Solipsism

(First i'm just going to apologize for making so many threads lately. i dont know why i'm in a thread-making frenzy . AHH! lol. I'm doing a paper and i'd like some feedback on it. I've basically summarized a chapter from my philosophy book and am sort of feeling iffy on the topics within Solipsism that I've chosen to expand upon. Feedback and ideas would be much appreciated . I hope its not too long for you guys to read...)

Paper 1

Chapter one in Nagel’s What Does it All Mean? deals with the view of solipsism. It explains this view and then shows a few weaknesses of it.

Solipsism is the view that nothing except your own mind exists. A solipsist is a person who subscribes to these beliefs. Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am. Literally it means thinking therefore summarizes or is the summation. This is a famous line from philosophy uttered by Descartes and nicely fits into the concept of solipsism which claims that the outer world as perceived by your senses can’t be proven to exist.

Nagel asks us if it even matters if everything exists only in our minds. Does it make a difference? Maybe to certain people it makes a difference; especially those of an existentialism mindset, the type of people that are searching for meaning in life. If nothing exists except the inside of our minds then how can there be meaning in life?

Nagel also points out that if everything in the outside world is a dream or a hallucination that there has to be a reference point with which to prove this with. I know my dreams are dreams because I wake from them to find myself in my bed. When people hallucinate we know they hallucinate because what our experience of reality is different than what their experience of reality is. The bottom line is that there is a reference point, a reality. And if what we perceive to be reality is supposed to be a dream or a hallucination then there must be a reality to wake up to a sanity to remember experiencing.

Another point from the chapter is that just because we can interact with objects that seem to be outside our mind and create two sensory experiences, it doesn’t mean that these experiences are not still in your mind. Nagel uses the example of hearing a knocking sound when you knock on a table and feeling pain when you pinch yourself. They employ both sight and another sense (sound and feeling in this case)

Not only does Nagel ask us to question whether the outside world as we know it exists, but he questions whether or not we can be certain that we’ve existed for as long as our memories would lead us to believe we’ve existed. He postulates that we cant be certain that we were just born a second ago since all we can be certain that exists in our own personal time-continum is the present.
Science, falls into the same trap that all of our perceptions of reality (which is purported not to exist by solipsists) do. Because Science attempts to measure a reality we cant prove exists in the first place.

We can’t experience reality outside of our minds, so we cant prove or disprove that reality as we know is or isn’t a figment of our mind. This problem is termed the Egocentric Predicament.

The issue within the concept of How Do We Know Anything? that has been chosen to be expanded upon is not actually in the chapter itself. Rather, it is something happened upon in the author’s own mind when the chapter was discussed in class. The issue is this: if the outside world and my memories as one knows them are purely a figment of their own mind, then why would one create suffering and pain in their lives? In short; theodicy, the problem of evil pops up.

It boggles the mind why anyone would choose to experience a world in which millions of innocent children die of starvation worldwide, a world in which genocide occurs, where one experiences grief, depression, cancer and AIDS. If the outside world is all in our minds, then why doesn’t it go the way we want it to go? Why do automobile accidents occur on the way to work and cause us thousands of nonexistent dollars to fix? Why cant we stop ourselves from falling off the edge of a cliff if we perceive ourselves to be shoved off of one? Why should we get C’s on an exam when the person next to us has an A?

It’s laughable really, almost masochistic in a way how we, as the creators of our outside experiences would inflict such ego and body bruising occurrences on ourselves.

Another issue is that Solipsism can be disproven in certain cases. For example, say someone was playing outside with their brother…and these children lived near a body of water. And the brother turns to his sibling and says “Watch how far I can throw this rock!” and he throws it, only to hit his sibling in the head with the rock. The next thing the sibling knows, everything goes black and she wakes up in the yard having completely lost conciousness from the rock hitting her head.

That is an example of an outside stimuli intruding into one’s internal mental world.

It's an interesting read, but I'm afraid I'm going to be a little negative about it :S Well, I mean, the summary is good but I don't agree with nearly anything that's in it. Was this just for fun or do you have to turn it in? I thought you studied psychology?

