Solipsism

[Icarus]

Schopenhauer once said that solipsism "could only be found in a madhouse: as such it would then need not so much a refutation as a cure." Yet, if you take yourself into the madhouse and think about it, you cannot disprove solipsism in any way. It's ok to find it distasteful and disparage the idea as ridiculous, but it still won't go away. Why not? Why can't you connect to another mind and see the world through another's sensibilities and mind and thoughts? Is it and will it always be impossible, or is it something that may reasonably be seen as technologically possible in a far flung future?

[Eric]

I think this is a great question. I think solipsism is here to stay. And we probably will never know why. I think consciousness is the culprit. I think consciousness allows us to adopt different *points of view* on our experiences, and one of those points of views is at the extreme far margin where we note that we merely experience; there need be nothing *causing* those experiences. But even if I’m right, this doesn’t help because consciousness itself is completely mysterious. Heck, dualism is alive and well, again.

[Elena]

Solipsism does reveal one possibility of consciousness, but it is only one. In order to understand the problem of solipsism, and why it can seem inescapable, we must grasp the existential stance that engenders it, as well as the philosophical categories that structure this stance. Since this thread was started under the "Goodbye , Mr Descartes" category, it seems Icarus understands that something about the Cartesian conceptual apparatus is what engendered this problem to begin with, and this is correct.

Only because we have come to structure our consciousness in terms of self/other, mind/nature, mind/body, and reason/feeling dichotomies do we come to experience an inescapable slide towards solipsism where pre-modern philosophers didn't even register solipsism as a valid, never mind a central philosophical problem. Where they perceived the mind as inhabiting a meaningful ontological order, we perceive a radical dissociation between "primary" and "secondary" qualities, and furthermore, we understand thought as representation and projection, not as some kind of participation in the world that is peculiar to our kind of being. As a result, we inevitably come to perceive ourselves as inhabiting some mind-bubble, sealed from the rest of reality, and understand our experience as occurring "in "a kind of mental container. Thinkers such as Heidegger and the late Wittgenstein have offered alternative starting points for reflection which place the mind is a shared, public domain of meaning, and which therefore make solipsism vanish as a legitimate modality of consciousness. Where many of us seek to start from the mind-bubble and build our way out to an external world, they pull the plank from under this whole epistemic enterprise by showing us we're already out there.

Again, the starting points for thought determine the problems registered. Is this the only starting point? No. Why is it so persuasive then? It's not for everyone. It is above all for those who adopt Descartes' epistemic project, which deems the attainment of objective certainty to be the ultimate end of human life, with no other end, nor any other mode of knowing save the Cartesian (geometrically-derived) as a valid form of access to being. The existential corrolary of such a project is simply solipsism, a mind made so completely "other" to its utterly objectified world.

[Elena]

Because solipsism is the result of a perspectival stance, it can't be proved or disproved. It's what -happens- when you commit to that stance. Therefore, to show its inadequacy you do not need disproof, but a shift in perspective.

However, a -kind- of disproof that reveals its inherent contradictions and inadequacies as a perspective can be offered along the lines offered by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein showed the absurdity of conceiving of such a thing as a "private language," and that in fact each of us is constituted by a public, shared universe of meanings. The intersubjective is the primary reality; the introspective is derivative from this. It follows from this that there is an inconsistency, a performative contradiction involved in most solipsism: unless you're living in a jungle or a Montaignian tower, you exist by performing in some social reality. Saying: "I am a solipsist," even if only on a piece of paper, is a performative contradiction because you are holding an intellectual position that goes contrary to what you are actually performing, existentially. This position is inconsistent, as well as harbouring a great deal of self-deception.

But even if you do manage to extricate yourself from discourse, even then, solipsism is a form of participation in the universe, just as any other conscious act is. The evolutionary perspective simply annihilates the solipsist stance as illusory: we are organisms constituted by and participating in an environment, if not social and cultural, then at the least natural. But again, for most of us (who are not very accomplished Zen masters), we carry all our interactions into reflection, and shape our inner voice against our past interpersonal experience. When we speak to ourselves, we speak only with a voice already shaped against others. Therefore, solipsism is a double-bind strengthened and made inescapable by a powerful self-deception.

And lastly, folks like Husserl have shown that consciousness is -intentional- in nature. In other words, consciousness is something that -happens- between a subject (one we can isolate merely for analytical purposes) and some “external object.” But consciousness -is- the act, the happening, the in-between connection that flares up across a certain ontic field. It is not some privately held, sealed-off essence. Therefore solipsism can only emerge from a dubious, mental atomist picture of consciousness that is simply not tenable in the light of new science and new philosophical explorations. It is not an adaptive perspective, and it is filled with inner contradiction.

