I believe in solipsism. Is that crazy?

Phew! Finally. Be at least mine enemy!—thus indeed speaketh the true reverence. Tell me, ye men, who of you are capable of friendship? (I have enough self-confidence not to mind being called a cow. Feminists need more spine.) Did you figure out this is what I was doing? I can't tell.

A little too jumpy, though. It's certainly true that almost all MAL users could indeed use some humbling, some actual academic gymnastics, so they can see that such knowledge is too wonderful and high, something they cannot attain to. But what of the mode of such humbling? Answer not the fool according to his instrumentalized-reason social-media folly. Anyway, you don't need to impress me, as I'm already impressed—as you maybe should have realized, though again, the MAL average makes this difficult. I'll reciprocate the level so as not to be disrespectful, but I don't believe in being too quick to that particular variety of vaunted reference out in the open. It demeans knowledge. You should be more gnomic.

Transcendental arguments require transcendence, see; this practical, instrumental reason stuff only works if you're as naive and rigid as Kant. Yes, any truth has to work given the obviousness of what we see around us, but who knows which entities are needlesly multiplied? Kant knew we couldn't see to the foundation, so he tried to do what we physicists call an effective field theory, work out the mid-level objects necessary to allow for the observable dynamics but forfend speaking of what was at the bottom, integrating out the high-momentum degrees of freedom. Coherence theories of truth fail because they assume we can see enough of the foundation to know that one thing does indeed fit with another. Eugene Thacker's In the Dust of This Planet was mostly unrigorous mumbo-jumbo for the purpose of self-aggrandizement, but his notion of the world-without-us was worth the read (as was the fun horror literary criticism). In the cosmological/field-theoretic concept of AdS/CFT, all the information in our universe is able to be defined and encapsulated in what happens at its edge, or surface, which possesses one fewer spatial dimension. And the way this information is encoded on the edge is impossibly convoluted, exactly and conceptually like a space-filling curve. So yes, we humans must perceive the world in some prescribed fashion contained within a set of possible ontologies, but it's the measure of this space of ontologies that you're ignoring. I do believe in a universal (and in case it wasn't obvious, non-solipsistic) foundation, but what if it is a Barthian wholly-other, a sleeping Azathoth that will destroy our naive formulations when it awakes? Back when I was taking Lagrangian mechanics my sophomore year of undergrad, a faux-intelligent colleague who hero-worshiped Feynman, was similarly lauded by my peers, and wasn't as good at physics as I was, told me, when I objected to some stupid pablum our TA said, that, "If the universe weren't elegant, we'd all kill ourselves." I'll put more cards on the table than rhetoric would dictate and say that, as a Christian, I wonder what evil, stupid human notions of elegance amount to. (And by Christian I don't mean nice, fluffy, Western-civilizational superiority nonsense.) I expect the truth of the universe is an astonishing condemnation of all our sensibilities, just as I believe in total depravity. Thacker's world-without-us, something that exists absent human bias and construction, is salutary in its vision—its humility, which you claim to appeal to.

But you don't know me, so—you can be forgiven for calling me a nominalist. Though, admittedly, not knowing you, who knows how superficial you are. I dislike the American-Lutheran "best-construction" fetish, primarily because most people who appeal to best constructions lack the ontology to construct anything in the first place, but certainly I'll say I'm impressed at least that you're unafraid to disparage cosmology. As someone who has sat through enough astrophysics seminars to have dark matter coming out her ears, I applaud you for realizing cosmology's tentativeness (or at least claiming it, whether or not you know enough to do so). Most physicists are idiot Feynman acolytes who hate philosophy, and I can't stand them for it. (I also begrudge Feynman his brilliance, as he used it to disparage philosophy, and had zero idea what he was talking about.) But I am not one of these; the size of the voids we've observed in the universe is indeed evidence against the cosmological principle. I referred to cosmology rather than physics in general in my previous post precisely because its foundations are shaky. If anything smarted in what you said, it was the suggestion I was allied with the science-supremacists. All hail Thomas Kuhn. Errol Morris should have borne the ashtray, if his story was indeed true.

It should not surprise us that the false consciousness of our age encourages solipsism, especially among the uneducated. You have only to look at the two nominees of the dominant American political parties to understand this. And by the way: Maybe you find material security more important than the truth, but I'll give up my wallet for the truth any day. God is the prime mover of humor. And in case my point got lost, appeals to coherence require more ontological confidence than I think we've earned, entrenched in our historical milieu as we are. Anyway, you bother me because you have knowledge but not the wisdom to discern time and place. You make references like you know, but you don't write like you do. You write like you're doing a Ben Shapiro, not a Terry Eagleton.

So what's you're most-beautiful philosophical argument, that you weren't willing to state over on the other thread?

@auroraloose Every sentence of yours I read I find a new assumption that I disagree with, mainly informed by your metaphysical illiteracy and inability to parse the implications of my prior statements (all the while calling me transparent, no less). It seems that I'm being more opaque than first appreciated so I'll try again. That said, I am not interested in obscurantism - I have had no need to speak of anything explicitly esoteric with you or anyone else here so far, and so I feel no need to shield my words in obtuse and covetous manners. I value writing in a simple and direct fashion whenever possible, because at my core I am simple also, but chiefly due to the fact that I find no joy in the rabbit-hole of syllogistic logic and reductive formulas; these are but tools. I do enjoy polemics however, although it's hard to find the motivation when my present assignment is not to untie knots but merely poke holes. The true reverence to the divine which you speak of is something I employ constantly, and the fact that you think otherwise by me merely naming conduits of ideas (as opposed to their essential content) is very telling of your sophistic nature.

