Solipsism and other modern philosophies--why accepted?

[Partinobodycula]

According to Christianity and maybe Judaism the Creator maintains us in existence, we ‘live and move and have our being in him’, so you are in a way living in someone.

I believe that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon. It arises from something else. I’ll leave it to you at the moment, to decide what that something is.

 

[inocente]

I totally agree that the three have had different experiences and seen different aspects of the world, but I think that your using this word “reality” in this way here is colloquial and differs from your use of the word when discussing the beliefs of different kinds of philosophers.

The three people you describe are faced with many aspects of the same thing–the rich man experiences credit as a way to make money; the poor women experiences credit as a way to pay a lot more for cheap furniture; and the Berber has only heard of credit on a tv he watched through a store window.

But credit exists as an independent thing in itself; it is obtainable under similar circumstances; it operates under rules which exist as the result of the nature of credit. The fact that these people have only experienced narrow slivers of the whole does not change the nature of the whole.

But credit doesn’t exist as an independent thing. It’s not concrete, it’s an abstract idea, and even the idea only exists in some human cultures. It may form no part of the Berber’s reality. It definitely forms no part of a bat’s reality.

It’s like someone from the future telling us that zreding exists as an independent thing in itself. Zreding might well be part of his reality, but it isn’t part of ours because I just made it up. After all, trying to define exactly what is and isn’t reality has been debated among philosophers since the year dot.

 

[inocente]

I’m a soft solipsist, which is generally understood as someone who believes that nothing can be known to exist outside of one’s own mind. But, as is the case with most beliefs, I have a few caveats. The most significant of which in my case is that I believe that it can be strongly inferred from the complex nature of consciousness that it has a source outside of itself. Consciousness is an emergent phenomenon and as such isn’t the first cause. This leaves open the possibility of “God”, although it hinders somewhat the implied properties of God.

When you look at the world around you it makes fairly reasonable sense. Cause and effect assures that today is consistent with yesterday, which is consistent with the day before, which is consistent with the day before that, all the way back to the supposed Big Bang. Reality is built upon this process of cause and effect. It creates a world that’s consistent and coherent across yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It’s this very consistency that makes consciousness possible. Without it, all that you have is chaos. So consciousness will always see a world that’s consistent and coherent. A logical, rational world that explains what it is, and where it came from.

Your second paragraph appears to rely on prior assumptions: that an external world exists, that there was a yesterday, and that external consistency brings order to your mind. That doesn’t sound like solipsism, it sounds more like realism. Plus, you say “consciousness is an emergent phenomenon”, which again relies on a prior existing world - emergentism kind of goes hand in hand with physicalism.

Put another way, how do you know that you even existed yesterday, or even that there was a yesterday? How do you know you even existed one second ago, and that all your memories and senses are not just an illusion and you only exist in the now, with no continuity, no past, no future? Surely you can only know by first assuming you exist within an external world of space and time, which disqualifies you from solipsism?

 

[Partinobodycula]

Your second paragraph appears to rely on prior assumptions: that an external world exists, that there was a yesterday, and that external consistency brings order to your mind. That doesn’t sound like solipsism, it sounds more like realism.

It would indeed appear that way, until you realize that science tells us that cause and effect works equally well both forward through time and backward through time. Which means that it’s just as likely that the way things are now, is the cause of the way they were in the past, as it is that the way things were in the past is the cause of the way they are now. So even in a consciousness centered reality, the past will always be consistent with the present, and for the very same reason, cause and effect. All that you really do is alter the starting point. In your view cause and effect began with the Big Bang and leads inexorably to you. In my view cause and effect begins with me, and leads inexorably to the Big Bang. Same process, different starting point.

The difference is that according to science the odds of a universe arising in which the fundamental parameters are consistent with life, are infinitesimally small. In a consciousness centered universe however, the fundamental parameters will always be consistent with life. Because the universe isn’t the cause, it’s the effect.

Plus, you say “consciousness is an emergent phenomenon”, which again relies on a prior existing world - emergentism kind of goes hand in hand with physicalism

That is indeed one of the caveats that I put on my solipsism, that there must be something from which my consciousness emerges. The nature of this underlying cause is difficult to determine however. But to say that it must be physical begs the question of how one defines physical. Especially since you have no way of proving that anything physical actually exists.