Well, here goes.. I'll comment on it as if it were a paper for your studies (do note, I haven't really studied solipsism, actually this is the first time I come across the term and I'm writing this without reference so it's only my own thinking)

Solipsism is the view that nothing except your own mind exists. A solipsist is a person who subscribes to these beliefs. Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am. Literally it means thinking therefore summarizes or is the summation. This is a famous line from philosophy uttered by Descartes and nicely fits into the concept of solipsism which claims that the outer world as perceived by your senses can’t be proven to exist.

Click to expand...

- Solipsism can indeed also be the view that nothing outside the mind can be known or proven to exist, so it might be good to alter your first sentence.
- Cogito ergo sum means I think, so I am. Cogito, from cogere - to know/think, ergo=thus, sum from esse - to be. Also,if you want to be really correct then you should note that what Descartes actually wrote was dubito ergo sum, from dubitare - to doubt. This is in reference to the way he got to this conclusion, namely by doubting the existence of anything at all. He couldn't doubt the existance of his doubting though, hence the famous words.
- Descartes didn't think that there was no outside world or a way to prove it. He had his own (very weird) theory on how to prove the outside world exists, it involves God and a lot of imagination and plain bad thinking..

Nagel asks us if it even matters if everything exists only in our minds. Does it make a difference? Maybe to certain people it makes a difference; especially those of an existentialism mindset, the type of people that are searching for meaning in life. If nothing exists except the inside of our minds then how can there be meaning in life?

Click to expand...

- That leans very heavily on your (Nagel's) definition of a meaning of life. I'd say that as long as there is a will there is also a purpose, right? To make that happen what you want. So, as long as there are emotions (I like, don't like, am happy when I get that etc.). I wouldn't say emotions are the outside world. If what we want/project our emotions onto isn't outside our mind, then it's still inside our mind and as such it exists.

Nagel also points out that if everything in the outside world is a dream or a hallucination that there has to be a reference point with which to prove this with. I know my dreams are dreams because I wake from them to find myself in my bed. When people hallucinate we know they hallucinate because what our experience of reality is different than what their experience of reality is. The bottom line is that there is a reference point, a reality. And if what we perceive to be reality is supposed to be a dream or a hallucination then there must be a reality to wake up to a sanity to remember experiencing.

Click to expand...

- What if one time you didn't wake up from sleep, what if you were being kept asleep by people or other beings in 'the real world' for some reason, and they artificially created your own little reality inside your head, implanting memory's and manipulating stimuli and such? Even simpler, while asleep, how do you know you are asleep?
- When people hallucinate we know they hallucinate, but they don't. That's what matters, for all you know you're the one hallucinating. You might even hallucinate about being with people that see the world i exactly the same way you do.
- Memory loss? Do you see vivid full-color images of your day while asleep? When hallucinating, you typically don't have great recall, and when even when it has worn off you might not remember much of that time shortly after you ate the cake

Another point from the chapter is that just because we can interact with objects that seem to be outside our mind and create two sensory experiences, it doesn’t mean that these experiences are not still in your mind. Nagel uses the example of hearing a knocking sound when you knock on a table and feeling pain when you pinch yourself. They employ both sight and another sense (sound and feeling in this case)

Click to expand...

- Not quite sure what's meant, I think you got a double negation there. But it seems that Nagel points out that having two sensations from one object doesn't rule out that your mind makes them up? Up to here, I thought Nagel was critiquing solipsism.

Not only does Nagel ask us to question whether the outside world as we know it exists, but he questions whether or not we can be certain that we’ve existed for as long as our memories would lead us to believe we’ve existed. He postulates that we cant be certain that we were just born a second ago since all we can be certain that exists in our own personal time-continum is the present.
Science, falls into the same trap that all of our perceptions of reality (which is purported not to exist by solipsists) do. Because Science attempts to measure a reality we cant prove exists in the first place.

Click to expand...

No gripes here

We can’t experience reality outside of our minds, so we cant prove or disprove that reality as we know is or isn’t a figment of our mind. This problem is termed the Egocentric Predicament.

