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From: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk (Gordon Joly)
Newsgroups: comp.ai.philosophy
Subject: Re: THE I OF THE BEHOLDER (and Solipsism)
Message-ID: <1630@ucl-cs.uucp>
Date: 17 Jun 91 09:39:59 GMT
Sender: news@cs.ucl.ac.uk
Lines: 25

Marvin Minsky writes:
 > 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."

A mere imagined hurricane in teacup.
Gordon.

____

Gordon Joly                                       +44 71 387 7050 ext 3716
Internet: G.Joly@cs.ucl.ac.uk          UUCP: ...!{uunet,ukc}!ucl-cs!G.Joly
Computer Science, University College London, Gower Street, LONDON WC1E 6BT

                    Order is paramount in anarchy.