Relative Understanding

General Discussion
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I’m hoping to find a website out there, with something like those “describe a movie in one sentence” memes, except it would be for philosophy. The problem with the solipsism arguments is, they are ultimately un-provable either way, so people like Xain always have that out. The best arg against it that I know of relies on evolution, and in a solipsistic world, evolution would be a creation of the mind that created everything, so again, a big way out of accepting it.

But, if you can accept we live in a physical world, then for matter to arrange itself into consciousness, it would have to conform to some set of physical laws. To survive, whatever physical thing created the consciousness would need to have an understanding of those laws and even if flawed, it would have a working knowledge of them. Solipsism is a theory that everything we think is true is actually not true, so it would fail as a survival mechanism. Poof.

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Lausten: "Solipsism is a theory that everything we think is true is actually not true, so it would fail as a survival mechanism."
Lausten (or almost anyone else), does the following make sense to you?

Even if everything you experience is only in your mind, there must me a physical self that your mind inhabits. Thus there is a physical reality that you are surviving in which requires interaction with the environment. No only can solipsism not explain your survival in the environment, it can’t; there is no explanation of survival that is compatible with solipsism.

Solipsism is a description of reality that has no basis or proof and has a definition that prevents either from being discovered. The only thing it has going for it is that it can’t be definitively proven false, which makes it a mental toy, not a philosophy to live by.

Please let me know if I am right or wrong or somewhere in between. I think I make sense, but some people never get what I am saying so I might be fundamentally wrong in some way.

I haven’t read too deeply on solipsism because it doesn’t interest me personally (I only think/read about it at all because it’s a topic on here) so there might be some serious flaws in my understanding of it.

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Absolutely dead on 3 point. What you said could be added to what I said, but I was attempting to keep to one sentence and I had three. It could replace some of what I said. I said “evolution” but that has baggage and requires a whole theory of its own. I like that your way of stating it just says something has to maintain the mind. If we are a brain in a vat for example, then something else made the vats and the brains came from something too. You don’t need to demonstrate that for it to be a counter to solipsism. Even if they try to switch it to say there is nothing physical, there’s just some energy and that energy organized itself into my consciousness, they still are claiming a something.

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I can’t say it’s baseless because (as I have posted before) the claim is that the burden of proof rests on the one arguing AGAINST the solipsist and that it’s the baseline position to take (according to some).

"

Instead of getting over it, I’ll help you understand it.

if you take away names, boundaries, forces, equations and everything you think exists, all that’s left is your current experience. Your experience for you is “this”. Everything you think and feel is all one experience that you’ve separated into things like sight and sound.

If there is just the experience, then there’s nothing else. It’s all there is. So how can other people exist?(keep reading)

When you take a picture or video of yourself, you can see what used to be the current experience as a past experience. Not only that, but you can also see that past self as a small part of your current experience.

Even your past self looks slightly different than your current self. So if you go even farther back(or forward) don’t you think you might not recognize your past and future selves?

We all exist, but we are the same stream of experience.

You’ll probably try to disprove this over and over again, but eventually you’ll realize that “this” is the basis of all knowledge.

There is only “this”, “this” changes, past moments of “this” are small parts(people) of the current “this”, other people are past or future moments of “this”.

“This” is the basis of reality and every “thing” including the term “this” is a mental construction that can only point to aspects of “this”."

 

Plus this link seems to swat down the common objections to it (it’s a thread and kind of long but I read through the whole thing):

 

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If there is just the experience, then there’s nothing else. It’s all there is. So how can other people exist? - @snowcity
When you die, you die alone. No other people die with you. No other people exist.
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So it goes.

Into this life you were born naked, into this earth you will die naked.

or something like that.

 

Or the grand western line: “I am but a traveler from the place I was born to the place I die.”

Ahh, they don’t make them westerns like they used to.


So how can other people exist?

Because you are not alone,

and other people and creatures exist, in numbers you, nor me for that matter can ever imagine.