But your line of line of reasoning could lead to a very odd conclusion, that it’s actually God who’s physical and us who are spiritual. We’ve simply confused the meaning of the two words. I doubt however that that was your intent.

Put another way, how do you know that you even existed yesterday, or even that there was a yesterday? How do you know you even existed one second ago, and that all your memories and senses are not just an illusion and you only exist in the now, with no continuity, no past, no future? Surely you can only know by first assuming you exist within an external world of space and time, which disqualifies you from solipsism?

Put one way I don’t know if I existed yesterday. But put another way, what is yesterday? It’s a memory, an experience, a concept. And I’m the sum of such memories, experiences, and concepts. They’re what define me. In a sense, they are me. So yes, I existed yesterday, because yesterday is at its core, a concept.

 

[You]

You pay your bills I imagine, you don’t just tell them ‘I’m a Solipsist’.

 

[Partinobodycula]

You pay your bills I imagine, you don’t just tell them ‘I’m a Solipsist’.

Of course I pay my bills, and that’s the point. It doesn’t matter whether the world exists only in my mind or not, the rules of cause and effect still apply.

It’s understandable that people assume that if reality exists only in my mind that I should be able to change it at will, but I can’t, and for a very good reason. The conscious mind’s very existence is dependent upon a coherent framework of past, present, and future. If cause and effect didn’t exist then consciousness wouldn’t exist either. It’s cause and effect that gives rise to consciousness, and not the other way around.

So the consequences of my actions aren’t amenable to my will, they’re independent of it.

 

[Latias]

It would indeed appear that way, until you realize that science tells us that cause and effect works equally well both forward through time and backward through time. Which means that it’s just as likely that the way things are now, is the cause of the way they were in the past, as it is that the way things were in the past is the cause of the way they are now. So even in a consciousness centered reality, the past will always be consistent with the present, and for the very same reason, cause and effect. All that you really do is alter the starting point. In your view cause and effect began with the Big Bang and leads inexorably to you. In my view cause and effect begins with me, and leads inexorably to the Big Bang. Same process, different starting point.

The difference is that according to science the odds of a universe arising in which the fundamental parameters are consistent with life, are infinitesimally small. In a consciousness centered universe however, the fundamental parameters will always be consistent with life. Because the universe isn’t the cause, it’s the effect.

Why do you need solipsism to explain the phenomenon of the existence of intelligent life in the universe? Why not just explain with the anthropic principle, by trivially noting that life could only exist within the domains of the (meta)universe that has the laws of physics and physical parameters that could support the evolution of intelligent life?

I do not know what do you mean that “cause and effect” begins with me. Perhaps through some epistemic exercise (predominantly relying on the findings of a rigorous and methodical framework of empiricist inquiry, which can be referred to as “science”) one can arrive at a coherent account of naturalistic (according to the laws of nature without invoking any metaphysical or theological concepts or entities) cosmology that is congruous with one’s understanding of the world, which for an educated person, such the preponderance of such understanding should be ascertained through educating oneself of the modern scientific theories. Of course, one’s ideas with how the world works should be tested against observation and experiments, and those ideas should be assessed and revised in the light of scientific investigation, experience, and the theoretical insights of informed individuals.

For a skeptical empiricist,they are skeptical of the metaphysical and epistemic foundations of the notion of causation and other forms of induction. Perhaps you mean that the process of ascribing causation to a particular event is primarily a psychological phenomenon.

I consider myself to be an adherent of constructivist epistemology in science.​

I am not a proponent of gun control, but I do not understand how could assault rifles and high-capacity magazines are integral to the notion of “self-defense”. Regarding self-defense, most conservative opponents of gun control usually do not want North Korea and Iran to have nuclear weapons to defend themselves, so they can inflict adverse consequences if another country invades them, not that they would reasonably initiate an aggressive first-strike since they face inevitable massive retaliation from the nuclear arsenals of other countries. The rhetoric of “self-defense” is just non-sense.

 

[St_Francis]

Of course I pay my bills, and that’s the point. It doesn’t matter whether the world exists only in my mind or not, the rules of cause and effect still apply.

