[pharrington]

It seems so weird to me that so many people confuse someone saying a phenomena is a mental process for saying that phenomena doesn't exist.

[TeMPOraL]

I find they often miss the key fact - human brains are made of the same template; we do have universal values and thought processes. Things that are universal to humans are not arbitrary to us (even though they might be in the grander scale).

[haberman]

> we do have universal values and thought processes

If there was universal agreement about what is meaningful, we wouldn't be having this conversation.

I think you would be pretty hard-pressed to find very much that is absolutely universal to the human experience.

But even if there are things which are highly prevalent in the human experience, that is not evidence that these feelings are "truth." We have direct evidence that our brains are pre-programmed with tons of cognitive biases and nonsensical beliefs: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cognitive_biases

[romaniv]

It's probably because there are many people who say "this is a mental process" when they really mean "this does not exist".

[romaniv]

Also, come to think of it, the proper term for this is "abstract concept" not "mental process".