--- In [email protected], "curtisdeltablues" 
<[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
>
> snip  The concept was not created for that 
> > > purpose.
> > 
> > Curtis, I seriously doubt it was "created for a
> > purpose," i.e., by philosophers as a conceptual
> > tool.
> 
> That sounds possible but its origin is presocratic so I
> don't know if we can get to the bottom of it.

Even if some presocratic philosophers came up
with it one night in a deep discussion and
decided it was a useful conceptual tool, what
I'm suggesting is that it's the sort of thing
that might occur to anybody who tended toward
introspection, whether they'd ever had any
contact with philosophy or not.

<snip>
> It is a radical conceptual departure from our everyday
> experience.

I'd say it's a radical conceptual departure from
how we've been trained to think about our
everyday experience. There isn't anything in our
experience *per se* that actually privileges one
interpretation over the other.

<snip>
> It doesn't have to
> > change anything about how you interact with the
> > world; it just changes your understanding of the
> > meaning of "interact with the world."
> 
> This is a cool point.  I agree and acknowledge my limits
> in speculating at this level of abstraction.  It is also
> why I have little interest in theoretical physics, I know
> my limitations.

Oh, pooh. Your limitations are where you draw them.

I have no idea how the notion might be useful. It
just seems to me it's a mistake to invest everything
in the Standard View when there's no way of proving
it, or of disproving solipsism. If you leave the
door open a crack, maybe take a peek through from
time to time, you might one day see something
interesting. So I was just throwing it out there for
the heck of it.


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