I thought it was clear as day that I am indeed discussing matters of transcendence, and certainly am not interested in projecting the limitations of my own cognition and presupposing foundationalism in a Kantian fashion. I am the last person you need to tell that the study of sensible phenomena is not where the line begins or ends. I am unsure by what you mean with the term "needless". Needless by what criteria? Those of the metaphysical vacuum you're leaving unaccounted for? What are your priors that you're assuming everyone is on board with? I am yet to come across a part of reality that doesn't fulfil the principle of sufficient reason in one way or another, and I'm mostly convinced you haven't either unless your studies in purposefully limiting the scope of your inquiry have made you privy to some fundamental secret. Let us relish in our shared transcendental assumption that this (or frankly any) conversation is of any significance; you do have Schopenhauer in your signature, after all. I can only hope that with all those "good books" you've been reading have yet internalised the fact within you that epistemology is a self-referential outcome, not a first principle.

The measure of the possible space of ontologies is exactly what I'm describing, and I'm letting everyone here know that this can be further mapped and approximated by contemplating first principles (which indeed depend on coherence, by which I don't exclusively mean syllogistic correspondences) - not by failing to comprehend the fact that something's parts and its essential "wholeness" have an intimate and mystical relationship which binds even the highest god (that we can contemplate of and have any real contact with whilst in this state). It has yet to be proven to me that by breaking things apart we fundamentally understand what they actually are. But what I can hope to prove is that each component of our reality needs to contain all universal laws "within" it in an ontological fractal recursion - this is fundamental to every object, if you do not accept that then you need to redefine for me what the formalised "laws" of reality fundamentally are (if not the teleological symbol of the divine) and "where" they exist (if not in the shadow of the divine itself). Any difference we can perceive is dependant upon some system of syntax, a law of relation within the medium, so therefore your counterpoint (as it was expressed above) is nonsensical and I think you are in no position to call others ontologically inept. The idea that manifested reality has unaccountable blips in it seems to be more influenced by your depressing, and effectively gnostic, theology than any appeals to rationality, which itself is a gift from god that allows us to get closer to him - even if it does have a limit and we must eventually go beyond dialectic. Argue against parsimony all you wish however, just be sure to preface much more strongly in the future that it is ultimately more a dogmatic and emotional claim than anything else. The aforementioned notion of an underlying unity stretches beyond being itself, so obviously appeals to cosmology or physics are worthless in these considerations; there is nothing praiseworthy in recognising that unless you're itching to make a category error again. A world without us is nihilistic masturbation to me, nothing more; a perversely impious thought. Just convert to Judaism already or something like most self-respecting protestants already have in all but name, or take the full leap and become atheist if you are this detached from god and his limbs. There is an order to divine effusion, thinking otherwise leaves the door open for some part of his creation as being arbitrary. To be clear: I am also affirming the ineffable, but I also believe we can attune ourselves with its presence as many people more intelligent and spiritually adept than either of us have done and will continue to do so. The fact that this is a possibility makes me doubt your diatribe and want to categorise it as nominalist, even if I understand you clearly are not. If god has the potential to terrify you, it is because you are distant from him, not because he is distant from us.

If you share my (tentative) fondness for Khun, and I'm not misreading sarcasm (simple, remember?), then I fail to see a good reason for your dislike of reality. The reality of course being that you don't have much of a choice but to choose from a range of potential hypotheses on the base of adequate criteria, which are informed by the hypothesis itself. The best criteria I have found myself are coherence, empirical consistency, and parsimony, in that order. Failure to do so puts you at a serious metaphysical and scientific disadvantage in terms of your ability to describe reality, as you'll have no clue as to where to look next; your intuition, a Ouija board, whatever, you need it to make any guesses at all. Affirming one system over any other is simultaneously and affirmation and a rejection, and what basis would you choose on if not coherency first and foremost? Again, coherency is more than just logic or vague transcendental notions, I am describing pure metaphysics here and not simply that which aligns with our purely noetic notions. Even considering which questions in of themselves are worth asking is simply an ethical question of how to best allocate our resources, in of itself dependant on first principles - and as such, a more complete system is necessarily better than a less complete system. You can keep building your autistic model train set, but what lies underneath it?

All of that simply put, ontological coherence is not an abstraction, it is something we can affirm through states of mind (or more correctly, states of being) which we can induce by manipulating our perception and reality accordingly. Time and place is but a threshold to be passed if you are really looking towards truth, I find this so obvious that I'm unsure what you could mean by the opposing statement; being subjugated with popular modern spirits bars you from communion with higher spirits. In the meantime, I'll meditate on whether I'd be more hurt by being compared to Shapiro or Eagleton. On the upside, someone who reads pomo saying I lack "wisdom" did give me a good laugh; if someone of your ilk gave me any more praise I'd be compelled to take a sobering cold shower and ask my parents where it all went wrong.

Material security and the truth must converge at some point, that's a bet I'm willing to hedge and as a religious person I'd imagine you're sympathetic to that (although most Christians I've met seem to have trouble with this). The idea of these being in opposition is foreign and frankly offensive to me, to the degree that it is

Also: Unless prompted by necessity I prefer not to touch on genuinely esoteric matters any more than I have done already in my initial reply to OP, and no, merely asking politely after I have already declined will not work.