If God Ever Stopped Intervening In Nature....

That's not the end of it ringo. Placebos directly affect the mind, but the result can be physiological changes in the body.Even if the effect is simply to relieve stress, stress produces physical effects, and the pill can relieve those effects. Again, it would not advance your argument about reality if the doctor, instead of giving a placebo, simply convinced the patient he had nothing to worry about using discussion rather than a placebo.If you are instead talking about a purely mental effect and nothing more, then a nothing that causes nothing would not be proof of reality or non-reality. It would advance neither argument.

Nonsense ringo. When the physicist predicts the outcome of an experiment and has it verified that is a link. When they are proven wrong that is also a link. To deny such evidence is to surpass the evidence denying capacity of the yec.Even if it is all inside the mind (against all of the contrary evidence) then that is what it is and we can either be wrong or right about it. The concept of wrong requires the reciprocal concept of right. You can falsify it by showing me how it could be otherwise.

If reality is but a construct of my imagination why then is it not subject to the force of my will? Why can I not imagine it to be otherwise?If reality were the product of my imagination beer would be free, women would make sense and we would all be having a much better time.

Yes that has been established. I find it interesting that you think it has not. Apparently you believe that things like fear and anger are all in your head. Well they are not. Those things have a physiological component."Gradients of Physiological Arousal in Parachutists as a Function of an Approaching Jump."

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Continuous recordings of skin conductance, heart rate, and respiration rate were obtained from experienced and novice parachutists during a sequence of events leading up to and following a jump. While novice jumpers showed a sharp rise in physiological activity up to final altitude, experienced jumpers produced an inverted V-shaped curve--i.e., an initial rise was followed by a decline. It was concluded that with repeated exposure to threat, expanding gradients of activation and of inhibition develop, the latter with steeper slope. The early rise in activation provides an automatic signal of danger, while the inhibitory reaction prevents the arousal from becoming excessive, thus providing a highly adaptive mechanism for the mastery of threat.

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http://www.tandfonline.com/...300/J146v04n02_08#.U52bFJRdU8o"A Biological Model for Delayed Recall of Childhood Abuse"

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PTSD patients also show changes in structure and function in brain regions mediating memory, including the hippocampus and medial prefrontal cortex, as well as in brain chemical systems involved in the stress response that influence the laying down and retrieval of memories, including cortisol and norepinephrine.

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http://www.aipro.info/drive/File/228.pdfThe Physiological and Psychological Effects of Compassion and Anger.

Because you don't have conscious control over every product of your mind? Can you make your heart beat twice instead of once at the next opportunity? Can you make your stumped toe stop hurting? Can you stop your brain from processing the audible signals received by your ear?

Why are all your dreams not happy ones? Because your subconscious is a bitch?Again - If this disproved solipsistic possibilities do you not think Descarte and every subsequent philosophical giant might have provided your position with firmer shoulders to stand upon?Your absolutism with regard to truth depends on you having absolute knowledge of things which you cannot possibly know absolutely.

What I said was that if the doctor told you he gave you a placebo - e.g. in your IV - it would have the same effect as if you swallowed a pill. The effects in your body are caused completely by your mind. The placebo doesn't have to be "real" at all. I'm not trying to advance either argument. I'm trying to shoot down one of them. Can you guess which one?

The observations of the experiment are within the psyche. The consensus among peers in in the psyche of each peer. Your observation of their results is within your psyche. You could be hallucinating this entire discussion. In your philosophy it does but your philosophy is entirely in your mind.

You're missing the point: the only evidence of "physiology" that you have is in your mind.

I understand that to be the concept you are pushing.But your claim that no link between physiology and mind has ever been established does not seem to be related to that idea. It is instead an incorrect statement about what we believe to be true.

They are not all happy ones because they are influenced by external things. If reality is the result of my imagination and I do not control my imagination then reality is a separate thing from my conscious mind which is where I experience reality. If my subconscious manifests itself in my dreams then it is clearly not equal to reality.If I am resposible for reality then why would I imagine my corporeal self to be such a feeble and mortal creature?Here is another hurdle for solipsism. My mother existed before I did.It seems to me that if you would entertain solipsism as a viable possibility then there is nothing that you would not consider to be possible? The notion that anyone could hold the totality of existence within their mind is preposterous and could be described as believing oneself to be God. According to these guys Descartes dismissed solipsism this way.

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In the Sixth Meditation, Descartes recognizes that sensation is a passive faculty that receives sensory ideas from something else. But what is this something else? According to the Causal Adequacy Principle of the Third Meditation, this cause must have at least as much reality either formally or eminently as is contained objectively in the produced sensory idea. It, therefore, must be either Descartes himself, a body or extended thing that actually has what is contained objectively in the sensory idea, or God or some creature more noble than a body, who would possess that reality eminently. It cannot be Descartes, since he has no control over these ideas. It cannot be God or some other creature more noble than a body, for if this were so, then God would be a deceiver, because the very strong inclination to believe that bodies are the cause of sensory ideas would then be wrong; and if it is wrong, there is no faculty that could discover the error. Accordingly, God would be the source of the mistake and not human beings, which means that he would be a deceiver. So bodies must be the cause of the ideas of them, and therefore bodies exist externally to the mind.

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Personally, I think that Descartes had God on the brain and got plenty of things wrong. Can we be absolutely certain that reality is not a product of Descartes' brain? When I die will you be certain that reality was not dependant on the existence of my brain?

You seem to have a lot of trouble understanding what solipsism is.Talk of reality being created by the mind of your dog or by the mind of dead people misses the point entirely.

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As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known, and might not exist outside the mind.

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Talking of the minds of others is to assume/conclude that others have minds. But this cannot be known absolutely. This is the problem with your absolutism. Sure - But there is a reason he is dubbed as the father of modern philosophy and it has much to do with "I think therefore I am".Think about it......Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.

A hallucination being that condition where our perception does not match reality.

No, I understand the concept. It requires the duplicity of accepting one's own existence while denying the substance of that existence. You can not use the senses to proclaim that you exist and then deny the validity of the senses to be able to determine that something exists. Your defence of solipsism denies equal access to the facts.The most cursory of examinations reveals that the dead man possessed the same kind of mind that I do. My dog receives tactile sensations in the same manner that I do. This is proven and can be demonstrated. All of the available evidence indicates that solipsism is an impossibility.

Firstly - I'm not defending solipsism. I'm pointing out it is an issue for absolutism of the sort you are advocating. That's all. The whole point of solipsism is that "All of the available evidence" could be misleading and any conclusions based on it therefore entirely wrong.Your absolutist stance remains founded on something of which you cannot possibly be absolutely certain. The entire point of the evil demon and "Cogito ergo sum" is to consider what one can be absolutely certain of whilst doubting one's senses.That's the point.Edited by Straggler, : No reason given.