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From: minsky@media-lab.media.mit.edu (Marvin Minsky)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: THE I OF THE BEHOLDER (and Solipsism)
Message-ID: <1991Jun14.195449.28656@news.media.mit.edu>
Date: 14 Jun 91 19:54:49 GMT
References: <9106140011.AA14996@lilac.berkeley.edu> <1991Jun14.153701.842@cs.yale.edu>
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Now I understand better what McDermott meant.  

I think I also understand better what Smoliar meant.  I rather liked
his use of the term "solipsism" to make a nice point about objective
truth being largely (or entirely) unavailable, so that our "knowledge"
is always to some degree really, only "belief" and that belief itself
is not ever clearly about "things" but is an internal repationship
between the person's "self-fulfilling hallucination conspiracy", as
McDermott put it, and other parts of that person's representational
data structures.  "I believe X" means, in that interpretation,
something sort of like "the imaginary person-self S that is me has
stored an X expression in the (imaginary) part of S's memory that is
used for expressions that are not to be easily changed."