Simple. Accept that your perception is not the same as reality. Problem solved.
We’ve ALL had to do that at some point.
Whether it’s part of the maturing process (and you’re only a few decades behind, you can catch up), or a relationship (where you have to realize that other people’s lives don’t revolve around your needs), it’s very liberating.
Where the hell were you with this gem of wisdom like seventeen @Machinaforce threads ago?
BTW, this is his cake day. Your timing could not be more perfect.
I wear glasses. This is a given.
Hell, when I got may last pair, straight vertical lines weren’t straight anymore. Annoying, that. But not exactly an existential crisis.
And eyeglasses for myopia bring things closer. Looking at the ground, I feel shorter. And, one day, I made a flying leap from one boulder to another…and fell short. Barked my shins something awful. The distance looked less than it really was.
And, in context, there’s the blind-spot, various color-perception illusions, the “eternally rising pitch” audio illusion, and Penn & Teller!
“Also, solipsism asserts that your MIND exists without evidence. A conscious, human mind. There is no reason to believe this; I could easily be nothing more than a soulless computer experiencing bursts of dopamine and cortisol and so forth, observing myself in the process. The only argument against it is that I feel like an individual self, but that can be quickly dismissed by arguing that the illusion of self helps the computer observe the effects of emotion better.”
First, let’s note the word “soulless”. The idiot you’re quoting has hung his hat on the assumption that if you’re not possessed by a supernatural entity, your mind/existence is somehow invalidated.
This is equivalent to saying that if a car isn’t made of jello then it’s not a car, purely because he likes jello. And then saying that because the cars he’s talking about aren’t made of jello, they don’t exist.
Seriously, the dude is complaining that real minds incorporate dopamine and cortisol as part of their function. This is like be angry that tables have atoms in them, and claiming that real tables have no atoms in them and are a single unit table birthed undifferentiated from the forehead of god.
Reminds me of Roger Penrose, in “The Emperor’s New Mind,” who insisted that a mind had to be able to “feel.” He was never so very explicit as to demand that “feelings” require dopamine and cortisol, but it was kinda hiding behind his rhetoric. One of the world’s greatest mathematicians, but when it comes to questions about “self” and “mind,” he was as pig-ignorant as anyone else.
Actually the idiot behind Machinaverse’s quote considers dopamine and cortisol disqualifying factors for being a mind. He literally will only accept magic. If the mind is based in anything in the real world, if the mind is based in reality, then it’s not a mind to him. Only things that are not real are real, and things that are real are not real, as far as he’s concerned.
It’s astoundingly stupid, obviously, but that’s the direction you have to go to deny Cogito Ergo Sum.
It’s entirely reasonable to consider that we don’t have minds (but merely think we do). Or that we do have minds, they may be epiphenomena, riding along as passengers on our autonomous bodies.
I didn’t want to mention that, cuz for many it’s as soul-sucking as solipsism. 
Really, you can’t sweat the small stuff here. 
I don’t see how it’s reasonable to consider that we don’t have minds, but are merely using our minds to consider and think about it.
Regarding epiphenomena, where you conceptually separate the mind from the body and call the mind ‘epi’ and the body ‘autonomous’, that’s sophistry. The ‘autonomous body’ includes the brain which is carrying out the mechanical process of thinking. The mind is indeed a ‘byproduct’ of this - clearly a form of internal feedback.
It would be equivalent to say that when you’re watching a computer play pong against itself, that the game of pong you see on the screen is just an image (and thus no game is being played there) and that the computer is just ‘autonomous’ and something something underwear gnomes no game is being played there either because you can’t see it from the outside.
If the computer were playing pong with itself, I would absolutely consider the screen output a mere epiphenomenon. The screen display is merely a graphical representation of the game that’s being calculated in the computer.
When I watch the football game on TV, my saying that “the game is on TV” is clearly a figure of speech. I harbor no illusions that this is the real game; the real game is being played at Lambeau Field.
We have come a long way technologically since the days when when they would lock up tiny singers and announcers inside radio cabinets. 
Sure, but the argument is saying that because the mind is an epiphenomenon, this is somehow a bad thing or invalidates the mind somehow. This would be like saying that because you’re seeing a representation of the game on a screen, no game is being played anywhere.