It’s understandable that people assume that if reality exists only in my mind that I should be able to change it at will, but I can’t, and for a very good reason. **The conscious mind’s very existence is dependent upon a coherent framework of past, present, and future. If cause and effect didn’t exist then consciousness wouldn’t exist either. It’s cause and effect that gives rise to consciousness, and not the other way around. **

So the consequences of my actions aren’t amenable to my will, they’re independent of it.

The bolded part elaborated on what I didn’t understand in your previous post replying to me, so I am quoting this one instead.

I imagine that when you were a child you believed pretty much as I do still, that the world exists and you are in it, etc., so how did you come to believe what you believe now about the world and your situation in relation to it?

 

[St_Francis]

But credit doesn’t exist as an independent thing. It’s not concrete, it’s an abstract idea, and even the idea only exists in some human cultures. It may form no part of the Berber’s reality. It definitely forms no part of a bat’s reality.

First, there is a difference between reality and the experience of a particular individual. Talking about “someone’s reality” is slang and leads to relativistic ideas about reality.

Second, I chose credit because you said something about material things… the six blind men and the elephant is a similar example which I would have used otherwise.

Third, animals cannot think abstractly: that’s why they are animals and we are humans. The Berber has the capacity to understand credit where a bat does not.

It’s like someone from the future telling us that zreding exists as an independent thing in itself. Zreding might well be part of his **experience, **but it isn’t part of ours because I just made it up. After all, trying to define exactly what is and isn’t reality has been debated among philosophers since the year dot.

If I went back to the past, corporations would be outside their experience, but I could explain it to them and they would understand. I’m sure if the person from the future explained zredings to us, we would understand that too.

The fact that something does not exist at a certain point in time does not mean it is not real in the time it does exist.

 

[Latias]

First, there is a difference between reality and the experience of a particular individual. Talking about “someone’s reality” is slang and leads to relativistic ideas about reality.

Second, I chose credit because you said something about material things… the six blind men and the elephant is a similar example which I would have used otherwise.

Third, animals cannot think abstractly: that’s why they are animals and we are humans. The Berber has the capacity to understand credit where a bat does not.

Why talk about credit, something that is patently socially constructed and does not have any obvious concrete material reality. I could understand if you are trying to assail some form of hard physical reductionism (as it would be hard to provide a materialist account of credit), but the thread is about solipsism and related forms of epistemology, not the metaphysical claims of physicalism or Cartesian Dualism (or softer “property dualism”). You are free to elaborate on this though since I may deem it interesting.

Needless to say, any inquiry into the objective reality of credit is quite futile, since it just a social construction to facilitate various forms of economic activity where one party does not immediately have the financial capital to undertake a specific transaction, such as purchasing a car or some entrepreneurial activity. Since the etymological root of the word “credit” comes from the Latin meaning “to believe”, the nature of credit reflects the lenders’ belief that they will be recompensed for the money either through the success of the enterprise or purchases being funded by the loaned money, and the imperative for the borrow to pay off the loan out of fear of imprisonment (debters prison), loss of access to future credit, and confiscation of their assets. Using this rather basic explanation of “credit” from rudimentary economic theory, one could use that to formulate a material ontology of credit as a neurological phenomena.

This would necessarily imply that beliefs and incentives underlying “credit” could be physically reducible, or from an eliminative materialist perspective, “credit” may not even exist, since according to them beliefs, more precisely propositional attitudes, do not exist, but rather human behaviors resulting from the intricate feedback between the processing of environmental stimuli of observed human behaviors and one’s behavior to adapt to those observations. If, taking the former reductionist ontology of human beliefs (as opposed to eliminative materialism), this would also suggest that the neurological phenomenon such beliefs are also adaptive in the sense that it models reality accurately enough to facilitate survival and personal flourishing. Moreover, since this material basis for this neurological phenomenon is inherited from one’s parents (if not, how does a physically complex system such as human neurological hardware develop and assemble without fairly complex genetic information), the information that influences the development of this neurological hardware must have served some adaptive function in order to facilitate reproduction, so one cannot glibly say that the neurological process underlying any human belief and human social behavior is merely chemical, as there has to be some Darwinian connection between the material basis of those beliefs and behavior and survival. In other words, Darwinian evolution provides the resolution of one’s intuitive skepticism that there is lack of a connection or relationship between the neurological processes in one’s mind or the arrange the arrangement of matter of one’s brain and the structure of reality outside of one’s brain.

