Why should anyone take solipsism seriously?

[Lust4Life]

@AHunter3

OK after reading your “tightening” I see that you are taking a social determinist position on the contents of the individual mind.

IN VERY CONDENSED DESCRIP: I believe that the same pattern-recognition process that enables the individual to acquire language and make sufficient sense of spoken word, written word, body language, and other aspects of other people’s behavior so as to acquire anything of cultural values and belief systems in the first place also operates so as to allow each individual to make independent assessments of things as they actuallly personally experience them and to compare and contrast that with what they have been socialized to. I believe that language-based cognitions are only a subset of cognitive processes, that emotion- and sensation-informed processes are the larger set and are in fact necessary in a “building blocks” sort of way for language-based intellectual thought to take place; and because of this I do reject formulations that would have it that individuals can only “think” in terms that were put into their heads along with the language of the surrounding culture, etc.

And yet at the same time, while this is stressing (necessarily, given the turf you are apparently staking out) the real existence of independent individual cognitive processes, and therefore negating any TOTALIZING theory claiming that ALL of what goes on in the mind of the individual is caused IN ITS ENTIRETY by socialization (good old Durkheim and orthodox sociology and its tabula rasa), I also want to go on record that I think most of what is going on in any given individual’s head is a local manifestation of the thinking of the culture or the species; rather than a head full of entirely original thought, the typical person chooses between some perspectives on some subject matter, both of which perspectives are “out there” already, and furthermore makes that choice based on a selection between several batches of thoughts about those perspectives, wherein those arguments and thought-batches and discussions, et. al, are also all “out there” as part of the ongoing discussion. Perhaps the individual has some insights that could be written up as a defense and elaboration of one strand of one argument in favor of one portion of one perspective over the other. Even then, 99% of the reasoning behind and defense for those insights will be composed of things that are already “out there”. This is in no way to be read as an indictment of the lack of originality or creativity of this person —if it were not so, hardly anyone would be able to read it and follow it and make sense of it. It is still an actual contribution by the individual, miniscule though it is in comparison with how we generally think of individual thoughts and the originality thereof.

BECAUSE individuals do engage in something other than the mindless sponging up and repeating of existing content — miniscule though it may be — the things that individuals do write and say creates a modifying force, a perpetual ongoing critique and corrective of a huge body of thought that the culture and species is collectively entertaining. And BECAUSE this is so, the culture and species IS CONSCIOUS, the contents of its collective thought-patterns undergoing change not at random but as a consequence of things being considered, mulled over, compared with actual felt experiences, and so on.

Therefore the answer to “where is the self” is multilayered: there IS an individual locus, such that the everyday belief that one is one’s individual self is not ENTIRELY misplaced or TOTALLY wrong; but that “I” exists in context and a vastly larger portion of self is actually the “we” than we tend to think it is. NOT ALL, but a huge portion nonetheless.

There’s a more metaphysical extension of this that pertains more to the origins and meaning of the conscious and volitional species and where ITS consciousness actually lies, given the context of what many would hold to be a deterministic physical-temporal world of causal processes and reactions and so forth, but I don’t think that’s necessary for peeling apart the social determinism versus individual “I” portion of the question.

So hows the G/F then?
Or maybe we’re inbetween ones ?

[AHunter3]

G/F = girlfriend?

::checks::

She’s in good condition at the moment. Why?

[Polerius]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

There’s actually a somewhat deep question hidden here: can you dream without (ever having received) external input? Obviously, if you get some manner of data from the outside, it is easy to explain how dreams are created by you, through reinterpretation, reorganization, and restructurization of that data. However, if that data is absent, and something generates it out of nothing without your conscious awareness, separately from your volition, etc., then yes, I would hold that it has to be considered a separate entity.

You bring up a good point about things that you may dream of that you had never experienced or learned about.

But, even for things that you have experience or learned about, I always find it odd that my conscious self (the “observer” of the dream) can be surprised by the turn of events in a dream. I can never surprise myself if I start telling myself a story I make on the spot while awake. Is the part of the brain that generates the dream not “you”?

[adhay]

@AHunter3

OK after reading your “tightening” I see that you are taking a social determinist position on the contents of the individual mind.

IN VERY CONDENSED DESCRIP: I believe that the same pattern-recognition process that enables the individual to acquire language and make sufficient sense of spoken word, written word, body language, and other aspects of other people’s behavior so as to acquire anything of cultural values and belief systems in the first place also operates so as to allow each individual to make independent assessments of things as they actuallly personally experience them and to compare and contrast that with what they have been socialized to. I believe that language-based cognitions are only a subset of cognitive processes, that emotion- and sensation-informed processes are the larger set and are in fact necessary in a “building blocks” sort of way for language-based intellectual thought to take place; and because of this I do reject formulations that would have it that individuals can only “think” in terms that were put into their heads along with the language of the surrounding culture, etc.

