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You know that how you experience the world is not the world as it is. Your eyes move about constantly but you dont see it, and the brain removes things, and th

• svnt 3y ago
  This is not profound, it is only solipsism. Things exist outside your experience. Things exist outside my experience. The only way to get to the perspective you describe is to discard or devalue the experience of everyone else. If you encounter a large carnivore in the wild and it knocks you out, the animal doesn’t disappear. To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience is an extreme exercise of narcissism that enables some fairly incredible behaviors. But it is not closer to truth.
  • whelp_24 3y ago
    I mean, saying firmly that other things exist doesn't make it true. Solipsism may be disliked but not disproven.
    • mannykannot 3y ago
      Solipsism is a concept insofar as we can define it, and even talk about it, in a way that is not obviously nonsensical, and is arguably useful in discussing epistemology, but it is not obvious that a rational person could be a solipsist in the sense of holding a justified belief that the (i.e. their) self is the only reality. I suspect that any such person attempting to justify that belief (to themselves, of course - who else?) would run into inconsistencies whenever they tried to define concepts such as the self, justification and reality in ways that are not tautological.
      • mypalmike 3y ago
        What inconsistencies would you encounter? It would seem that a solipsistic view is trivially consistent. Any phenomenon you experience has a simple explanation : that's how it was designed for you. Conversely, a non-solipsistic view demands explanations for an unimaginable plethora of phenomena. Everything you observe from the subatomic to the cosmological to people eating Tide Pods has aspects that are difficult to explain.
        • mannykannot 3y ago
          I'm not convinced that there are unavoidable inconsistencies, but I suggested it would be difficult for a rational solipsist to define concepts such as the self, justification and reality (all of which are concepts needed in order to take any position on solipsism), and I don't see how saying "it's just how it was designed for me" gets the job done; in fact, this introduces another concept, design, in need of definition. If you could present a more worked-out example of how a rational solipsist would define the concept of reality without, at any point, adopting a non-solipsist stance (such as using the concept of design), I might be more convinced. Furthermore, a rational solipist does not avoid any of the questions faced by non-solipsists: wherever the latter asks "why is it that... and not something else?", the rational solipsist has the question "why does it seem that... and not something else?" Saying "it was designed that way" is no more of an explanation than "it is that way", and the rational solipsist will realize that this is so. Perhaps you are thinking of brains-in-vats or simulations in their own simulated universe? If such an entity supposed that it was a brain-in-a-vat or a simulation, however, it would not be a rational solipsist, as these hypotheses presume a reality beyond their experiences (in any such case, of course, the non-solipsist brain-in-a-vat or simulation would be mistaken about what reality lies beyond its experiences, but nevertheless, there would be such a reality.)
          • whelp_24 3y ago
            There are different forms, but isn't the main one just that you can only prove the existence of your own mind? If there is a reality beyond your senses that you cannot interact with, does it matter to you? A brain in a vat hallucinating a universe, is the same thing as just hallucinating a universe with no further reality, is the same thing as being in a particularly vivid dream, is the same a being a simulation. The idea that a brain must exist somewhere in a vat to present this reality to you, came from your mind. If some of the rules of your reality are entirely disconnected with your senses, why not all?
    • svnt 3y ago
      If I find the remains of another person who has been killed and eaten by an animal, should I assume that this can never happen to me because this world was created for me and this person was only a simulation? Because if all that exists is what I know then that would be pretty logical. I’ve never been eaten by an animal and I am the only one in here.
      • roenxi 3y ago
        That is the big question, isn't it? We don't know enough about time to say. It is as philosophically plausible as any other idea that any particular thread of consciousness wends on infinitely in its own personal timeline, watching everything else decay and disappear until it is the last thing left. It is so implausible that the universe even exists for our statistical impossibility of self to have happened, it would be a bit of a chuckle if there was a third impossibility in the future.
        • incompatible 3y ago
          It seems a bit odd that we exist at all though, doesn't it? Surely the natural state, or the starting state, would be to have nothing, no time and no space. But then, how would anything ever happen? But given that we exist, then perhaps things have always existed, before the apparent beginning of the universe that we can apparently observe? But if things have existed for so long, why are we in such a state of ignorance and imperfection? Surely given all this infinite time, something better would have been created by now? But consciousness doesn't seem to be a "thing" with a physical presence in the real universe. It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. Like a web browser running on a computer. Go to sleep and the web browser shuts down, wake up the next day and a new one is instantiated. Then there's no continuity of consciousness, it only lasts for a few hours, and we can return to wondering why I feel like I exist in a here and now, one moment in a possibly infinite timeline.
          • vintermann 3y ago
            > It seems to be an emergent phenomenon created by the brain apparently because it's useful in some way. People need to be more careful about that word "useful". Saying something is useful, is always implying a who it is useful for. Saying it's useful, but it's not useful for anyone, is as meaningless as saying something is useful, but it's not useful for anything. (This was, as I recall, one of Kant's "categories of reason"). So by saying the brain creates something for a purpose, you're already assuming that the brain is a thing, and it's a thing that wants things. I'm not saying that's wrong, but given how hard it seems to not make circular arguments with it, maybe it isn't actually an empirical question.