As one can see from that discursion as an attempt to provide a materialistic ontology for “credit”, the range of human beliefs and the material basis of those beliefs are constrained by reproductive imperative imposed by Darwinian evolution. (Those who are eliminitivist regarding propositional attitudes would focus just focus on human behavior, not beliefs). These constraints could accommodate a wide range of possible beliefs, and those beliefs do not necessarily have to align with reality, but they have to at least facilitate survival and reproductive or at least not hinder survival. For example, one would say that the beliefs of a psychotic schizophrenic patient are obviously maladaptive since they adversely affect one’s social and occupational function. This, at least, provides a reason for the verisimilitude between the content of one’s subjective beliefs and an external reality, since those beliefs help one navigate through that physical objective reality.

As someone largely interested in the philosophy of science, perhaps a better and more illuminating example than “credit” concerns the objective existence of theoretical entities from science such as neutrinos and the Higgs boson, since they are more resistant to the claims that they are “socially constructed”. A scientific instrumentalist (a form of anti-realism) would argue that one does not “experiences” neutrinos directly, but they are ultimately ideas that are understood with the framework of physics. Thus they are ultimately ideas constructed to render one’s experience of reality more comprehensible and are incorporated in scientific theoretical frameworks in order to enhance their predictive and explanatory power (even though in this case, it would refer to the experience of assessing data from various science observations and physics experiments within a narrow domain of human knowledge, and using that data to infer that neutrinos are involved in the observed phenomenon)

 

[inocente]

It would indeed appear that way, until you realize that science tells us that cause and effect works equally well both forward through time and backward through time.

Nope, that’s not the case at all. It’s true that some physical phenomena are symmetrical in time, for instance a movie of a planet orbiting a star looks reasonable whether played forwards or backwards. But consider a movie of a glass being dropped and breaking into hundreds of shards. It’s immediately obvious if you reverse that movie, because the odds of all the shards spontaneously coming together in exactly the right way to reform the glass are phenomenally unlikely.

In the same way, the odds of molecules of smoke spontaneously coming together to reform a cremated body, who then comes alive are spectacularly unlikely. Everything in your backwards universe is statistically incredibly less likely than in a forwards world. (It’s called the arrow of time, look it up).

The difference is that according to science the odds of a universe arising in which the fundamental parameters are consistent with life, are infinitesimally small.

Nope, so-called fine-tuning isn’t science. Science is based on evidence, and the evidence is that the only universe we have supports life, so the odds are 100%.

But your line of line of reasoning could lead to a very odd conclusion, that it’s actually God who’s physical and us who are spiritual.

Err, no. That would be the case with your backwards world. But for everyone else, emergentism is the idea that the whole is greater than the sum of the parts, first proposed by Aristotle.

Put one way I don’t know if I existed yesterday. But put another way, what is yesterday? It’s a memory, an experience, a concept. And I’m the sum of such memories, experiences, and concepts. They’re what define me. In a sense, they are me. So yes, I existed yesterday, because yesterday is at its core, a concept.

But according to your backwards world, yesterday hasn’t happened yet, so it can’t define you.

 

[inocente]

First, there is a difference between reality and the experience of a particular individual. Talking about “someone’s reality” is slang and leads to relativistic ideas about reality.

Second, I chose credit because you said something about material things… the six blind men and the elephant is a similar example which I would have used otherwise.

Third, animals cannot think abstractly: that’s why they are animals and we are humans. The Berber has the capacity to understand credit where a bat does not.

Well, for example, I’ve no evidence that a bat can’t think in abstractions, but suppose I go along with that, what does that have to do with reality? If your implication is that nothing is real without human observers who can think in abstractions, then reality depends on those abstractions, and so differs from one person to another.

Or, if reality doesn’t depend on human observers, if the world was just as real before humans, then what humans think is reality is equally relative.

We could debate this, but the bottom line is that you have particular notions of what constitutes reality, and there are others, including philosophers, who don’t agree with you.

