Overcoming Solipsism

In My Humble Opinion
121

I think you’re overlooking the way the different parts of the world interact with one another.

Consider the humble tree. The tree casts a shadow - even the parts on the other side. This shadow might be visible to you. A squirrel might be running around the tree - in the time it takes to go around the tree you can hear it interacting with the tree’s surface, and the time it takes to go around the tree is dictated by what’s back there. Leaves could be falling; how they brush against the back of the tree, how the wind moves around the tree, that matters. And, of course, if you walk around the tree, when you get back to the front it needs to be the same as it was the last time you looked; the universe needs to remember that.

Atoms nowhere near your microscope are participating in chemical reactions, producing byproducts - byproducts which need to be consistent with atomic reactions even if the microscope only arrives later. Atoms outside your view all are participating in a grand narrative that is waiting there to be discovered. France has a history that has interacted sporadically with the United States’; when you hear about it later, the full collection of events needs to form a consistent narrative that meshes with events happening in the region and things (and people) coming out of it, even if all that is taking place half a world away from you.

Millions of miles away, if a sunspot happens, all the signs and consequences of it have to arrive on earth at the correct time and interact with the earth the right way, even if it only effects you in a second, third, or fiftieth-hand way.

To put all this in a single term, the universe has to have object permanence - which precedes your interaction with it. The Chicxulub meteor’s existence was proven by the examination of evidence scattered around the world that all taken together told a consistent story - and the evidence was all present as soon as it was encountered, long before the cause of it came to light, and which was consistent with an event that took place millions of years prior.

All of this information had to be determined long in advance, and all of the atoms that we may someday look at with our microscope need to have left the evidence of their passing in their surroundings waiting for you when you wander up. The amount of things around you that indirectly influence you without you realizing it is astonishing. And, of course, the second you look at something the universe has to remember it - and continue to sim the passage of time in your absence so things look properly aged when you come back later.

It is not possible that everything you encounter is made up on the fly. It simply isn’t. The entire universe has been simmed already - from billions of miles away, you are being impacted by the stars in the sky, and the other space objects -and concentrations of atmosphere for miles distant- that occlude them.

And, of course, the idea that this is all being consistently planned and tracked by one’s subconscious mind is completely absurd.

122

I must politely disagree with you. Events and objects appear to correlate, but a decent sim could account for that with only the tiniest fraction of the computing power necessary for a full and detailed sim – and quite possibly without computing power at all, just directly stimulating your brain to think whatever the maestro wants.

You’re using reason…but reason might not apply, and might only be something we are taught to believe in, here in the sim.

But even using reason…I come to different conclusions than you do.

Pleasantly, it’s among the least important debates ever to grace the SDMB!

123

The only way that a sim could compensate for a lack of existing history would be to actively retcon our cognition to correct for the inevitable discrepancies that would occur when, for example, you travel to a new town, the sim hastily generates a history for the town, and it happens to play out that per the new history one of the kids in the town turned out to be a serial killer who left town and murdered your mother a year before you were born.

Well, that or as new areas of the universe were exposed to your senses it would be hastily trying to solve for new created histories that somehow don’t contradict anything that it had previously generated. This calculation would perforce have to actively account for literally every established fact that had previously been generated - and this process would have to be going on constantly, on an ever-expanding set of previously-generated data. All done with no overarching plan - since, as you say, things aren’t being deliberately made to correlate.

As for the idea that out brains might be gibbering masses of illogical non-thought, that only think they’re thinking because the “you’re thinking” flag has been set…you realize that I’m in here, right? Actively experiencing my mind? You might as well be arguing that the mind doesn’t exist. In both cases it’s an experience incompatible with what is observed. And no, I can’t be fooled into thinking that I’m thinking with the level of detail I’m experiencing - the level of detail is there, directly observable.

And, finally, regarding processing power. I don’t see processing power being the issue - rather, processing complexity. The ‘reality is as complex and complete as it appears’ model doesn’t require the simulation to make snap decisions, hasty corrections, active interventions, or to be consciously aware that you exist at all. All it requires is a vast sea of simple stuff doing simple stuff according to simple rules, with no differentiation aside from which types and amounts of simple stuff happened to be in any random place when things randomly started moving. Whereas all models where this is faked require a massively complex intelligent algorithm that actively responds to a constantly evolving scenario with a vast amount of extremely deliberate and very precisely calculated responses. Even if this happens to be working on a smaller overall scenario (which, as I pointed out, it’s not - the stars are not painted on the dome of the sky) it’s got a hundred billion trillion magnitudes more deliberate complexity and data management. It can’t possibly have emerged randomly; it would have to have been created, very deliberately, to carry out this very specific task, for your specific personal benefit. Compared to the real universe’s complexity that amounts to little more than “There’s a whole lot of it”, Occam’s razor cuts that to ribbons.

This is the fun kind of philosophy! Reason and debate, not wishy-washy sophistry.

124

The link actually does support my position, you just grossly misinterpreted what was being said.

