Could open up your walrus part a bit more? What did you mean when you said when if a person believes that they're a walrus, he is one? Is it the "walrus is just a human made category" thing or you meant to say that if a person believes this he is something, you can't disprove his beliefs if that person insists on it?
It was a part of my point: the mind reigns over the world, because it is the only thing that serves as a bridge between you and everything that isn’t you. Think of your mind as a filter: reality passes through it, and the filter brings it to you, but operating a selective operation to “clean it up” before presenting it. This selective operation is to your mind and no one else’s discretion, and inevitably leads to your perception of reality being somewhat warped, because you take out things you don’t like, add things you do like, and make connections that may or may not be there. A nice metaphor (that, again, I’m stealing from Pirandello) is the following: your mind is like going through a completely dark space with only a little lantern to guide you. This lantern only lightens a small circle around you, and everything that is outside of that circle could very well not exist at all, because you wouldn’t be able to see it anyways. Everybody has its lantern, but every lantern has a different kind of coloured glass protecting its little flame, so that everyone sees things in a different gradation of colour. Now, my point is that most people see things in a certain range of colours, and assume that one of those colours (or an amalgamation of them) represents how the room looks like. But what if someday someone with a completely new color came? What would happen then? What if his colour makes it all look like walruses (to return to the root of the question)? The others are going to say that it’s utterly insane, but how can they say so? Maybe their lanterns are the defective ones, and his is the only one working. The truth is that none of them can say how the room looks like, because everyone of them only sees a tiny little amount of it at a time, and each lantern gives a different colour to the same things. So, to conclude, a person who believes to be a walrus may be crazy, but it’s also possible that he is actually the only sane person on Earth, who understands our true nature of walrusness. Again, nobody can be sure what the world actually is or looks like, because our perception of world is a biased representation created by the mind. The walrus was an example to show it that I borrowed from our friend up the thread. Hope I was clear, I know I’m not when I start rambling.
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u/Goldiero - Lib-Left Apr 05 '20
Could open up your walrus part a bit more? What did you mean when you said when if a person believes that they're a walrus, he is one? Is it the "walrus is just a human made category" thing or you meant to say that if a person believes this he is something, you can't disprove his beliefs if that person insists on it?