<HTML> <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px"> Chris Doss wrote: > >> CB: Spacetime manifold, quarks, and genes aren't common sense. ( Well, >> actually, the notion of human inheritance through "blood" is common >> sense) >> >> But Lenin-Sokol-Bricmont vs Bishop Berkeley,  materialism vs >> idealism-solopsism, i.e. that there is an objective world, external >> reality ,to our minds that >> our minds don't just create, is common sense. > > Those of course are not the only possibilities. > I tend to prefer Kantian transcendental idealism, or variants thereof. Isn't this idealism the logical implication of the kind of "materialism" CB is defending i.e. doesn't the conception of reality involved require experience (including experience of time and space) to be interpreted as consisting wholly of experience of secondary qualities and not at all of direct experience of "reality"? </BLOCKQUOTE> ^^^^^^^ CB: This seems a rhetorical question. What is your answer ? Elaborate. Does the proposition that objective reality exists require experience to be interpreted as consisting of experience of secondary qualities and not direct experience of "reality" ?  mediate instead of immediate experience ? Yes, mediated through the senses. Does mediation through sense imply , surprise, solopsism ? Elaborate.  What are the mediations from here to your conclusion ? <BLOCKQUOTE TYPE=CITE style="BORDER-LEFT: #0000ff 2px solid; MARGIN-LEFT: 5px; MARGIN-RIGHT: 0px; PADDING-LEFT: 5px">If this is true, the implication for epistemology is solipsism - "solipsism of the present moment" actually. Asserting the reality of the materialism would therefore be self-contradictory. In fact, any assertion about reality other than the solipsism, e.g. any assertion about the reality of Russia, would be self-contradictory. Ted </BLOCKQUOTE> Yes there may be a self-contradiction, as the basis of a dialectic of the personality, the individual in relation to objective reality, I don't know. Whadaya think ? </HTML>