LogFAQs > #973818737

The_Apologist posted...

But dreams aren't actually inconsistent. They just follow a different set of rules: psychological rules or whatever. Those rules are ultimately consistent, as far as we can tell scientifically, and thus they can be incorporated into the overarching system of 'mental rules' of the solipsist.

Yeah, that's not true at all. You have to deny that a mind exists at all to claim that dreams are completely consistent and follow their own rules with no such thing as will and impossible to influence them as you'd need to do to claim what you just stated, and even if they were true, you don't even need to be dreaming to have inconsistent observations. We are not the greatest observers of objective reality. Occasionally the things we see are not the things that actually happened. The human mind is imperfect. These imperfections aren't a big deal when there is an objective universe for us to pay attention to, because what we think we saw is irrelevant when that never occurred, as we'll quickly discover that the universe has remained consistent despite our momentary inconsistent observations.

If there is no objective universe, that goes completely out the window. No such objective template can exist without being objective reality itself. Those inconsistent observations would have no way to return to consistency, and eventually the past would be inconsistent with the present the solipsistic mind observes, in a way that does not currently happen and so the theory can't explain our observations. (Although the solipsists could argue that that template exists "in their minds", that template in the mind itself would be objective reality, and it's stretching the definition of mind quite a bit to even grant them that much.)