This is exactly equivalent to saying that whenever two people are in the same room, they are the same person.
You’re not going to get very far telling me I don’t understand the argument, and you’re not going to get very far trying to play some kind of shell game where YOU start talking about the left and right hands, and then when I blow your argument to shreds yet again you pretend that it was never about left and right hands.
I know it’s tough, but try harder.
Ah, but you see, you don’t exist. You’re just a figment of his imagination. And since he doesn’t understand it, you couldn’t possibly understand it either.
Exactly so.
Meanwhile, the guy who kicked the rock and declaimed, “I refute it thus!” only ended up with a hurt foot.
To paraphrase the old saying, “If it doesn’t feel good, don’t do it.”
I would have argued, instead, that “there aren’t any other people.” The argument that they’re run by the same code/dream/demon seems valid to me. Everyone else is just a holodeck projection: they aren’t “the same person.” They simply aren’t persons at all.
Where you and I politely differ is that I argue that the sim doesn’t need to simulate the event of two other persons in a room when I’m not there to observe. (The sim doesn’t need to simulate “the other side of the tree.”) You seem to be arguing that the sim has to be absolutely comprehensive and simulate the motion of every atom in every star in every galaxy. I say “galaxies” could be just smudges of light, and don’t have to have “atoms” at all.
In Star Trek terms, the holodeck is only forty feet by forty feet by forty feet. It just appears to be much larger! I believe a sufficiently well-programmed holodeck is indistinguishable from reality.
Definitely agree with you re ice cream!
Amusing, but if he believes enough in the existence of traffic to have survived this long, he believes in me enough to accept that I am no more is figment than the cars are.
Solipsism successfully argues that you can, with logical consistency, disbelieve in everything except the following three things.
It is impossible to dismiss any of these three things without flagrantly ignoring some aspect of the evidence available to us. Even if considered limited and reliable these things remain undeniable - without screwing up or deliberately ignoring logic and truth. Which philosophers and religions are certainly capable of - there is no minimum intelligence or honesty requirement to either.
So. We can be sure that there are, at a minimum, two minds: yours, and whatever’s controlling everything else. Note that we can not be confident that there are more minds than that - it’s entirely possible that every single other person you see is controlled/puppeted by a single master intelligence. This intelligence would of course have to be proportionately huge - smart enough to remember what each separate person knows and thinks without mixing anything up. But it could still exist - a single master dungeon master, a single controlling AI that controls all the NPCs. A single intelligence playacting as all other apparent intelligences (except you).
Or, alternately, there could be lots of intelligences - including ones you never meet or hear from! There’s no way to completely rule out either option. There could be many, there could be only one.
It’s manifestly clear to me that to simulate the tree and its environment the computer needs to know if there’s a giant branch sticking out of the back casting a shadow or not. That means that the back of the tree must be fully computed, just to be sure there’s not such a branch.
The further away you get, the more plausible it is that gaps could be left in the world - that spaces could be left uncompleted. Except that the problem of the shadow still exists - you may think the AI doesn’t need to render France, but it has to know enough about it to be certain that France never sent out an army to burn your town down and salt the earth. If you ever meet a person from France it has to be prepared when you ask them what street they lived on. And so on. Areas far and wide cast shadows on you - or don’t. And the lack of shadow is still a known fact that must be accounted for.
Now, it’s theoretically possible for these spaces to be left for a while - like, reality wasn’t forced to invent molecules until people made microscopes. But the thing is, when we do make microscopes, the molecules that the universe suddenly creates have to have behaviors that are consistent with every chemical reaction ever observed by man. (Well, one man. You.) Anywhere you point that microscope, things have to make sense. Every country you read about, their history and borders need to slot in nicely with the other countries you’ve already read about. All the pieces it makes have to fit together into a coherent whole.
A whole that includes things like an extinction-level meteor that it took us years to find the evidence for. If the universe is making this up as it goes along, if it’s winging it, that is masterful storytelling, to come up with billions of years of story with no story-breaking plot holes. There aren’t even gaps large enough to drive a God through, anymore. All the pieces have fallen into place.
Have you ever written a story? I have. This sort of perfection of continuity is not easy, and the idea of doing it while literally making whole countries up out of nowhere on the fly is unimaginably complex. Not impossible, necessarily - but yeah, almost certainly impossible.
Whereas if one does it the easy way - dumping out huge amounts of raw data/atoms and letting things run their course - well, that’s easy! All you need to pull that off is lots and lots and lots of stuff, and since we don’t know why there’s any stuff, there’s no particular reason to think that the cause of the stuff wouldn’t have simply caused huge amounts of it. Every part of this is simple - way easier to believe than claiming that the universe is just BSing everything continuously and it still ends up working without a hitch.
It is a philosophical certainty that we all scream for ice cream.
I finally, and for the first time, understand Evard Munch. : he is on a boardwalk and has dropped his ice cream cone.
I can’t disprove a tea pot in orbit around the sun beyond Mars.
I can’t disprove god.
I simply don’t believe it and live my life as if there isn’t, and I don’t obsessively torture myself and others about it.
I still definitely disagree with your other points, but I can’t see any way to debate them. Your conclusion that “there must be two minds” just doesn’t convince me. Two parts of my mind, sure, but not another mind. (I suppose I must sound like a Trinitarian talking about “persons!”)
However, within the (illusory or not) world of experience, there are, thank goodness, good things that make existence enjoyable!
The ancient Vedic tradition has a fully developed theory of virtual reality, and uses the metaphor of waves on an ocean.
The individual consciousness is like a wave on the ocean - having its own size, shape, and changing characteristics in space and time - but it’s still a continuous part of the underlying ocean of universal consciousness. So vast numbers of individual minds exist and interact, but at a deeper level all are parts of a single whole.