…

Back again. After looking over your post I don’t see much more to say other than as I previously noted I am not a “social determinist”. Your attempts to contrast your beliefs with my supposed position are thus misplaced[my emphasis above]

I said quite the opposite in my very first OP back in June where I posited that everyone on the planet speaks a different language, regardless of his “mother tongue”.

…
Language has obvious value in commerce because commercial categories are both vague enough and well enough defined for the purpose. Just about everyone knows the difference between a tire and a pumpkin. Even so, it is always possible to be surprised at what another calls a tire or a pumpkin for that matter. But words standing for abstract concepts like “fairness”, “God” and “democracy” seem to have as many meanings as there are people.

All this to say, there are 6+ billion languages (and religions I might add) walking the planet. I suspect this is generally left unremarked for political reasons. If our basic individuality was fully acknowledged, the illusion of we/they would have no traction and the idea of political parties and armies would be seen as ridiculous.

[fuzzypickles]

@AHunter3

G/F = girlfriend?

::checks::

She’s in good condition at the moment. Why?

If you don’t change the formaldehyde every week, she’ll begin to rot.

[Cisco]

If I created the universe, I’d be able to fly.

That’s curtains on that one, for me.

[AHunter3]

@fuzzypickles

@AHunter3

G/F = girlfriend?

::checks::

She’s in good condition at the moment. Why?

If you don’t change the formaldehyde every week, she’ll begin to rot.

I know it may be a bit of a stretch for you, but would you mind going to a bit of additional trouble and try to translate a bit from the Picklish dialect to the Hunter3ian vernacular, or at a minimum perhaps to a neutral language such as the lingua SDMBoardia conventionally spoken here?
Alternatively, would anyone with so much as a glimmering of what the gherkin is on about w/regards to my significant other make an attempt to clue me in here?

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@AHunter3

(Except possibly the cartesian one, which is the one thing that can be derived from conscious thought itself: I think therefore I am. This conscousness ITSELF is real.)

The thought just occurred to me (sorry if it’s old news to everybody else) that this is actually somewhat of a paradoxical position to hold: if it is true that the only thing that can be derived from conscious thought itself is the cogito, then that truth would be something that can be derived from conscious thought, as well; which then obviously means that it’s not true that the only thing that can be derived from conscious thought is the cogito.

@Polerius

You bring up a good point about things that you may dream of that you had never experienced or learned about.

But, even for things that you have experience or learned about, I always find it odd that my conscious self (the “observer” of the dream) can be surprised by the turn of events in a dream. I can never surprise myself if I start telling myself a story I make on the spot while awake. Is the part of the brain that generates the dream not “you”?

Were you surprised by the realization that events in dreams can surprise you?

I have been surprised by the results of calculations I undertook, as well, yet I don’t believe that those results were fed to me by some external source; it felt too much like work arriving at them. In some sense, the results were contained in (or at least implied by) the data I fed into the equations, and the equations themselves – the model and the boundary conditions, if you will. Yet, their actualization came as a surprise to me (and if it hadn’t, I wouldn’t have needed to do all that work in the first place). Perhaps surprise in dreams works in a similar way?

That is a bit of an ad hoc-hypothesis, I realize, however, it strikes me as sufficiently plausible for present purposes. In general, I don’t think a mind or a self is much in the way of a unified thing, but rather a compound entity comprised of some sorts of agents fulfilling certain tasks; but that stance isn’t of much use in discussing solipsism, since it pretty much amounts to rejecting it out of hand, proposing a necessary plurality of entities from the get-go. So this would be my ordinary explanation for the seemingly external nature of dream content, but for the purpose of discussing solipsism, I think I have to put myself in the shoes of someone who believes the mind with all its phenomenology to be one unified, elementary thing, and work from there.

[dropzone]

When I think of Zeno’s Paradoxes I think how Achilles would react if presented with such arrant nonsense, especially if it claimed to involve him racing a tortoise. It doesn’t end well for Zeno. eek

[AHunter3]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

The thought just occurred to me (sorry if it’s old news to everybody else) that this is actually somewhat of a paradoxical position to hold: if it is true that the only thing that can be derived from conscious thought itself is the cogito, then that truth would be something that can be derived from conscious thought, as well; which then obviously means that it’s not true that the only thing that can be derived from conscious thought is the cogito

That’s freaking brilliant. And concise.

I don’t know as how cogito ergo sum is always conventionally assessed in an (otherwise) vacuum or not, but it doesn’t matter. It’s treated as such.