So to finally answer the OP: we are engaged in a continuous interaction with other minds and with our world. We may never be able to fully articulate all that is exchanged, and all that we perceive about others and our world, but these transactions manifestly constitute us at a fundamental level. And in fact, we -are- nothing but the interaction. We don't need technology: we -have- empathy, which only becomes problematic in the light of our artificial, reductionist accounts of ourselves. The continuity of interchange is, not surprisingly, lost in translation. But this is not to say it doesn't manifestly -exist-.

[Rhonda]

With all the hammering on Descartes, one ought to hasten to point out that, at least according to his Sixth Meditation, that solipsism is not a necessary conclusion. Indeed, to throw the baby out with the bathwater, something empiricism has no trouble doing with aplomb, creates the entire range of solipsistic problems. Hence sophistry is alive and well beyond the meteoric issue of Wittgenstein's language confusion thesis.
We may argue as to whether D's conclusions are valid, but not that he stumbled into a darkened room from which he was unable to extricate himself. As Elena mentions, should that have been true, Husserl could not have written the Meditations. If we were solipsists, of course, we would have no means by which to verify this.
Elena said, Therefore solipsism can only emerge from a dubious, mental atomist picture of consciousness that is simply not tenable in the light of new science and new philosophical explorations. It is not an adaptive perspective, and it is filled with inner contradiction.
I would argue something slightly different than this, without differing in the intent, I think: perhaps solipsism emerges necessarily from the hazy disconnected picture we may have of our own consciousness at times. In itself, I agree that it is not adaptive in perspective, but that centers on the idea that we believe it to be necessarily non-dynamic. Taken dynamically and systematically, perhaps solipsism is the account of consciousness moving through the world.
Lastly while solipsism may represent inconsistencies through its own expression, (and it would be heretical to suppose that a given consciousness has done otherwise,) it is incapable, statically or dynamically, of contradicting itself.

[epiphenomenalism]

Solipsism only makes sense if you are a dualist. If you are not, there is no reason whatsoever to assume that from all the people with identical brains, you are the only one with consciousness. And with all the increase in materialist thinking - no, solipsism is not here to stay.

When it comes to Descartes - you don't have to wave him goodbye, he was not a solipsist.

[Elena]

To respond to the attractive notion that, once the blaze of materialist revelation sweeps light across our minds' eyes, we shall be cured of solipsism once and for all - well, not quite. I actually read Descartes' dualism as a last attempt to "save the phenomena" (which was Aristotle's injunction to science - to seek to explain, not explain away, ie reduce, the phenomena we actually experience in the lifeworld). Descartes's positing of a ghost of interiority in the machine I read as an instinctive and desperate defence gesture against the ravages materialist reductionism play on the concreteness of our day-to-day experience. Never mind that the world around has been boiled down to a few austere abstractions in his cosmology; at least we can maintain this warm and fuzzy human core - itself now reduced from its previous manifold richness to "pure" contentless thought which bears only the most tenuous relation (if at all) to the surrounding mechanistic world.

Solipsism becomes a problem only when the tiny specter of consciousness becomes (pathologically) purged out of the world by materialist abstractions (which become confused with the world, instead of being recognized for what they are - instruments of understanding), and shoved into the smallest corner it can possibly occupy. Descartes' view inevitably leads to such solipsism. But you have to give him credit for at least keeping mind (and the irreducibility of our lived experience) into the picture. Beyond Descartes' pathetic fencing off of the psychic life - ie, after total materialist meltdown - lies something -worse- than solipsism. I think of it as intellectually-induced schizophrenia. Adrienne Rich described it well: When someone, some savant, perhaps, holds up a picture of the world, and you're not in it, you experience a kind of dreadful vertigo.

You (or one, or whomever) experience - this is your primary knowledge, this primary involvement with the world. The claims of your experience are undeniable to you. And yet, the abstractions held forth explain away the seemingly irreducible concreteness of your actual experience and boil these down to a few abstractions and generalized averages of phenomena. The one thing we know about reason, after all, is that it -abstracts-, it -selects- from the continuum of our living involvement with the world certain representations of averages. In other words, the particular, the in-itself, the actual moment with its totality of involvement, escapes reason. We will never catch ourselves in our own symbolic nets. We ourselves as we manifestly exist, and all the complex engagement with the surrounding world that is the substance of our experience, will filter right through that net. But if you forget this, and if you paste the materialist picture over the lifeworld (the actual world of your experience), suddenly, you're not just cornered into a tiny claustrophobic spot: you're not even there.