It’s a fallacious reframing of the situation. Yes, clearly, the human mind doesn’t exist in a vacuum. It’s somehow generated by the brain. The brain is doing all the work. This is no more a problem then the fact that a table is actually a bunch of atoms makes it not a table.
I’m not a philosopher, and I was speaking casually, so I think I muddied the water a bit back there.
To clarify, if mind is an epiphenomenon, you do still have a mind. It’s just that your mind doesn’t control your body, as you think it does. All the thoughts and actions arise from biological processes. The thoughts (the mind) is analogous to the computer screen output, in that they don’t affect the computer processes.
(Many people don’t like this vision of things, and consider it equivalent to not having a mind at all. So it allows me to say, “It’s possible that we don’t have minds, we just think we do.” Which is an obviously paradoxical statement. So, kind of fun, but inexact.
It’s just a framing/definition issue. Specifically, one where you’re defining the “mind” as purely being the output data, in a seemingly deliberate attempt to separate it from the part of you that is doing the thinking. You’re not changing the fact that there is a part of you that’s doing your thinking - and that part of you is demonstrably running through all the same thoughts your conscious mind experiences. (Though it might be getting through them a littler earlier - there seems to be a little lag in delivering them to your consciousness.)
It’s all well and good to draw a distinction between the physical mechanism of the mind and the subjective experience of the mind, but using such a distinction to try and devalue the whole shebang is erroneous. And that’s what’s happening when one dismisses the part that’s doing the work as being an ‘autonomous body’ - with the implication that it’s operating without a mind. When, of course, it has a mind - it includes the brain which is doing all your thinking.
We may be talking at cross purposes. You are saying that clearly something is thinking. I’m referencing the “mind-body problem”- how does a material body interact with a non-physical mind (assumes a mind is truly non-physical, not light waves or magnetic fields, etc).
I really only brought this up in contradistinction from solipsism. Which is more likely- that you are a mind that imagines it has a body, or that you are a body that thinks it has a mind? They both seem about equally unlikely. But both solutions address the mind-body problem.
But most of us feel that we have a mind that controls a body and a body that affects our mind.
Well, I come from the perspective that we only have a ‘non-physical’ mind in the sense that if you see “3” written on a piece of paper, that “3” has an existence as data in the eyes of anything observing the paper - even the paper itself, if the paper was capable of observing itself.
The brain, of course, is certainly capable of observing itself, and I figure that we perceive as our conscious minds are really just the physical brain’s running self-diagnostic, as perceived by the self-diagnostic itself. We feel like we have independent consciousness, which we do, because the brain has independent consciousness.
So, which is more likely - a ‘3’ that is floating around independent of anything and imagining a paper for it to be printed on, or a piece of paper that has “3” printed on it. I personally think that one is a tad less likely than the other, myself. I am a body that thinks it has a mind - because it does. The mind feels like it controls the body, because it does - the conscious mind is a reflection of the physical processes that control the (rest of the) body, and the mind is not separate from those processes, just like the “3” is not separate from the ink particles that compose it.
Well, a piece of paper with a “3” on it is a numeral.
The concept of the number three exists regardless of how you choose to express it. *
*Assuming there is anyone around to grasp the concept, which I think we both agree on. Platonically, maybe even if there isn’t.
Sure, and in fact I toyed with whether to have it say “3” or a gibberish word, to avoid the ‘universal concept’ issue.
Perhaps it would be better if the text on the paper said “This paper’s happiness level is 3”.
I guess I’m not sure that (excepting the belief that your mind controls your body, which is described as illusory in epiphenomenonalism) that your position doesn’t match up pretty well with epiphenomenonalism.
Here is a Wikipedia quote:
[q]Epiphenomenalism is a position on the mind–body problem which holds that physical and biochemicalevents within the human body (sense organs, neural impulses, and muscle contractions, for example) are causal with respect to mental events (thought, consciousness, and cognition). According to this view, subjective mental events are completely dependent for their existence on corresponding physical and biochemical events within the human body yet themselves have no causal efficacy on physical events. The appearance that subjective mental states (such as intentions) influence physical events is merely an illusion.[/q]