  • Etheryte 3y ago
    It may be extremely narcissistic, but there is no way for you to prove nor disprove it. That is, in very broad strokes, also the point Kant makes.
    • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
      Not everything that I can't disprove should be taken seriously.
      • qudat 3y ago
        Why so negative?
        • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
          Why do you perceive that as negative? To me, it's freeing. Great, someone created some philosophical position that is not provably wrong. That doesn't mean that I have to take it seriously.
          • qudat 3y ago
            It was a joke. Your sentence was hard to read because it had 3 negatives in it: > [Not] everything that I [can't] [disprove] should be taken seriously.
            • AnimalMuppet 3y ago
              Ah, I see. Well, in that case, I was negative because I couldn't think how to phrase it better in the positive (or with only one negative). I tried to come up with a good story, and was then going to say "you can't prove it wrong ;-)", but my imagination failed me...
    • svnt 3y ago
      It hasn’t been disproven. That doesn’t mean it can’t.
  • vacuity 3y ago
    > To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience I don't think there's a solpsistic component to the idea that we have our own subjective realities. For one thing, it's about as true as we seem to be able to tell. For another, accepting it doesn't mean we have to be self-centered. Even our experiences of other people aren't objective; someone giving a speech can give very different vibes depending on who's listening. I read what you wrote, but do I really understand what you mean? In this case I have a pretty good idea, but there's no way I can be certain that we're on the same page. Our consciousnesses, our intelligences, are separate. We aren't in some hive mind; we are self-contained agents that interact with each other and gain our own experiences.
    • svnt 3y ago
      You don’t seem to have taken the time to understand my comment. I acknowledged subjective realities earlier in my statement. You are arguing a strawman. The solipsism is the second half of parent’s comment where they state that everything exists only within their reality. Subjectivities are subsets of our existence. Arguing that an entire universe exists for one human awareness is solipsism.
      • vacuity 3y ago
        GP and I aren't talking about subjective realities merely on the level of "this is my perspective of this person and that thing". Insofar as you or I could be said to be conscious, to perceive the world and to think about it, that is the extent of our respective subjective realities. It's not that the universe exists for every single human. Rather, as humans, we each perceive the universe, and others, in the ways that we do. We could be in the Matrix right now. The nature of a subjective reality is that, in a sense, there is no difference to us whether we are "real" or in the Matrix. What we perceive is what we perceive. How useful this model is is a different matter, but it's not solipsistic.
        • svnt 3y ago
          I understand the conversation you’re having. Here is the definition of solipsism: Solipsism (/ˈsɒlɪpsɪzəm/ ⓘ SOLL-ip-siz-əm; from Latin solus 'alone', and ipse 'self')[1] is the philosophical idea that only one's mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.
  • ruszki 3y ago
    There is no difference between your reasoning and religiousness. You cannot prove it either. That “could” in parent comment is a very important part of what they said.
    • EVa5I7bHFq9mnYK 3y ago
      There is a difference. With reasoning, you can predict future, to a degree. If I see a brick falling on me, I know I will feel pain in a few moments. This helps me to live a long and healthy life by avoiding falling bricks. Religion is, by design, unverifiable. It can't be used to predict the future. If it were, its predictions would be easy to check, which is not allowed. So all religious teachings evolved to avoid making any hard predictions about the future. The Messiah WILL come - but nobody will tell you the date. You WILL go to Heaven if you behave - but nobody came back to report.
      • bbor 3y ago
        That’s the thing - you can’t predict the future 100% of the time. What if we float into a dark matter cloud tomorrow and it reverses gravity and we all fly off into space, bricks and all? Reasoning is great but we shouldn’t forget the faith element of induction
        • WillAdams 3y ago
          The approach of the dark matter cloud would be seen in perturbations of orbits and its effects predicted long before they occur. Consider --- if you use traditional physics to completely calculate the orbit of all the planets around the solar system, everything falls out pretty much perfectly --- except for the orbit of Mercury --- it is elliptical and gradually rotates around the sun: - ~5,030 arc seconds of this rotation are from the gravity of the sun - ~530 arc seconds from the other planets - ~43 arc seconds cannot be accounted for by the classic laws of physics, but are perfectly explained by general relativity
      • mistermann 3y ago
        > Religion is, by design, unverifiable. It can't be used to predict the future. Chapter 1 of the Tao te Ching has a long track record of quite accurately (not the best word?) but very vaguely predicts future human behavior: constant ignorance of the truth contained within the scripture, the consequences of which we continue to suffer.
  • smokel 3y ago
    It might also be "idealism". Perhaps that is less narcissistic, but even so, an undesired trait in society cannot be a good argument against a metaphysical theory, don't you think?