Sort of, maybe, vaguely, like what Jung was trying to say? I only wish that this brought us more “togetherness” and fewer wars and murders. More building of cities…and less burning them down again. Our “collective whole” is not completely sane…
I did think of another wrinkle, but it doesn’t really do any good… Have you ever written a note to yourself, forgotten completely about it, and found it and read it later? Is the person who wrote the note a “different mind” than the person who reads it?
The world-illusion might be like that. I created it…and then forgot (or used magical amnesia.) But one could rebut, then, that the mind who created the world is sufficiently different from the mind experiencing it as to be two distinct minds.
I don’t know what to believe but I definitely intend to suspend disbelief in the real world, at least until after lunch!
Well, you just proved that the world is separate from you.
If we were all figments of your psyche, would we be “grossly misinterpreting what was being said” or misunderstanding your links, or refuting what you’re saying?
See, we’re all independent entities, ‘Selves Beyond Yourself’…
(ooh, I just coined that phrase, sounds like I know what I’m talking about).
And good news: YOU believe that! If you didn’t, you wouldn’t get impatient with begbert2 and Trinopus and probably digs, too. You’d have no reason to lose your temper.
Now that that’s settled, you can get on with living a healthy, objective life.
Only one of your three points has anything to do with solipsism.
The second one is half right in that you are receiving sensory input but the nature and origin are unknown.
The third one is flat out wrong because it assumes other people when they can’t be known.
Solipsism is essentially this: Solipsism - Wikipedia
And none of your analogies even come close to it.
In the real world, as is observed by our senses and such, the universe can be described as a single whole. It is a big old pile of matter and atoms and such that are interacting with one another in nifty ways. It is possible to describe the universe and all its contents in this way, as a single whole.
Additionally, there are clearly distinct things within the universe. There’s me. There’s you. You’re not me. You’re, like, way over there, and I’m over here. There are walls and such between us. No part of me has any direct interaction with any part of you - what interaction there is is through many, many intermediary things that stand between us.
And yet, though every person is distinct, at the atomic level the division between “my atoms” and “the atoms next to my atoms” is one step away from being entirely arbitrary. The atoms on the border interact with atoms both inside me and outside of me indiscriminately, with no care for which one any other atom is.
A person could look at this situation and say that individual people don’t exist - the universe is a single unitary whole, and there are no hard atomic boundaries between any given person and the rest of the universe. Thus, they could say there are no such things as people.
They’d be wrong, of course. It’s possible to have distinct things inside larger things, and this remains true if the things are interacting and sharing information and even particles with things around them.
Similarly, simulated entities within a simulation. They’re all part of the simulation in a very real sense, but they’re also distinct entities in a real sense.
And, if you consider there to be an entity that is you with your thoughts, knowledge, and cognitive abilities, and if you also consider there to be a godlike entity with the knowledge and cognitive abilities to create and hold the entire physical universe in its thoughts and memory, then while you can claim that there’s one mind doing all that, the demonstrable complete inconsistency between the behaviors and capabilities of the two entities demonstrates conclusively, beyond reasonable doubt, that the two entities are in fact distinct entities, and if you wish to claim that they’re in the same ‘mind’, you’re simply defining that ‘mind’ as being a larger universe/simulation/whatever that the two distinct entities both happen to be in. You can call them “parts” of their containing universe, but that’s just obfuscating language. They’re clearly completely separate entities in every meaningful way.
And no, it can’t be a single entity that fulfilled the ‘God’ role in the past imagining and creating everything, and then got amnesia and became the you of today, because you’re perceiving things with your senses now. Whatever is feeding you your ocular input is piping fresh visual information to you at the same time that your mind is busy being your mind and not imagining the entire universe. Thus, it’s coming from some other currently existing and active source separate from your mind, demonstrably beyond reasonable doubt.
First it should be noted that you made this in response to a post that was part of a side discussion about simulations, not about solipsism directly. So if there are some things in it that are about simulations and not solipsism that should be a surprise to nobody.
Secondly, it’s not at all clear which things I said you’re referring to with any of your statements here. If your goal is to actually refute something I’ve said, you’ll first have to make clear what, specifically, you’re refuting. Quoting specific things would be a good start.
So this is what you’re really like…?
I didn’t say this before, but I always appreciate when one of your links is written by people who speak clearly and coherently. Wikipedia qualifies, so kudos on that.
And yeah, we all have a pretty good idea what solipsism is - it’s where you start by dismissing every assumption and paring yourself down to the proven knowns:
And that’s it. That’s what you start with. That’s solipsism.
It’s possible to stop there and just shrug, just like it’s possible to look at “1+1=?” and wander off and have a burger. It’s also possible to reject one or all of the three premises, by lying about the observable situation, and then start spouting random gibberish which can then then be peddled for money or as a religion. But the fact that a person could do these things doesn’t mean that they’ve disproven that 1+1=2, or that there aren’t further things that can be deduced from the knowns in solipsism.
Okay, I admit it. I went to college but all I got out of it was a Comp.Sci degree. But seriously, all that stuff in the link – that made sense to you?
Well, I confess I didn’t reread the entire article right now; I’d read it before earlier in the thread. And by and large it seems comprehensible enough.
It’s worth noting that it includes a survey of the history of solipsism, stating the views of multiple authors and philosophers with varying views on the subject - pointing to the page and saying “this is what solipsism is” is a little like pointing at the supermarket grocery section and saying “See there? That’s a banana.”
But the actual usefulness of the link aside, it’s still way better written than some woo blog, and also we do all still understand what solipsism is. It’s not that hard to understand, really, which is why it’s so unimpressive when machinaforce tries to play the “you don’t understand anything!” card.