Click to expand...

- Personally, I'd quote this, it reads like an opinion.

The issue within the concept of How Do We Know Anything? that has been chosen to be expanded upon is not actually in the chapter itself. Rather, it is something happened upon in the author’s own mind when the chapter was discussed in class. The issue is this: if the outside world and my memories as one knows them are purely a figment of their own mind, then why would one create suffering and pain in their lives? In short; theodicy, the problem of evil pops up.

It boggles the mind why anyone would choose to experience a world in which millions of innocent children die of starvation worldwide, a world in which genocide occurs, where one experiences grief, depression, cancer and AIDS. If the outside world is all in our minds, then why doesn’t it go the way we want it to go? Why do automobile accidents occur on the way to work and cause us thousands of nonexistent dollars to fix? Why cant we stop ourselves from falling off the edge of a cliff if we perceive ourselves to be shoved off of one? Why should we get C’s on an exam when the person next to us has an A?

It’s laughable really, almost masochistic in a way how we, as the creators of our outside experiences would inflict such ego and body bruising occurrences on ourselves.

Click to expand...

- This assumes, without giving any arguments, that our mind itself controls the way in which it makes up the world around us. It could be that something else is doing it, it could be that it's done randomly, it could even be that our mind has a certain sinister ulterior motive that it hides from the conscious part of itself xD

Another issue is that Solipsism can be disproven in certain cases. For example, say someone was playing outside with their brother…and these children lived near a body of water. And the brother turns to his sibling and says “Watch how far I can throw this rock!” and he throws it, only to hit his sibling in the head with the rock. The next thing the sibling knows, everything goes black and she wakes up in the yard having completely lost conciousness from the rock hitting her head.

That is an example of an outside stimuli intruding into one’s internal mental world.

Click to expand...

- I don't understand how he can be serious. Our minds would be able to fabricate a whole reality, but not the pain that comes from having a rock hit your head and unconsciousness? It could just have set a 'timer' in itself to 'wake up' again, or something. And what if you've never been unconscious before?


Alright, sorry if it's a bit thorough but almost of of the criticism is against Nagel

Thank you for your response! I'm having a bit of difficulty trying to figure out which concept to expand upon..since it has to be a page or so long. Solipsism seems to be a concept which I have a lot of difficulty trying to grasp and argue against. In fact, I find it hard to argue against viewpoints in general when asked to do so for my philosophy course.

Finding weaknesses in arguments to expand upon is not my forte.

But I'll use your analysis to help me a bit so thank you n_n

I always know it automatically, feel it kind of, when something is said and I don't agree. The skill is to find out why you don't agree; I always try to find which words in what is said I don't agree with the most, if you know what I mean Arguing against something you do agree with is a whole other story, that's very hard :S

But yeah, I think it's hard to argue against solipsism if you think of some extreme examples. Like the matrix, I don't have any arguments against that. I still don't believe it though, but that's because I think the chances of something like that being the case are below 50%. I mean, what do you see as more likely, that we live in the real world, or that we live in a fake world created by things that are in the real world?
And.. well, not really an argument against that being the case, but think of the chances that those things also are in a fake world made by other things etc etc xD That's actually kinda funny..

( I redid my paper and expanded upon a new issue. Thanks for the input I didnt feel quite right with the other angles I tried to go for the first time. I put the issue I chose to expand upon within Solipsism in italics)

Chapter one in Nagel’s What Does it All Mean? deals with the view of solipsism. It explains this view and then shows a few weaknesses of it. Solipsism is the view that nothing except your own mind exists. A solipsist is a person who subscribes to these beliefs. Cogito Ergo Sum, I think therefore I am. Literally it means thinking therefore summarizes or is the summation. This is a famous line from philosophy uttered by Descartes and nicely fits into the concept of solipsism which claims that the outer world as perceived by your senses can’t be proven to exist.

