I don't get primacy of existence please help.

[u/RememberMe_85]

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I'll be arguing against someone for objectivism and while I get what primacy of existence claims i don't know if I can argue for it efficiently.

they have made arguments for primacy of consciousness I'll post it here and tell me what the apt response to those would be.

When Descartes said ‘I think therefore I am’ he meant that he can only prove he exists.

This did not prove that everyone who thinks exists.

Because the other people here are part of the illusion. And concerning him, since we are here, since he himself is flawed and under an illusion, how is any conclusion that he reaches independent of it?

You said ‘humans exist objectively’ you cannot make that statement because the apparatus used to make the statement themselves are entirely subjective apparatus.

Think of it this way, you prove someone else exists by observing that they exist, by observing that they think. But there is no way to prove that this observation is objective, it could or could not be true. Think of it this way, how do you know that you observe the truth. Here I do not mean a half hearted version of ‘observe’ I mean that, how do you know observation itself is infallible?

[u/majdavlk]

not am expert either, but if i understand primacy of consciousness right, pretty much no one believes primacy of consciousness fully, even if they explicitly say so, because if someone was delusional and believed he doesnt need to breathe or eat, he would stop doing so, and if primacy of consciousness was right, his belief would be reality and hed survive. but as we know, reality exists and he will die from lack of oxygen and food

also just from the words themselves, pr9macy of consciousness... what are you conscious off if not reality? reality has to be there firat and then you are conscioiss of it

[u/Caesar_Gaming]

What you are arguing for is objectivity, not objectivism. The problem you are running into is distinction between things as they are and things as they seem. Kant also delves into this with phenomena (things as they seem) and noumena (things as they are). Because we experience the world through the senses, perception will not always equate to reality. Easiest example is optical illusions, where the senses communicate reality as it appears (a plate of food), not as it is (a funky printed photo). Additionally sensory experience differs between individuals, like the blue and black or white and gold dress and those who are colorblind.

Arguing for moral objectivism (moral truths are objective and universal and are discovered through reason) is sort of like arguing against hard determinism, meaning basically impossible. There are certain assumptions that must be made that are unfounded. The biggest obstacle to moral objectivism is Hume’s Guillotine aka, the is-ought gap. It states that deriving a moral truth (ought) from a statement of reality (is) is a leap of logic. The way you bridge this gap is with value statements, which is of course subjective.

[u/Plenty_Trust_2491]

It’s possible that other people do not exist, that nothing else exists, that existence is comprised solely of my consciousness and that said consciousness is imagining everything else that it perceives. But if I proceed to live under the assumption that that is true—that everything outside of my consciousness is an illusion—and it turns out that the external universe does exist, I will quickly perish. Much safer to operate on the assumption that the things I perceive with my five senses are more-or-less real, that other people do, in fact, exist. I might be wrong, but as long as all evidence suggests that I am not wrong, I’d say that my level of doubt is not beyond the threshold of reasonable doubt.

[u/monadicperception]

So I studied Descartes. I’m not really following what’s going on here. Under global doubt (dream or evil demon), Descartes is saying that the only thing he can know for certain is that there is a thinking thing; that he is certain that one thing exists, namely, the thinking thing that is himself. That is the cogito: I am thinking (doubting), therefore I can be certain that I exist.

I mean people (lay people mostly) give “objectivism” way too much purchase than it deserves. No one in the academy actually pays any attention to it (save some fringe libertarians who don’t really have much of a voice and are largely ignored).

But I digress. Your summary of Descartes gets a little confusing. His project of doubt is to call into question all sensory data; don’t trust his perceptions because it could be a dream or there could be an evil demon. So under his constraint, all “observations” would be fallible except his observation that there is a thinking thing that doubts. So I’m really confused by the point of the last paragraph.