 

====================

Gotten mighty quiet around here, sad to see.
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Even your past self looks slightly different than your current self. So if you go even farther back(or forward) don’t you think you might not recognize your past and future selves?
Dude you need to start learning about evolution, because only then does that regression thing get to be a really fun trip.

I’m serious, besides you and you’re life, you are connect to all who came before in your line.

But you are right. You are the accumulation of your experience up to today - time keep coming, tomorrow becomes today and you’ve added another small, sometime large page to your experiences and who you are.

You’d never recognize your baby self, but that was you, that little person was forming around YOU and it continues. Then the years add up.

It is interesting, and fascinating and mind blowing.

But it makes sense too, and if you’re lucky enough to have people in your life, they are growing old with you, and life keeps happening to all of us and new kids join and kids become parents and that parent is no longer the teenager who was, but dang if he/she isn’t, just older the same, but different . . . and so on and so forth. It’s actually a pretty cool wild ride, with a little luck.

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There is only “this”, “this” changes, past moments of “this” are small parts(people) of the current “this”, other people are past or future moments of “this”. --Sree
That's true. It isn't solipsism. It's not an argument for it. We can understand what "this" is from right here, in "this". That's what science does.
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That’s true. It isn’t solipsism. It’s not an argument for it. We can understand what “this” is from right here, in “this”. That’s what science does. - Lausten
You are responding to something I didn't say.
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You are responding to something I didn’t say. -- Sree
For once in a blue moon, you are right. I quoted something from Snowcity and didn't attribute it. Not really a crime.
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Not really a crime. - Lausten
No, it isn't. I don't want to be the black man that gets pulled over even when I am not even in the car you pulled over. Systemic injustice is not a good thing.
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“The best argument I’ve seen for solipsism is as follows: when you dream, and you meet other people in a dream, who are they? Of course, the “other people” are really “you,” appearing as figures within your imagination. One could therefore assume that everyone we meet in the waking world is also a projection of our own mind.”

There was also this argument for solipsism, but I think it suffers from all the same weakpoints dream arguments do.

"

So how can other people exist?

Because you are not alone,

and other people and creatures exist, in numbers you, nor me for that matter can ever imagine."

 

Literally no evidence for that claim.

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Also I urge you guys to read the thread I posted where I said the guy refutes common objections before commenting further on solipsism.

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Literally no evidence for that claim. -- Xain
We don't agree on the word evidence. You say we only have our experience. Right. That's where evidence comes from. There's more to it, but I don't think you understand what I mean by that, so, we can't get off square one.
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A different thread on the matter but as the first thread I referred to mentioned it’s the end point of Occam’s Razor.

Using experience as evidence is what leads to the problem of solipsism in the first place, hence why I said that you have no evidence for other people.

"

Solipsism is interesting in many ways, and I too find it annoying when people blow things off because they “sound like solipsism”.

The main interesting point of solipsism is that there’s no way to know if it’s true; in fact, were you to strictly (and I mean very strictly) follow Occam’s razor, I believe solipsism would be your final result. All your perception and reality exists within your subjective reality; outside of this subjective reality, there is no possible way to verify existence, because you can only verify the existence within your reality.

However, the main problem with solipsism is that, in my experience with it, it will get you nowhere. All solipsism does is fill you with doubt, but it doesn’t really contribute anything, so in the interest of progress, solipsism is usually abandoned and adopted again only as “uncertainty”, which means, for all relevant purposes, that it’s a major problem but people don’t want to deal with it.

Of course, how do I know these people exist at all? How do I know I’m not just talking to myself?

Realistically, assuming external reality does exist during our waking life, the best example of solipsism comes from dreams. We see these people in dreams as separate, having their own words and personalities and mannerisms; then we wake up and find they were in our minds all along. How do we know it’s not the same right now?"

The second link is a better read, but as I said I encourage people to look through them before responding again.

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Of course, how do I know these people exist at all? How do I know I’m not just talking to myself? - @snowcity
You are not talking to yourself. You, as a person, are talking to other people who exist within your reality. Your reality is you, and you are your reality which is a Conscious Space (as defined by Klinko) that contains everything in your life.
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“You are not talking to yourself. You, as a person, are talking to other people who exist within your reality. Your reality is you, and you are your reality which is a Conscious Space (as defined by Klinko) that contains everything in your life.”