 

[St_Francis]

Well, for example, I’ve no evidence that a bat can’t think in abstractions, but suppose I go along with that, what does that have to do with reality? If your implication is that nothing is real without human observers who can think in abstractions, then reality depends on those abstractions, and so differs from one person to another.

Or, if reality doesn’t depend on human observers, if the world was just as real before humans, then what humans think is reality is equally relative.

We could debate this, but the bottom line is that [bb]you have particular notions of what constitutes reality, and there are others, including philosophers, who don’t agree with you.

To the bolded statement: Precisely, which is why I started this thread, to find out why people think and accept these other notions of reality.

To your first paragraph: I do not think that anything I said should lead one to think that is what I was advocating.

To your second paragraph: Huh? If reality exists independently of observation, how can our thoughts about reality be relative? They would instead be either right or wrong, in alignment with reality or not.

 

[Partinobodycula]

Why do you need solipsism to explain the phenomenon of the existence of intelligent life in the universe? Why not just explain with the anthropic principle, by trivially noting that life could only exist within the domains of the (meta)universe that has the laws of physics and physical parameters that could support the evolution of intelligent life?

You’re absolutely right, I could use the anthropic principle to explain the existence of intelligent life. In which case reality, whatever that may be, simply gives rise to an untold multitude of universes, some of which will, by sheer chance, meet the conditions necessary to evolve intelligent life. Sort of the brute force approach. Nature simply tries every possible iteration, and some of them are bound to work. Oddly enough, this hypothesis, and my hypothesis aren’t all that incompatible.

I do not know what do you mean that “cause and effect” begins with me

I’ll try to explain as best I can. But this isn’t as simple of a task as it might seem. Consider for a moment a question that we’ve probably all asked ourselves at one time or another, do things exist when I’m not looking at them? There are three possible answers to this question, yes, no, and sort of. If you answer yes then you believe that the world around you is fixed, tangible, and “real”, at least everything above the quantum level. If you answer no then you believe that the only things that are fixed, tangible, and “real” are those things about which you have direct knowledge. We’ll get to what it means if you answer sort of in a bit.

Now if you answered yes, that the world around you is fixed, then that would mean that the causal chain of events leading to the state of the world as it is now began way back at the Big Bang, and has progressed one causal step at a time, to where you are now. Past and present are fixed, the future is unknown, and you’re just an insignificant blip in the causal chain of events. If you answer no however, then not only isn’t the world around you fixed, but the past isn’t fixed either, at least not until you “look” at it. In this case the causal chain of events begins with you and progresses outward through both space and time. You’re the epicenter of what’s real. You’re the focal point from which reality emerges. This is what I’m talking about when I say that cause and effect begins with me. The past is fixed only in so far as the state of the world as I experience it, dictates the state of the world in the past. What is, dictates what was, and not the other way around. Which is where the answer “sort of” comes in. Although I may know the general outline of the world around me, the specific details aren’t fixed until I look at them.

At this point you might recognize this as what quantum physicists call the theory of consciousness created reality. The idea that consciousness is the ultimate deciding factor in the collapse of the wave function. You might also point out that this theory, although popular for a time, has now been pretty much discarded. I would counter that it hasn’t actually been discarded, it’s been morphed. Specifically it’s been morphed into the Many World’s interpretation. MWI posits that the wave function doesn’t collapse, it decoheres, such that every possible outcome actually exists. In which case I’m back in the consciousness created reality again, it just isn’t apparent. In MWI when I look at the past it decoheres from all the other possible pasts, leaving me in only one. I could have been in any one of the pasts that leads to the existence of me. But when I look, I end up in only one of them. So MWI has morphed consciousness created reality into consciousness chosen reality. But the effect is exactly the same, nothing is fixed until I look at it. I don’t create the past, but I choose which of the possible pasts I’m in. Which of course begs the question, why am I in this one? To which some people would respond, because you’re in all of them. To which I would counter, no “I’m” only in this one.

Let me make it clear, I really don’t like this answer, not that it’s incorrect, but rather it’s too complicated, too esoteric, and leads to too many questions that deviate from the original idea, that my consciousness is the starting point of cause and effect. I create reality, or more accurately, reality emerges around me. The past and the future are fixed only in so far as they’re dictated by the present.

