But what I meant to ask, provocatively, was: “Why do you think there is a reality outside of yourself?”

Everyone would say that there is something “real” which exists outside of their mind. (It seems ridiculous to argue about that, but I believe that some Idealist philosophers do.)

But our belief in some external reality seems a little paradoxical to me since our idea of “reality” and “out there” are mental constructs of ours. So it’s a kind of tautology, isn’t it? (A “meta hoodwink”). It’s the quantum paradox that has got me going on this.

I was just trying to go somewhere with this vis a vis the Tao, but I think I’m rambling.

What makes you think there is something out there that maps to your whole concept of reality?

Huh? What makes you think that I think there is something ‘out there’ that maps to my concept of reality? Just the opposite, in my view. What I see ‘out there’ maps what is ‘in here’. What I see ‘out there’ mirrors what I feel ‘in here’. From this vantage point it is easy for discernment to penetrate the four quarters and yet be capable of not knowing anything.

Never mind any potential mismatch in your perception of reality and what reality is really out there: What makes you think there is something out there that maps to your whole concept of reality?

Idealism seemed mostly killed off in the last century, but when I look at (decades-old) issues of things like ‘causality’ and ‘consciousness’ in quantum physics, I sometimes wonder if Kant and Bishop Berkeley might be having a chuckle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Idealism