this very ideal. Brilliant guy. I think this is also an excellent way to pursue participation in life, being "in the moment" so to speak. A person could spend their entire life trying to perfect it.
Yak wrote:If I were to announce that this entire board, and everybody on it, existed only as a personal hypothesis on my part, through a variety of pseudocertainty (as when I am confident enough that I will be alive tomorrow to plan for it), you would laugh.
I would not laugh, because there is no certainty that the things outside ourselves exist as anything other than a pure manifestation of our own minds. IMO.
Yak wrote:Do you guys really want to play with this kind of _____________ ?
Sure! I think this kind of thinking is great brain exercise. Although, I have no formal philosophy education, which will likely result in my getting in deep over my head quickly.
Also, an argument well made. However, if one were to assume, for the sake of argument, that you were not completely alone in a construct of your own mind and that other people actual exist, we have to acknowledge that this argument leaves them out.
Including others in our definition of reality and in the interest of continuing this specific line of discussion, people react a fairly predictable way to a large array of stimulus and, in this instance, communication styles. George makes a point about it being the listener's responsibility to assume that the speaker communicates without malice or definity (new word?). It is my opinion that both the speaker and the listener must be willing to adjust how they're communicating and how they're listening in an effort to achieve understanding. I've found that if one or both are unwilling to adjust, all communication is likely to crumble.
None of that matters in a vacuum, but assuming that reality is real, it can and frequently does make the difference between a positive interaction and a negative one. At least, in my experience.
(<--- apologetic suggestion)