I realize that in giving this answer I’ve opened a rabbit hole that I’m not sure that I want to go down. I also realize that if I’m not willing to go down it, nobody else will either, and I’ve effectively lost anyone who didn’t already think that I’m nuts. So to anyone who’s still reading this…dang you’re patient and open minded. Or perhaps you’re bored and masochistic, I can’t tell.

 

[St_Francis]

You’re absolutely right, I could use the anthropic principle to explain the existence of intelligent life. In which case reality, whatever that may be, simply gives rise to an untold multitude of universes, some of which will, by sheer chance, meet the conditions necessary to evolve intelligent life. Sort of the brute force approach. Nature simply tries every possible iteration, and some of them are bound to work. Oddly enough, this hypothesis, and my hypothesis aren’t all that incompatible.

I’ll try to explain as best I can. But this isn’t as simple of a task as it might seem. Consider for a moment a question that we’ve probably all asked ourselves at one time or another, **do things exist when I’m not looking at them? **There are three possible answers to this question, yes, no, and sort of. If you answer yes then you believe that the world around you is fixed, tangible, and “real”, at least everything above the quantum level. If you answer no then you believe that the only things that are fixed, tangible, and “real” are those things about which you have direct knowledge. We’ll get to what it means if you answer sort of in a bit.

Now if you answered yes, that the world around you is fixed, then that would mean that the causal chain of events leading to the state of the world as it is now began way back at the Big Bang, and has progressed one causal step at a time, to where you are now. Past and present are fixed, the future is unknown, and you’re just an insignificant blip in the causal chain of events. If you answer no however, then not only isn’t the world around you fixed, but the past isn’t fixed either, at least not until you “look” at it. In this case the causal chain of events begins with you and progresses outward through both space and time. You’re the epicenter of what’s real. You’re the focal point from which reality emerges. This is what I’m talking about when I say that cause and effect begins with me. The past is fixed only in so far as the state of the world as I experience it, dictates the state of the world in the past. What is, dictates what was, and not the other way around. Which is where the answer “sort of” comes in. Although I may know the general outline of the world around me, the specific details aren’t fixed until I look at them.

At this point you might recognize this as what quantum physicists call the theory of consciousness created reality. The idea that consciousness is the ultimate deciding factor in the collapse of the wave function. You might also point out that this theory, although popular for a time, has now been pretty much discarded. I would counter that it hasn’t actually been discarded, it’s been morphed. Specifically it’s been morphed into the Many World’s interpretation. MWI posits that the wave function doesn’t collapse, it decoheres, such that every possible outcome actually exists. In which case I’m back in the consciousness created reality again, it just isn’t apparent. In MWI when I look at the past it decoheres from all the other possible pasts, leaving me in only one. I could have been in any one of the pasts that leads to the existence of me. But when I look, I end up in only one of them. So MWI has morphed consciousness created reality into consciousness chosen reality. But the effect is exactly the same, nothing is fixed until I look at it. I don’t create the past, but I choose which of the possible pasts I’m in. Which of course begs the question, why am I in this one? To which some people would respond, because you’re in all of them. To which I would counter, no “I’m” only in this one.

Let me make it clear, I really don’t like this answer, not that it’s incorrect, but rather it’s too complicated, too esoteric, and leads to too many questions that deviate from the original idea, that my consciousness is the starting point of cause and effect. I create reality, or more accurately, reality emerges around me. The past and the future are fixed only in so far as they’re dictated by the present.

I realize that in giving this answer I’ve opened a rabbit hole that I’m not sure that I want to go down. I also realize that if I’m not willing to go down it, nobody else will either, and I’ve effectively lost anyone who didn’t already think that I’m nuts. So to anyone who’s still reading this…dang you’re patient and open minded. Or perhaps you’re bored and masochistic, I can’t tell.

Why did you chose to answer no instead of yes?

For example, I am hanging out with a baby. One of the common things to do with babies is to hide and then reappear. (Babies love this once they are old enough ) So, when the baby cannot see me, I continue to exist. So I know my existence is not dependent on the baby’s noticing me. This sort of thing leads me to believe in the yes answer rather than the no answer.

 

[Protestor]

Solipsism is the idea that only the mind exists, and there are various other philosophies which propose the non-existence of things… Now, these philosophers continued to behave as if things were real. Why?

