An Apple

[_gramps]

Maybe the OP should have asked 'how do we know if we have a broom in our hand?'

[_Morley]

If this is what it takes for the discussion to stop being about me and resume being about discussion, then I am a custodian at a local middle school in Nebraska.

No thesis, no education, no knowledge of any kind. A dull, uninspired, dimwitted TBM. Okay?

One my best friends in life was an elementary school custodian. He was anything but dull or uninspired. I dislike the stereotype.

Now, back to the apple in your hand?

[_honorentheos]

I just wish Simon would get to the punch line already!

I wonder if it would be more productive to help Simon get there if we stick with the apple scenario or move to one where a person is more likely to actually question the existence of something? I mean, other than stoned college freshmen who have just started a philo 101 class, how many people really go through a process to prove something as benign as an apple really exists while they are holding it?

[_honorentheos]

Simon,

In the interest of clarifying my answer I think it's important to consider your question honestly, and with as much introspection as possible.

I can not honestly recall a moment in my life when I did not associate the concept of "apple" with the thing that I have to assume you and I agree matches that description. There is no "pre-apple" memory that I can truly reconstruct from my life, any more than I can reconstruct a valid memory that pre-dates my own existence.

I can reconstruct memories of my perception of how other, younger people such as my daughter went through a process of learning the concept of apple. Then I can reapply this reconstructed memory from my life of what I imagine was her subjective experience of learning to associate apple with something else to what I assume was a true, but inaccessible, moment in my own past.

However, my answer is as I stated it - I do not hold an apple in my hand and question it's existence. I do not go through any process to analyze it's existence as reality and, if I attempt to do so, I can only do it by inventing much of this from combined manufactured memories and assumptions based on the observations of other people's lives.

More simply put: I take it as fact - if I am holding an apple it is reality. The reasons why are no longer honestly accessible to me. Any attempt to do so invokes invention in it's purest sense.

[_Simon Belmont]

The apple, if I understand the majority of answers, is evidenced to exist by interpretation of our minds through which all things filter.

Everything we ever know, do now know, or will know filters through the brain.

Messages from our five senses filter through our brain.

Emotions filter through our brain.

There is one point of success or failure in this "network."

Some have said that emotions aren't reliable -- but they are filtered through the mind, just like touch, smell, sight, hearing, and tasting. What makes emotion unreliable while input from our five senses reliable? They're filtered through the same mind -- the same brain.

[_Buffalo]

The apple, if I understand the majority of answers, is evidenced to exist by interpretation of our minds through which all things filter.

Everything we ever know, do now know, or will know filters through the brain.

Messages from our five senses filter through our brain.

Emotions filter through our brain.

There is one point of success or failure in this "network."

Some have said that emotions aren't reliable -- but they are filtered through the mind, just like touch, smell, sight, hearing, and tasting. What makes emotion unreliable while input from our five senses reliable? They're filtered through the same mind -- the same brain.

Emotion isn't an external sense organ. Emotions tell you all about what's going inside you. The five senses are what tells you what's going on outside you.

[_gramps]

That's it? That is what this all about?

Did you run this by your professors in your Masters program? What did they say?

By the way Simon, after your stellar track record of constant lies, why in hell do you think you can follow someone around this board as some kind of moral authority?

Please just stop it already. Please. Give it up.

[_Simon Belmont]

That's it? That is what this all about?

Did you run this by your professors in your Masters program? What did they say?

I have no professors. I've never been to college. I've never even been to most of high school. Remember?

By the way Simon, after your stellar track record of constant lies, why in hell do you think you can follow someone around this board as some kind of moral authority?

Please just stop it already. Please. Give it up.

Who am I following around?

[_Simon Belmont]

Emotion isn't an external sense organ. Emotions tell you all about what's going inside you. The five senses are what tells you what's going on outside you.

I am not sure I agree with this, but let's say that I do:

Why is what's going on inside less important or less reliable than what's going on outside?

They're both interpreted by that one single organ (point of failure), the brain.

[_gramps]

Still at it, Simon?

Are you just stupid, or do you have some better answer?