All three of your points weren’t refutations at all, they just showed that you didn’t understand what you were reading. They all make strong cases against a self really. You so far have not proven that there is a self. Everything that the “self” seems to be responsible for is tied to brain activity in that there would be nothing for a self to do if it did exist.

You call them all idiots but all that really shows is that you are the idiot.

125

As for why solipsism being true is scary, it would render everything pointless. There would be no friendship or love because people don’t exist. Helping or caring for others would hold no meaning because they don’t exist. Doing something would not matter because it’s just a mental world. You see my point?

"I, for one, actually think it is – once you see it you can’t really fully unsee it, all you can do is pretend it’s not true. It’s one of those realizations that if happened upon viscerally – as opposed to linguistically – it’s self-evident and irrefutable.

But it’s also very often a useless realization that often holds negative value. It can be so bad and dangerous, in fact, that the philosophers in your mind will twist themselves into knots arguing that solipsism is incoherent or refuted by Wittgenstein, etc, when it really wasn’t adequately refuted and can never be refuted.

You’re alone in a real and permanent sense, as long as you are a you, and the only way to survive this realization is to trick yourself that you’re not alone, squint the world back into three dimensions and let yourself play the game as if you were not suspended in the middle of a closed sphere with colors and shapes projected upon it like a screen that only you can see; forget that you are moving about like a hamster in a ball when you walk, and that you’re never really moving at all. Forget the Truth of your life at the most raw and honest state of awareness, because this empirical encounter, once noticed, is irrefutable, and only just barely survivable in human form.

You can run but can’t hide. But still run. One way out of the terror this glitch in the Universe causes is to forget the idea and revert to the old way of conceiving; don’t think about the Truth, and if it chases and finds you, fight it. It’s kind of like looking at an autostereogram. The image you see can be there if you concentrate, and you can, indeed, un-see the Truth if you concentrate. Ice-cream also helps.

If you can un-see the visceral truth of solipsism, you can pack it safely in the back of your mind, or so I’ve been told. You can also take inventory on what matters – hopefully you can think of a few sensations or storylines that just capital m Matter and vibrate with a kind of self-evident value – and decide that the Truth of solipsism simply doesn’t Matter and is subjectively irrelevant at this time.

The hardest and most inescapable conundrum the sensation of solipsism imposes is the idea that even if there is an external world, it doesn’t Matter, because you’d still be infinitely and eternally cut off from it, just the same as if it wasn’t there at all, and because of this nasty piece of experience, for all intents and purposes, even if the external world exists, it sort of doesn’t exist, and can’t exist, in any way or form that Matters. Whether it exists or not, you are still locked in your own private filmic semi-sphere, smaller than a lepton, located exactly nowhere.

Try to enjoy the show, enjoy playing the game, treat the apparition of experience how you’d want to be treated, and let your pre-loaded values be your guide for what to do and how to play.

Assume that with regard to whatever is going on, It will probably either stop, or its purpose will be made evident. One or the other; both options are okay."

126

So you are a proponent of Philosophical Zombies?

The problem with that is, that they are normally used as an argument against physicalism. :slightly_smiling_face:

127

You take all this way too seriously and far too personally. Take a deep breath and realize that everyone who responds to you on this very same topic, that you post ad nauseam, does so as a purely recreational exercise with an entirely academic interest in the topic.

Aren’t there better ways to spend your time than obsessing over things that don’t matter in the least? This isn’t healthy or productive.

128

Agreed. Solipsism is a pointless, self-defeating, masturbatory exercise, that you dwell on obsessively, to reach a conclusion that ultimately does not matter any more than the reality it attempts to disprove.

In short, you’re wasting your time.

129

Don’t let your fury at being unable to refute that I have made strong refutations of your cite make you forget what forum you’re in.

And by the way, yelling incoherently that I don’t understand your cite, while utterly failing to tell me while I’m wrong, doesn’t indicate that I don’t understand your cite. It just shows that you’re furious about the fact that I DO understand your cite, and that everything in it is as I described.

If I actually was wrong, you could bring an argument showing that, pointing out where I’m confused. You won’t because you can’t because I’m not.

130

A little thought is a dangerous thing. The mistake you and these other great thinkers are making is thinking yourself into the bottom of a divot and then not thinking yourself back up the other side.

Firstly, if you - okay, firstly let’s note you’re quoting a dude who frankly admits that the self exists.

Secondly, if you consider what’s being shown on the screen, it’s patently obvious that the movie on the screen is not coming from you - not any ‘you’ that has anything to do with the conscious or unconscious ‘you’, anyway. So there is something besides you out there. The dude you’re quoting knows this; he consistently presents the projected sphere of your reality as being something presented to you, not something you’re imagining.

Thirdly, you both stop short of acknowledging that whatever it is that is creating your ‘sphere’ is most certainly interacting with you. Your senses are not a movie; the world you see reacts to the actions you take. This means that you’re genuinely interacting with the demonstrably real entity behind the curtain. Which means that you are interacting with something truly real.

And fourthly, note how the dude consistently capitalizes “Matter”. The reason he’s doing this is because he hasn’t defined it, and is capitalizing it to try to fool us into thinking that it’s a proper noun that thus means something. In actuality of course he can’t define it, because doing so would obliterate his position, as it does yours.

