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Old 06-10-2010, 01:42 AM   #218
TimMason
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Join Date: May 2010
Location: Pontoise, France
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Perhaps you should think of your mind in the same way you think of your purse or handbag. It belongs to you, you exercise a large degree of choice over what is in there (but the choice is constrained by factors external to you, such as the need to have a particular set of keys and so on). However, you didn't actually make the purse, nor did you manufacture most of the items that it contains.

In the same way, your mind is a collaborative product. When you were a child, your parents, your school-teachers, your friends, shaped your mind and helped you put things in there - mainly things that they thought you needed. Your mind is as much 'out there' as it is 'in there'.

Take the language that you probably use to do most of your thinking. There is no such thing as a completely private language - it is a symbolic system that depends on shared codes, shared images, in sum shared ways of speaking. You are only able to conceive of solipsism or of illusionism because you are plugged into this code. Indeed, the very concepts themselves are 'out there'; you might say that solipsism is a self-detonating artifice.
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