Nagel asks us if it even matters if everything exists only in our minds. Does it make a difference? Maybe to certain people it makes a difference; especially those of an existentialism mindset, the type of people that are searching for meaning in life. If nothing exists except the inside of our minds then how can there be meaning in life?

Nagel also points out that if everything in the outside world is a dream or a hallucination that there has to be a reference point with which to prove this with. I know my dreams are dreams because I wake from them to find myself in my bed. When people hallucinate we know they hallucinate because what our experience of reality is different than what their experience of reality is. The bottom line is that there is a reference point, a reality. And if what we perceive to be reality is supposed to be a dream or a hallucination then there must be a reality to wake up to a sanity to remember experiencing.

Another point from the chapter is that just because we can interact with objects that seem to be outside our mind and create two sensory experiences, it doesn’t mean that these experiences are not still in your mind. Nagel uses the example of hearing a knocking sound when you knock on a table and feeling pain when you pinch yourself. They employ both sight and another sense (sound and feeling in this case)

Not only does Nagel ask us to question whether the outside world as we know it exists, but he questions whether or not we can be certain that we’ve existed for as long as our memories would lead us to believe we’ve existed. He postulates that we cant be certain that we were just born a second ago since all we can be certain that exists in our own personal time-continum is the present.

Science, falls into the same trap that all of our perceptions of reality (which is purported not to exist by solipsists) do. Because Science attempts to measure a reality we cant prove exists in the first place.

We can’t experience reality outside of our minds, so we cant prove or disprove that reality as we know is or isn’t a figment of our mind. This problem is termed the Egocentric Predicament.

Because solipsism likens the outside world to a dream, the nature of dreams is the issue within Solipsism that will be expanded upon. From my own personal experiences with what dreams are like I’ll examine this claim.

Dreams; what are they exactly? What is their nature and how do they appear to us? If solipsism is going to compare the unreality of the world around us to a dreamlike state then we should explore what exactly a dream is and how they work.

The first point will be that dreams do not exist intentionally to fool us into believing that they are in fact reality. We usually are helpless in them and have little to no control over who we dream of, where we are in our dreams and what occurs in them. Logic is skewed in them. We may find that our legs have turned to jello as we attempt to run away from a monster. We may be able to fly, thwarting the scientific laws of gravity.

It is this very lack of logic, this…inability to be able to predict certain occurrences in dreams that in fact identify them as dreams. Dreams can defy physical laws of motion and other physical laws that we find ourselves bound by when we wake in our beds.

However, dreams do derive some of their elements from the real world. So, following this logic, it’s safe to say that if the world around us is merely a dream, then it must pull at least SOME elements from the reality which we can’t directly experience.

Furthermore, when I dream, I consider my personal dreams to be an expression of how I feel towards people or situations that have occurred/will occur in my waking world. For example, when I was a child, I had a nightmare in which there was a beast that lived under my bed. This dream was an expression of a developmental stage in my childhood; me fearing the unknown. Fear of the dark is a common fear for children and one they usually outgrow. But, me dreaming about a monster under my bed was an expression of my fear of the dark I’d experience when my parents would shut off my bedroom lights.

So, it follows that if dreams are an expression of how we feel about things in our waking world, then this reality that Solipsism likens to a dream-like state should be performing a similar function.

Another point within this issue is that if we can’t predict or control what happens in our dreams, then this indicates that the reality we wake up to is actually reality. Dreams do not conform to any physical laws and seem to disregard societal etiquette. For example, in reality, one can predict that when one drops a pencil it’ll without a doubt drop onto a floor or some sort of surface. In a dream, if one drops a pencil it may float, it may turn into a bunny, it may disappear entirely. We can’t predict what that pencil will do once it drops when we are dreaming. In our waking world (which Solipsists say is a figment of our minds and doesn’t actually exist) we have physical laws. If we had tea with the Queen of England in our waking world, we’d have certain expectations about what her behavior would be. If we dreamt that we had tea with the Queen, for all we know she might act like the Mad Hatter from Alice in Wonderland.

