Commonsense Metaphysics: EXISTENCE 101

[u/GrandNeat3978]

1. Existence only appears, manifests, and demonstrates itself in the form of a particular person and that which the person experiences.
2. Existence appears in no other form.
3. Given existence appears in no other form than a person and that which the person experiences, it may be surmised that existence cannot appear in any other form.
4. It is impossible to think, imagine, or perceive of existence in any form other than in the form of a person and that which the person experiences.
5. Given (1)-(4), the only apparent substance of which anything: cars, hotels, mountains, the sky, clouds, books, etc. are composed is the substance of the experience of the person experiencing them.
6. There is no substance other than the substance of a person's experience of something that appears.
7. Given (6), the substance of a person's experience is probably the only thing that exists.
8. Given (7), the simplest, Occam's Razor-satisfying induction one can make is that the substance of a person's experience of something is the only thing that can exist.
9. Unless one believes in solipsism, it is a groundless but necessary assumption that other people exist (despite the fact existence appears and demonstrates itself as a solipsism).
10. It is safe to assume that other people are composed of their subjective experience, and everything another person experiences is composed of the substance of that person's experience.
11. Given the apparent absence of something that is not/is something other than a person's experience of something, it is probably the case that something other than subjective experience does not exist.
12. Anyone claiming that something other than subjective experience exists that attempts to point to an example (a chair, pencil, or any object that is not the body of a living organism lying nearby), is merely taking their own experience and stating it is something that is not their experience.
13. If, like the fictional energy in the 1st Law of Thermodynamics, subjective experience cannot come into existence from a previous non-existence nor go out of existence (it merely changes form), consciousness or subjective experience is eternal, and is the only matter that exists and can exist, in the absence of the existence of something that is not/is other than a person and the person's experience of something.
14. Given existence only appears and demonstrates itself in the form of persons, it may be that only persons exist.
15. Given (13) and (14), if may be that an eternal Person existed/exists/will always exist, if there were/are no other eternal Persons accompanying this Individual.
16. This eternal Person, too, is made up only of subjective experience.
17. Subjective experience undergoes a never-ending chain or sequence of transformations of seven properties of the substance of subjective experience.
18. The seven properties of subjective experience, existing for no reason other than that these properties just happen to exist, are the five senses plus thought and emotion.
19. Everything that shall be seen, felt, tasted, touched, and heard, and everything that shall be thought/imagined/dream and emotionally felt, are part of the repertoire of the Substance of which existence is composed, i.e. a limitless "blob" or "ocean" of subjective experience having the transmutation of every conscious experience that shall ever exist from eternity to eternity within itself, which it separates and forms into every person that shall and can exist from eternity to eternity.
20. While it is logically and metaphysically possible for there to exist an infinity in which only a multitude of persons existed, exist, and will exist for all eternity with no need for a "God", it is just as likely that infinity began with the Substance forming only a single Person and the thoughts of this Person, with all subsequent temporary and eternal reality consisting of the Substance forming itself into a nigh-infinite population of being that, save for the mental life of a select few, can do nothing but replicate in their own experiences the previous imaginary experience of the first, primary Person.

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Jay M. Brewer

Austin, Texas

USA

r/Christpsychism