It’s not an irreconcilable type of paradox, it’s second level of necessary truth: In the absence of additional info, Observation #2: the only OTHER thing I can know with a comparable level of certainty is the very fact that FACT #1 (cogito ergo sum) is the only thing that can be known for sure.

Expressed in other terms: The fallibility premise. That the one and only religious truth you can ever be absolutely certain of is that you might be wrong about anything you entertain as a religious truth, insofar as you are a fallible human being. Umm, oops, except for this second truth. Which, exclusively, self-referentially, seems to extend from the first.

[Olentzero]

Not exactly sure what HMHW means by ‘the cogito’ but I see the logic in it and wish to second Hunter’s accolade. Another one for the notebook.

[Ludovic]

@dropzone

When I think of Zeno’s Paradoxes I think how Achilles would react if presented with such arrant nonsense, especially if it claimed to involve him racing a tortoise. It doesn’t end well for Zeno. eek

It’s halves of tortoises, all the way down.

[Half_Man_Half_Wit]

@AHunter3

It’s not an irreconcilable type of paradox, it’s second level of necessary truth: In the absence of additional info, Observation #2: the only OTHER thing I can know with a comparable level of certainty is the very fact that FACT #1 (cogito ergo sum) is the only thing that can be known for sure.

It recurses like a motherfucker, though, doesn’t it? If we know that we can only know X, then it’s not true that we can only know X; so, we can only know two things: X, and that we can know X. But this is again something that we know! The problem, as I see it, is that each level of recursion renders the knowledge of the previous one invalid: ‘we can only know X’ is proved contradictory by discovering that if it was true, we would also know that we can only know X; only a ‘highest level’ would truthfully encompass all knowledge accessible in this fashion. But, it appears, we can’t get there from here.

One might say that knowing the anchor (‘X’) and the recursion rule is tantamount to ‘knowing it all’, but this harks back to what I’ve said about being surprised in my last post: the result of a calculation is similarly implied by the input data (anchor) and the equations (rules) used to manipulate that data, but still, I have to carry out the calculation to know what comes out of it. Similarly, can I actually know the four billionth element of the recursion, when my mind isn’t even big enough to hold its formulation? And there’s still an infinity to come after that one! I’d be like poor old Achilles, scribbling down the tortoises’ infinitely accumulating premises, without ever being rightly able to say that I know anything at all (not even, it seems to me, that I don’t know anything; since knowing that I don’t know anything would be to know something).

Fallibilism may seem to offer an out, by basically implying the impossibility of absolutely certain knowledge, but what does fallibilism mean when applied to necessary truths (as most, I suppose, would take the existence of the self and thus the cogito to be)? We can’t be wrong about existing, can we?

So, perhaps it’s the ‘only’ where things go wrong – that, despite appearances, we can actually know things besides merely our own self-existence with certainty. Then, it seems like there’s just a class of facts we can know, starting with our own existence, the knowledge of our own existence, the knowledge of that knowledge, etc. But, paradoxically, that class of facts only exists if we start out with the proposition that the only thing that we can know is our own existence! Hence, if we reject that proposition, that class of things we can know does not exist, and the only thing that we can know is our own existence.

Thus, it appears that if the only thing that we can know is that we ourselves exist, then it is not; yet, if it is not, then it must be. (This seems kind of contingent on the assumption that there are no other pieces of knowledge one can be similarly certain of as of one’s own existence that do not belong to the regress, and I tried to consider that option, but I couldn’t pull my thoughts together enough to at least remotely appear as if I knew what I was talking about, so I just cut it out.)

Eh, I’m running out of steam here, and I feel that I’ve confused myself into a corner that I lack the tools to argue myself out of again; it does kind of seem that I’ve fallen victim to some language/level-confusion along the way, but I can’t figure it out right now. I’ll try and return to this later.

@Olentzero

Not exactly sure what HMHW means by ‘the cogito’ but I see the logic in it and wish to second Hunter’s accolade. Another one for the notebook.

Aw, c’mon, now you’re just trying to sweet-talk me…

[Digital_Stimulus]

@Half_Man_Half_Wit

One might say that knowing the anchor (‘X’) and the recursion rule is tantamount to ‘knowing it all’, but this harks back to what I’ve said about being surprised in my last post: the result of a calculation is similarly implied by the input data (anchor) and the equations (rules) used to manipulate that data, but still, I have to carry out the calculation to know what comes out of it.

This reminds me of a seminal CS paper by Brian Cantwell Smith: Reflection and semantics in LISP, 1984, in which he formulates the notion of a “reflective tower”, then implements it as 3-LISP.

While I know I found the above on the net at some point, all I could find now was an ACM page, which I think requires you to pay to access the actual paper. His PhD thesis covering the same is available, though – all 700+ pages of it.

[Lust4Life]

Pretentious moi?