You have been repeatedly asked why it would matter if the stuff you’re interacting with isn’t ‘real’. You haven’t answered, because you can’t answer - all the statements to that point are self-referential and fallacious. “It doesn’t matter because it’s not real” is not a sensible statement when you have altered the definition of “real”.

You and the dude you quoted can’t tell me why the stuff projected on the bubble of your senses doesn’t ‘Matter’. And your failure to do this is the signpost showing that the divot you’re in can be easily stepped out of, if one only has the inclination to think the situation through rather than twisting logic into knots in order to stay comfortably, deliberately, stuck.

Putting aside the fact that he’s wrong about reality, have you considered taking his advice? Here’s a dude who believes in exactly the same thing you do, and he’s telling you how to deal with it. Perhaps you should try it.

If anything, ice cream is never a bad investment.

131

If solipsism is real, then the only idiot in this thread is you because none of us exist. Why on earth are you arguing with a bunch of figments of your imagination?

132

Everyone else has long since tired of his bullshit.

133

I figure that there’s a part of him that accepts that we’re real, at least in the same sense that he probably also accepts that walking off cliffs and drinking acid are bad ideas. Philosophical fanwankery is all well and good for a smoke-filled college afternoon, but if you take some of this stuff truly to heart Darwin catches up with you pretty fast.

134

That is sort of what solipsism is getting at, and I can’t disprove it. I dont believe it but I can’t disprove it.

135

All you are really asserting is that he is wrong but you don’t say why he is wrong.

And if you want to cite Occam’s razor:

“I would say 1) Occam’s Razor is a guideline, not a rule, and that a full universe of material objects is arbitrarily chosen as a simpler explanation than a simulated and private one without material, and an argument could be made that employing Occam’s razor could just as easily if not more easily lead to solipsism. But again, Occam’s razor is only a guideline so it’s inconclusive and can be thrown out. 2) One hallmark of solipsism is indeed not knowing from whence the experience is coming since we are not conscious of creating it, only perceiving it, but this unknown doesn’t guarantee a separate entity, as it could simply be the right hand fooling the left, and even if it does imply a separate entity, it doesn’t change the sensation that the world is still a non-material illusion. The bottom line is it winds up not mattering to the solipsist, since the “how” is irrelevant to the “what.” 3) If you can’t violate the apparent laws of the grid you find yourself on, this doesn’t a priori = a separate agent, it just may mean you are constructing these laws, as we would in a dream.”

136

I dunno that philosophical zombies are the same as solipsism, but there’s a pretty straightforward argument for why you should be worried about philosophical zombies.

When you talk to a philosophical zombie, the zombie responds, remembers things, expresses opinions (and is fairly consistent about those opinions), and so on. So. The zombie is claimed to have no self/mind/soul/whatever. But in that case, what’s answering you? That thing is aware of you, responds to you, remembers you, and has opinions about you.

Be friends with that thing.

137

To see me saying that, you have to read the words I wrote. I write a whole hell of a lot of words, and they say things.

It is indeed the case that in the single argument in this thread to which I responded with Occam’s razor, that the universe could in theory be implemented via the vastly more complicated and programming-intensive simulation method. However the argument in favor of that simulation was not just that it was possible, but that it was more likely due to a continuously-self-constructing simulation being more efficient. Against that argument, Occam’s Razor applies.

(post split due to limits)

138

I don’t propose that we can know what is creating the ‘illusion’, only that is it 1) real, and 2) not you.

As for that left/right hand business, in that example the hands are most definitely different people - and the left and right hand in that scenario can get to know one another and be genuine friends.

It comes down to a definition of the bounds of ‘you’. Consider a game simulation, where it simulates various NPCs. Each NPC’s memory and computation space is kept separate from all the others - there is no shared code or ‘species memory’. The NPCs can interact with each other within the simulation.

In this scenario, it is accurate to say that all the NPCs are part of the simulation. However it is not accurate to say that the NPCs are part of each other. Similarly, if you are proposing to include the entity or entities that are creating your observed reality with the set of things called ‘you’, then clearly that set of things includes things that you don’t share memories and thoughts with. In this scenario your definition of ‘you’ is so inclusive that it demonstrably includes genuinely separate people within it. In which case even if they’re part of ‘you’, they’re not part of you. So feel free to make friends with them!

Were you quoting somebody? Regardless, when you claim that reality can be operating on the same mechanics as dreams, you’re not reducing the stability or value of reality, you’re just claiming that your dreams are absurdly stable and valuable. That you can make true friends in your dreams and have them greet you there when you next nod off.

That, or you’re making an absurd false equivalence that can be disregarded as the dishonest argument it is.

139

But again Occam’s Razor is only a guide and not a rule. Also we aren’t talking about a computer simulation, did you read the whole quote?

140

Actually it is 100% accurate to say that all the NPCs are part of each other since they are just code within a game. You are also still not understanding solipsism. It’s not about the definition of you but about what is known. Reread the quote again.