Reply #37: Where did I say there was nothing objective?

[GliderGuider]

I say it's hard, and perhaps impossible to prove conclusively that there is a single objective reality, not that there isn't one. I also think that there is something that looks an awful lot like one, and that believing that there is one and only one observer-independent reality is useful. I'm not sure why you think beliefs like that might be "dangerous".

On the question of solipsism, I'm a nondualist rather than a solipsist, but a lot of people confuse the two positions.

Nondualism versus solipsism

Nondualism superficially resembles solipsism, but from a nondual perspective solipsism mistakenly fails to consider subjectivity itself. Upon careful examination of the referent of "I," i.e. one's status as a separate observer of the perceptual field, one finds that one must be in as much doubt about it, too, as solipsists are about the existence of other minds and the rest of "the external world." (One way to see this is to consider that, due to the conundrum posed by one's own subjectivity becoming a perceptual object to itself, there is no way to validate one's "self-existence" except through the eyes of others—the independent existence of which is already solipsistically suspect!) Nondualism ultimately suggests that the referent of "I" is in fact an artificial construct (merely the border separating "inner" from "outer," in a sense), the transcendence of which constitutes enlightenment.