(No insult or mocking intended by use of the word “boy.” Those that have been redacted in other threads are given a second chance to participate here. Off-topic comments will probably be redacted. Let’s keep it civil.)
The two biggest objections to Mental Reality Theory is are: (1) it is essentially solipsist, and (2) it has no means of determining between “reality” and “delusion.” I’m going to address those items in this thread.
Any hypothesis that an external physical world exists must include aspects of mental reality theory or else it fails. The ERT proponent must insist there are at least three distinct categories of mental experience that are entirely real: (1) that which is correlated to the external world; (2) self-evidently true abstract universals, like logic and math; and (3) free will consciousness. A fourth category of experience is considered to be “of reality,” and that is memory about the “external world”.
All of these mental experiential categories have their distinct characteristics that are separate from each other, and must be accepted as “real” in order in any coherent ERT theory. In fact, these categories are absolutely essential to coherent ERT theories because no ERT theory can even begin without consciously or subconsciously asserting or relying on them.
So, it is no stretch to say that any coherent ERT theory must actually begin with some MRT aspects as assumed fundamentals or it cannot even get off the ground. Because of this, any coherent worldview theory requires the potential for solipsism, because it will always be the case that a person is the only mind in existence experiencing a grand delusion.
In any coherent existential theory, the only bulwark against solipsism is faith; that that other actual individuals with free will and their own mental experience exist. All any theory has to do to avoid this is to simply provide a reasonable model that allows for the existence of other conscious, free will people, and faith that this is so does the rest of the work.
MRT provides for this. Other individuals are defined as representing different base informational structures that define and generate different experiential perspectives. Individual perspectives of consciousness as it observes different information patterns could be said to be the core definition of what it means to be an individual in any coherent existential theory. Indeed, it’s not a stretch to say that the individual perspective changes as it observes new (or different) information.
Thus, the objection of solipsism is shown to be not an entailment under MRT. It is certainly available, but it is available under any coherent theory of existence.
The way ERT advocates deal with the problem of delusion is by asserting there is an objective world outside of mind that gives us an external, consistent reference point across individual perspectives. This would represent the subset of all mental experiences that are the same in all (or at least almost all, and at least highly “the same”) individual experiences.
At the end of the day, these are all still internal (mental) experiences that are shared by all (mostly) individuals, but how does MRT, where no “external” world exists, account for these shared inner experiences?
If we see individuals as informational structures consciousness is observing, this shared experience represents a subset of information that multiple people are simultaneously accessing. That common subset can be thought of as an experiential filter, or an algorithm (or set of algorithms) that expresses much of our identity information as a common environment.
This common environment can be jointly investigated, measured, and researched by those who share it. MRT would predict that what is ultimately found is would be common algorithms or mathematical equations processing individual identity information into shared, measurable experience, collapsing potential shared experience according to a probabilistic curve.
Under MRT, the ERT “objective world” would be referred to as that part of mental information that is being processed into shared experience in every individual perspective utilizing that “objective world” algorithmic system.
What we commonly call a “delusion” would be individual (or small group) deviations from “universal” shared experiences. That doesn’t make that experience “not real;” it just makes it not part of the “universal” shared experience. It’s a different category of mental experience.
MRT thus separates “objective world” experiences from “delusion” the same way, in principle, as ERT: recognizing the distinction between universally shared experiences and experiences that are not universally shared but, to the individual, seem to have much the same characteristics – physicality, “realness,” sensory acuity, etc.
TL;DR version: solipsism is not an entailment of MRT, and it is resisted in exactly the same way it is in any coherent theory: faith. Under MRT, what we call delusion is as distinguishable from what we call objective reality as it is in ERT. These objections to MRT are unfounded and based on uninformed assumptions about MRT from the ERT perspective.