 

AS has been mentioned before this is unverifiable.

This is from the link:

"

Well here’s my take on “Solipsism” (i never knew the term for it directly until now but it’s a line of thinking i’m familiar with)

first of all, there are two perceptual realities that occur as complete polar opposites of each other (to me at least)

The dream world and the waking world.

The waking world creates the dream world as you begin to conceptualize your interactions with reality, and subsequently the dream world shapes your conceptualizations of reality in non-conscious ways… because nothing you encounter in your dreams should be foreign to you, the dreams are an accurate reflection of what YOUR position in reality is, what YOU know, what you identify with, what is significant to you.

Because of this, it seems safe to say that the waking reality is a more objective and founded reality. Whether others are real doesn’t seem to matter so much, but I think we can scertain that it is not even REMOTELY as easy to alter the waking reality as it is the dream reality.

In fact though, the only sensible “reality” that seems to exist may lie between the “twilight zone” of waking and sleeping… where you temporarily are non-existant (unless you’re very good at meditation/yoga nidra). I think it is in this void of non-existance that all things share common ground… and that the death process is similar to the sleeping process.

So you could say that first of all, “you” don’t exist, because in the scheme of things you are largely impermanent, and you could say that the only thing that exists is you, because you have no way of telling if other people are “real.” However the logical conclusion would be that, much like in your dream, things, people, etc, “exist” they just do not exist in a solid or othwerise tangibly measured form.

In other words, they exist because they ARE form, and forms exist because you perceive them. I think solipsism arises from the inability to recognize the inherent similarities that all humans have, and erroneously assumes that YOU even EXIST in the first place, when really “you” are just inhabiting a temporary vessel through which to perceive and be.

I think some of the thinking blinds us from the (personal)fact that we are all connected through the inner void of nothingness that lies at the end of the universe that is human consciousness. Objects in your dreams, for example, certainly exist, for they are merely aspects of you and your own thought patterns, if you touch them they will eventually melt away into you.

Human beings are the same, as in, ultimately they are connected to you through your perception of them, and likewise vice versa, you exist because they perceive you. But we all are nothing on the inside.

This comes from me from loosely studying taoism, buddhism, tibettan buddhism, lucid dreaming, psychedelics, and new aged thinking. Hopefully it makes sense. My basic principle for thinking about things right now is that paradoxes DO usually ultimately make sense, that both “nothing” and “everything” exist at the same time. Duality.

Basically you would need to ascertain that YOU are real before you can figure out whether other people are. Most people think they are real… but when you realize how subjective and narrow your perceptions of reality are… and how much differently the world could be colored through different eyes. It makes you wonder. It’s safe to say that anything you encounter has some sort of significance that is proportional to your own, since you are in fact perceiving it, and perception is the only way to understand “reality” or “existence” in the first place."

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But we all are nothing on the inside.
Come on. You can't have an outside without an inside.
Basically you would need to ascertain that YOU are real before you can figure out whether other people are.
That's what growing up is all about. You think, therefore you are. ;-)
and perception is the only way to understand “reality” or “existence” in the first place.”
True enough. Though perception needs a rational structure, for it to be useful.

 

 

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You think therefor you are has been dismantled to the point that it’s useless.

And you can’t get around that Occam’s Razor favors solipsism:

https://schwitzsplinters.blogspot.com/2012/01/is-solipsism-simple.html?m=1

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The small world of the solipsist will have vastly fewer such coincidences in total, and vastly fewer free parameters, than the enormously large, fine-textured, and richly populated world of the realist. -- Snow
Solipsism does not change the size of the world. There are exactly the same number of things that need to be explained, regardless of the framework that you are attempting to use to explain it. No mater what, you need to explain why the feeling of holding something goes with the experience of seeing it. With solipsism, you need to explain why how someone else, someone you've never met, has the same experience. Because, when you do meet them, they describe the same sensations. That's easily explained by the standard model of physics.