Solipsism is more of a philosophical problem then a philosophical ideology, normally. Mostly when I hear these kind of things stated like BBV or the Matrix it is said that you cannot prove that you are not a part of this specific world. I had one professor say that these worlds do not defy any of the laws of logic and they map to our world which is why they are accepted as problems. Saying that something is not illogical, in other words a logically coherent world, is not the same as saying that it is possible. As far as I know you have to be able to prove that something is possible. Just asserting that something is possible because it isn’t incoherent or isn’t illogical is wrong as far as I know. Anyway if you were in the matrix and you didn’t know it, starving yourself would still kill you, presumably.
Even if someone asserts that they are the only mind it would still be beneficial for them to participate in their world even if they were the only one actually in it (whatever “actually in it” means in this world).

You don’t see mathematicians giving up when they learn about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.

 

[St_Francis]

Solipsism is more of a philosophical problem then a philosophical ideology, normally. Mostly when I hear these kind of things stated like BBV or the Matrix it is said that you cannot prove that you are not a part of this specific world. I had one professor say that these worlds do not defy any of the laws of logic and they map to our world which is why they are accepted as problems. Saying that something is not illogical, in other words a logically coherent world, is not the same as saying that it is possible. As far as I know you have to be able to prove that something is possible. Just asserting that something is possible because it isn’t incoherent or isn’t illogical is wrong as far as I know. Anyway if you were in the matrix and you didn’t know it, starving yourself would still kill you, presumably.
Even if someone asserts that they are the only mind it would still be beneficial for them to participate in their world even if they were the only one actually in it (whatever “actually in it” means in this world).

You don’t see mathematicians giving up when they learn about Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.

I like the idea that some think only that such an idea is not logically impossible, thank you

Say you were in the Matrix (as I understand it from the movie of that name), then presumably they would be feeding the people intravenously, so even if they didn’t eat in what was their “conscious life” (sorry, I don’t know the correct term), they would not starve to death. They would think they were eating in their “conscious life,” but they wouldn’t really be eating.

I didn’t pay a lot of attention to the movie when I saw it, so, did they get hurt when they were in those fights?

 

[Partinobodycula]

Nope, that’s not the case at all. It’s true that some physical phenomena are symmetrical in time, for instance a movie of a planet orbiting a star looks reasonable whether played forwards or backwards. But consider a movie of a glass being dropped and breaking into hundreds of shards. It’s immediately obvious if you reverse that movie, because the odds of all the shards spontaneously coming together in exactly the right way to reform the glass are phenomenally unlikely.

Sorry inocente but I missed this post earlier and so I’ll quickly come back to it now. We seem to have a misunderstanding about what I mean when I say that cause and effect works both forward and backward in time. It doesn’t mean that time runs backwards, or that a broken glass will magically reassemble itself. It’s simply that an observation of a system in the present can affect the state of the system in the past. There are any number of experiments that support this position. Think of it this way, that we’re reversing cause and effect, and we’re saying that effect can determine cause. What is, can determine what was. The odd thing is, that there’s no way to know. The universe would look exactly the same either way. Whether the universe gave rise to consciousness, or consciousness gave rise to the universe, there appears to be no way to tell the difference.

I would suspect however, that it’s a combination of the two.

 

[Partinobodycula]

I look at these two questions, and I go, man, do I go with the long answer or the short answer. I’m going to go with the short answer.

I imagine that when you were a child you believed pretty much as I do still, that the world exists and you are in it, etc., so how did you come to believe what you believe now about the world and your situation in relation to it?
Partinobodycula;13335282:

do things exist when I’m not looking at them?

Why did you chose to answer no instead of yes?

This is the short answer >>> Because people do things which my heart beseeches them not to do, and I need to understand why.

 

[fisherman_carl]

But it seems that the past iterations of solipsism were not really accepted, and it seems to me that we could accept certain ideas (like everyone has a brain) as a priori ideas that way we accept certain geometrical ideas as a priori. This idea of dashing reality down to the ground as a first step seems counter-productive, doesn’t it? I mean, they rendered philosophy useless by this!

Yes, for most people who have common sense. If you can accept nothing as truth or trust reality then you might as well be a vegetable.