So, the conclusion is that because one cant control anything that happens when one dreams, what one dreams about, and cant predict what’ll happen; that when we close our eyes to dream, we are not in fact having a dream within a dream; the reality we wake up to in the morning is actually reality.

Playing devil's advocate (because I don't believe in solpsism but I also believe it can't be disproven rationally)... remember that pain is information sent to us from the brain. Consciousness (or lack thereof) is regulated by the brain. The brain is just a physical representation of the mind. Just because my mind may be the only thing that exists doesn't mean an illusion of cause and effect can't influence it.

That being said... many people believe that the physical is the foundation of reality, and we are just conscious beings that inhabit it. I believe that consciousness is the foundation, and the material world is "thought up" to put it simply. It is just a stable pool of channeled consciousness derived from a greater, "collective consciousness" from which we all orignate. Some may call it "God" (and both share many of the same attributes such as omnipresence) but it is not a separate being. We are all just pieces of this "collective consciousness" in a world created by it (or us) in order to interact with itself (or eachother) and experience measurement and imperfection... why? Because consciousness is in itself perfect, and perfection is emotionless and boring.

I also believe that other than our physical reality, an infinite amount of less stable pools of channeled consciousness exist. Your subconscious visits these places every night when you fall asleep. Yup, dreams are really just different "worlds" with less conscious energy invested in them. You can even train yourself to take your conscious (ie. you in your waking state) to these different worlds by practicing meditation. This is called astral projection (wikipedia this if you're interested) or the out of body experience. I've had many out of body experiences (which are different from dreams... it's like you're awake in a virtual reality.) Experts on the subject have been able to transcend many levels (or planes) and have been able to reach the collective consciousness itself. I've really only gotten past the ethereal (a sort of reality that mirrors our reality) and the astral (where your subconsious goes when you dream.)

So yeah, thought I'd share this since this is a philosophical-based topic about the mind and all...

I find solipsism to be true in the most certain essence of existence itself, however, that which is not us, is not our ego. That which is you is your ego, therefore that which is you+ everything else that is not= the sum of your perceivable reality+ the sum of all other perceivable realities= the entirety of perceivable reality+ that which is not perceivable is nothing. So basically on some level of consciousness for one being and one being alone, solipsism is true.

One could say most certainly that the dream state is a state of solipsism. I've rarely had a dream that connected to the last in relevance similar to that of waking life. When you wake from a dream, most often, your last waking memories connect with your present when you wake up, as in you general tend to wake up where you fell asleep or around that area. Where as in a dream it's more of a random reset every time.

So to the solipsist, a being that truelly exists in a state of solipsism, existence must be much the opposite. The dream is the constant, and the waking life is you and me. The solipsist knows it is the only thing that exists which is therefore why we exist as a solution to the problem. The ego being an inevitability of consciousness therefor is capable of the concept of solipsism, but is not presented with the power to prove or disprove the notion becuase it did not originate anywhere else except in the mind of that whom the concept originated and created.

philosophy would be so boring to me lol, spent half my life stuck in a ******** philosophical haze. The eastern world decided philosophy was a disease a long long time ago lol, hence the creation of meditation. Thought is to arbitraury and limited to the auditory world.

anyway, you should just write on your paper, you are all just facets of my fabricated reality and don't truely exist so give me an A. lol. however reality wuldn't seem very real if everyone and everything responded to our desires now would it?

yesm said:

anyway, you should just write on your paper, you are all just facets of my fabricated reality and don't truely exist so give me an A.

Click to expand...

lol! I should shouldnt I . When we went over this chapter in class I seriously thought about walking straight out of the classroom and telling the professor that since she was just a part of a world which wasnt reality then I didnt have to stay in class

My teacher would probably be ok with that hehe. Depends on your teacher though.

I think it's a well written piece. If you keep to the rule that solipsism likens the perceived world to a dreamlike state it's pretty solid. I don't think it necessarily does, though.
Anyway, one other thing you might want to consider is that we don't always expect things in dreams to happen as we would expect them to happen in the real world. In a dream, you could drop the pencil, and it might float, and you might have expected it to float and not at all be surprised by it.