SolitaryWalker
Tenured roisterer
- Joined
- Apr 23, 2007
- Messages
- 3,504
- MBTI Type
- INTP
- Enneagram
- 5w6
- Instinctual Variant
- so/sx
The revelationists Mycroft lampooned are making a category mistake. Two types of things exist in the world, the mental and the physical. If we want to make an argument about something that exists in the physical world, we have to start with premises based on evidence collected in the physical world. Similarly, if we want to discover facts about the mental world, we'd need to start with observations of mental experiences. The fact that I had a dream about a dragon may mean something about my mental world, namely the fact that I have imagined a dragon. However, the dragon has been observed in my mental and not the physical world, hence, it can't be used to prove any conclusion about the physical world. The only way this would not be so is if we knew that there is no distinction between the mental and the physical, or that the mental parallels the physical in all cases. However, that is not so. Many entities conceived first in our minds do not mirror the physical world. For example, I can imagine dragons and unicorns, but this does not show that such creatures exist in the physical world. Thus, it is a mistake to assume that because I imagined that Steve the unicorn is the creator of the universe that he truly is the creator of the empirical, physical world that we inhabit.