Actually, not. WaR brings up the problem of other minds. Once you grant they exist, you have to explain how they exist. How an unitary consciousness is produced by a lump of discrete, ever constitutionally-changing assembly of cells. Taking the physicalist tack, the answer is unknown, taking a dualistic tack, you then have to propose discrete souls that confer singularity.
Solipsism posits a single ‘I’ and a world of phenomena. Here the dynamics of biological substrate lose their significance, since they’re just another phenomena with no causal relevance besides being a pseudo-correlate of other phenomena.
Except if the ‘illusions’ respond, in some way, to your beliefs. That’s a wishy-washy answer, I know, but it can’t be ruled out.
Slight quibble. Actually, solipsism is the idea that only your mind exists. In other words, your mind and the universe are co-extensive. Applying Occam’s Razor, then, the universe is not a necessary concept and it should be discarded.
In a WaR existence, my dreams can have unpleasant turns because my subconcious mind has to deal with WaR situations such as the death of others, my own mortality, hunger, desire, stress, inter-personal conflict. In a solipsist reality, none of these things would exist necessarily (I hope I am using that word correctly) since I would be and have been the universe for all time and would not have previous encounters with other entities on which my imagination of those ideas would be based on.
In your own mind/universe maybe
If this is a solipsist world and I am the only one truly concious, and the only entity with any control over anything, why can’t my wishes really be horses? If I was truly in charge of this existence I should by nature of that position be able to wish away the bad things and keep the good. If I am confined or constrained by some higher something then I am no longer the universe and no longer alone and therefore not in control. Even if that something is nothing more than a physical universe that runs by its own rules.
You’re right about the quibble, but due to the way language works, “my mind = the universe,” whether true or not, is a sentence with a meaning different than the sentence “my mind = my mind.”
They are, but they only exist in you mind because that is all there is. Kind of a conundrum, no?
Who says you have to be in charge? If solipsism is the true state of being, then your mind is all there is. Why does it follow that you are in charge of anything? Why does anybody need to be in charge?
Sounds like you are applying WaR experiences to a Solipsist existence. If I (my mind) as the only thing in existence has no control of itself, i.e. the universe, then what does have control? If everything is a figment of my imagination, as it were, what is causing the figmentation, if not my own mind? Either I am causing it, or something outside me is causing the figmentation.
What, that I’m a brain in a body? I don’t know what more that I could be, biologically. Brain in a jar — brain in a body. What’s the (substantive) difference? A body is just a bag of water.
That is a good point. I guess it does not necessarily follow that I would be in control. I can hardly accept determinism from an aesthetic point of view in the WaR, I find the idea that my sole conciousness would be deterministic rather vile.
I’m sorry, but this makes no sense. You seem to be claiming that in a solipsist reality, your imagination cannot come up with any bad incidents, because it has no previous encounters to base them on.
But, if my mind is so great as to imagine this whole universe, with all the intricate interactions and details, from the quantum level to the macro level, why can’t it imagine some bad incidents?
If it needs prior experience to imagine something, then the solipsist mind cannot imagine anything at all, because there is no prior experience of the universe as we see it.
When you dream, doesn’t the dream originate from within your skull? Doesn’t it originate from your brain? So, is there another entity existing in your brain that forces you to experience dreams against your will?
If your subconcious is the one deciding which dreams you will see, and if you cannot control your dreams at will, do you consider your subconcious another entity from “you”?
If you don’t consider it another entity, and if you consider “you” to consist of “your concious self” + “your subconcious”, then, can’t you see that in a solipsist reality, the entity known as “you” can consist of sub-processes that interact to create and experience the universe.
Just as your subconcious and your concious self interact to create and experience your dreams.
In your brain, it isn’t even clear that your subconcious occupies a separate area of the brain than your concious self. Most likely, they are both distributed throughout the brain, and are more like two different processes running on the same CPU.
Yes. Yes. No. My dreams are a result of the stimuli I have already experienced. They may be extrapolations, what-if scenerios, really bizarre versions of places I have been, or seen. But I never dream in a language that I don’t know, I don’t dream in ultraviolet or x-rays. I have never dreamed of something that is completely out of my realm of experience. So while I may dream things against the will of my concious minde, I have never dreamed of something that I haven’t experienced before. Any bad incidents I dream of are based on experiences (real or virtual) I have had.
Sure, but without a causal input what would these processes base their “decision-making” on? The only way I can see that working would require such an extreme amount of a priori knowledge. Knowledge that could come from nowhere since nothing existed prior to me in a solipsist reality to have a priori knowledge of.
But it is possible to dream in a giberrish language that your brain just made up.
And if you think about it, if solipsism is true, all the languages in the world are just languages that that mind made up. Those languages are not languages that the solipsist mind didn’t know and started to dream about them, they are just various “gibberish” the mind made up.
A couple of points:
Just because you have never dreamed of something that is out of your realm of experience does not prove that dreaming outside of your realm of experience is impossible.
We cannot compare the “simple” subconcious that creates your dreams to the infinitely more “complex” subconcious that creates the universe. Look at how detailed and complex the universe is and look at how simple and ephemeral dreams are. Just because the “dream subprocess” is limited in its abilities does not imply that the “universe subprocess” necessarily is similarly limited.
I don’t know if this would still be considered solipsism, but does the mind that creates our universe have to be the only mind in existence? That is, it is possible that the mind that created this universe existed in some other sphere and is able to have this “dream” precisely because it has had all these experiences in the past.
But WaR has a similar problem. How does matter “know” how to behave? How does space-time “know” what to do? Maybe it’s because by their very “construction”, or by their very nature, this is how they behave.
Similarly, maybe by its very “construction”, by its very nature, the solipsist mind is able to imagine this universe.
I don’t see that the latter theory makes more of an assumption than the former.