    • svnt 3y ago
      If the society exists and persists and is incompatible with said metaphysical theory, I think it is a great argument against it.
  • mistermann 3y ago
    > The only way to get to the perspective you describe is to discard or devalue the experience of everyone else. Technically incorrect. Standard abstraction, decomposition, ontology, etc can achieve it as well, sometimes even without people getting their feelings hurt. > To seriously hold that all of what you have known was created for your experience is an extreme exercise of narcissism that enables some fairly incredible behaviors. But it is not closer to truth. As a self-diagnosed narcissist, this seems more like delusion or normative cognition (on your behalf). Narcissism is very useful for certain forms of analysis though.
    • svnt 3y ago
      How is it technically incorrect to say that solipsism discards or devalues the perspectives of everyone else? You think your mind is capable of containing billions of identical sole-minds? Discarding is discarding. If that triggers affect for you or you read affect from me that’s down to your comprehension. How do you explain forms of socially facilitated learning if your mind is the only thing that exists?
      • mistermann 3y ago
        > How is it technically incorrect to say that solipsism discards or devalues the perspectives of everyone else? The burden of proof is yours, not mine. > How do you explain forms of socially facilitated learning if your mind is the only thing that exists? I don't because I'm not a solipsist, but I see no reason why that couldn't be imagined. If anything, most people have a problem with not imagining reality.
        • svnt 3y ago
          > The burden of proof is yours , not mine. That’s not how this works — you have to say that before you say it’s incorrect otherwise it becomes your burden. But I’ll answer anyway. If I am the one mind, then how could anyone make an argument that any other mind (which must only be an apparent mind, created in some way to serve my experience) could be my equivalent? The truth of my statement is inherent in the structure of solipsism.
• deleted 3y ago
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• tshaddox 3y ago
  Aren’t you contradicting yourself? “You know your brain adds things that are inaccurate” followed immediately by “you will only ever know the inside of your own head.” Clearly we can use reason to learn things about the inaccuracies of our sensory perception.
  • bbor 3y ago
    How could we learn the inaccuracies of our sense perceptions without involving those very same (flawed) perceptions? I totally agree that it is our duty to identify and account for our biases and inaccuracies, but I don’t think we could ever reach any meaningful certainty about the topic.
    • tshaddox 3y ago
      We’re always using perception, of course, but we can learn about inaccuracies in one perception using a different perception (and reason). A very obvious example is optical illusions, but this is in fact the case with all observations. To make scientific conclusions from observations made using a telescope, you need to know how the telescope works. And the same is true of all observations from all instruments, including for example the human visual system.
    • antisthenes 3y ago
      > How could we learn the inaccuracies of our sense perceptions without involving those very same (flawed) perceptions? By taking measurements from machines, who are devoid of such flaws. > I totally agree that it is our duty to identify and account for our biases and inaccuracies, but I don’t think we could ever reach any meaningful certainty about the topic. What in the world? That's literally what science has been attempting to do for over 1000 years. With varying degrees of success, true, but it's the best way we have so far to be able to approximate 'reality' without relying on our senses.
      • tshaddox 3y ago
        > By taking measurements from machines, who are devoid of such flaws. Kinda. We still need to know how the machine works, which of course involves making observations of the machine which are themselves error-prone.
• thom 3y ago
  But the hidden assumption here is that somehow our perceptions don’t generalise to the actual goings on in the universe, when they clearly do. Our perceptions seem extremely well correlated with reality, and even when this isn’t the case for someone psychotic, the rest of us perceive that perfectly normally. I’m agnostic and obviously can’t make any statements about where things came from or why, but I’m entirely confident that I perceive my lot in life accurately enough that I don’t need any philosophical angst about it.
  • hardlianotion 3y ago
    “ But the hidden assumption here is that somehow our perceptions don’t generalise to the actual goings on in the universe, when they clearly do.” I think there are enough posts on this subject thread to make me think that this is not clear to everyone. It’s not clear to me either.
    • thom 3y ago
      I feel bad for everyone who's regularly walking into invisible walls and waking up as a giant insect, I guess.
      • hardlianotion 3y ago
        I suppose there is conceptual room in the gap between things that don't internally make consistent sense to a person, and the actual rules of the true universe.
  • mistermann 3y ago
    With language this loose and ambiguous, is it even possible to "be" incorrect? An amazing percentage of human conversation is like this, including discussions between genuine (on a relative basis, which is how our culture "measures" such things) rational and scientific people.
• vintermann 3y ago
  > You know that how you experience the world is not the world as it is. Your eyes move about constantly but you dont see it This is a different kind of "the world as it is" vs. "the world as you experience it" difference, as I understand Kant: You can always make more sophisticated interpretations of your direct experiences that accounts for such things as visual or even temporal illusions, but there are things you can never know for sure - for instance, whether time is your consciousness moving through a series of immutable states, like frames on a film reel, or whether it's the reel that is moving. We are constrained from the basic structure of our reasoning from finding answers to such questions. That is very different from illusions we can correct for through better physics theories.