3am musings (Humans)

by Balance_Maintained , U.S.A., Friday, September 09, 2011, 23:07 (4822 days ago) @ dhw

I don't think it was the jet lag talking at all. Your thoughts remind me of George (Bishop) Berkeley (1685-1753), who argued that there was no such thing as matter, and all we have are our ideas, which are real to us. Of course, he went further, because he believed that the source of those ideas was God. Even if you believe, as I do, that matter is a reality outside of ourselves, there is still no way we can separate it from our perception of it, and even if there's a consensus that X is an apple and Y is an orange, our awareness of the consensus is also a form of subjective perception. 
> -Matter and motion might well be a reality outside of ourselves on some level, I don't necessarily disagree with you on that. -> Your grandfather-in-law was obviously talking about religious belief, and I myself can see no necessity for that, but in the wider context I agree that belief in our own reality, that of others, and that of the material world around us is the foundation of nearly all our experiences and actions. Common sense and the approaching double-decker bus should tell us very clearly that we ignore this "reality" at our peril. Similarly with values: what matters to us matters. The subjectivity doesn't make it any the less real for us, and if you deny subjective values their reality, you may as well jump off the bridge, coffee in one hand and cigarette in the other! I don't know why you should find this thought troubling. I find it exciting. While I admit that it can be frustrating and at times quite terrifying that my own aesthetic, social, cultural and ethical values are not shared by others, I wouldn't want a world in which everyone had the same values as me. Nor would I want a world in which everything was clear-cut and indisputable. For those who believe in God, this vast variety of phenomena, the restrictions of the senses, the thwarted aspirations of the mind, may all be a tribute to his far-sighted, creative genius. For those who don't, all of it is simply a source of endless fascination. Either way, I'd be interested to know exactly why it troubles you.-
I don't find it necessary to believe in God. I do, but that is me. What is troubling to me about this line of thought is what it infers into the question of values. Specifically, why bother valuing something that has no worth outside my own head? What value do I hold outside of my head, or that of others? There are other more wild ideas that go floating around my head when I get wrapped up in a train of thought like this, but the core of what bothers me about this line of thinking is that I inevitably come back to the question of, why bother? Why bother doing all the things that we do for things that do not in fact exist at all as anything other than nebulous transient ideas?