There is experience, the phenomenal world, and there are the abstractions derived -from- experience, which supposedly are to explain the experience, but which more often than not are reified and come to supplant experience. The difficulty with the materialist pictures disappears, not if we turn to dualism or idealism (both of which are bogey men held up by materialists to bully us into uncritical worship of the day's abstractions that pass for reality-itself), but if we adopt a self-critical materialism, ie, one that is aware of the nature of the instruments with which -we make- the materialist world picture. When we recognize that the abstractions are instruments, not representations of the order of things, or worse, the order of things itself (in a Platonism gone rampant), then we keep them where they belong, which is in the edifice of abstractions sacrosanct in our day. We do NOT replace the world of actual lived experience from which all abstract knowledge is derived with abstractions. This kind of intellectual contortionism is not only pathological when enacted existentially and pragmatically, but it is intellectual suicide. I make pictures of which I am not a part, and replace myself with the pictures in order to resolve the painful contradictions of my nature that prompted me to make pictures to begin with. The recipe for insanity.

Rhonda, I don't know how solipsism can be dynamic, unless dialectic can be fully internalized. Usually dynamism is set into motion when we enter into some kind of dialectical transaction with our outside world, no?

[Tom]

Hello, Mr. Descartes, it's about time we became reacquainted.

If you want to understand Descartes, read "The World (Treatise of Light)", instead of the canonical and now tired texts used to introduce all those poor beginning philosophy students to the silly problem of solipsism. In "The World (Treatise of Light)" Descartes makes clear he has one, singular, positive, non-skeptical mission and vision, to which the later works are addendum. That mission is to overturn the old Aristotelian cosmology and to establish a very interesting (non-Newtonian) metaphysics of the world as fluid and vortex and hydraulic mechanism -- not the British-style billiard-ball materialism -- but a more elegant, typically French vision of the world as a system of flowing hydraulic mechanisms.

http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35...

"The World (Treatise of Light)" is truly a beautiful work of the metaphysical and scientific imagination! This was science when it was inspirational and not drudgery as it's become too much today. The man shows his absolute genius here, a first-rate mind if ever there was one. And he can draw! -- all those interesting and illustrative pictures he draws to convey his ideas. We could use more philosophers with this talent!

The "Discourse on Method" -- with its emphasis on doubt and skepticism -- came later as a means to provide cover for his radically new cosmological vision laid out in "The World".

And by the way you doubters of dualism: Descartes understood better than all the poor saps in science these days that without a mind independent of the world there can be no such thing as real objectivity in science -- objectivity is purely and simply impossible if the mind affects the world from within it.

Descartes was simply attempting to articulate the only way true objectivity would be possible -- only by a mind independent of the world it studies. You can criticize him, but most today do it very unintelligently, even stupidly, that is, without understanding how deeply the rejection of dualism undermines the whole enterprise of naturalistic science as it is conceived in the Anglo world.

Reject mind-world dualism = give up the notion of scientific objectivity.

[Andrew]

One of the most urgent priorities for philosophy must be to make solipsism into a more attractive notion, because I feel sure it contains an important truth, namely that we can never free ourselves totally from the world that is the object of our attention, and we cannot incontrovertibly establish an independent world of objects and other people.

Yet it seems so antithetical to common sense that the world somehow depends on me being conscious in it, which is what solipsism seems to imply. Surely the world must go on without me? Does not the value in my existence depend on the world carrying on after I'm gone?

Related questions are: Must not the meaning of notions such as 'me' and 'others' be extended beyond 'human being' as biological object? Should we not embrace religious notions of surviving death (afterlife), though perhaps as metaphor; not meaning to physically survive death.

[Elena]

I agree with Andrew that solipsism contains a powerful insight into our condition. The reason why it is so powerful, I think, is because it is immediately -evident- to us (in Husserl's phenomenological sense of evidence, ie, an incontrovertible truth about the structure of our experience). To be more precise, it appears evident when we adopt a particular stance vis a vis the world. It appears evident when the Cartesian epistemological project (as adopted by tradition), with its standard of analytical, reductionist, or as he put it, "geometrical" knowing becomes the yardstick for all knowledge. When the perceptual world becomes filtered through this epistemological framework, the ontology produced is that of materialist reductionism. The only existential experience that can result when confronted with this world, for the embodied observer, is solipsism.

The reason solipsism has such a pull on our minds is because it is evident, and no amount of argument can dispel this experiential evidence. Only a leap to an altered stance, which would yield other experiential evidence, could pull us out. Heidegger and Wittgenstein, as well as Husserl, pointed the way to such evidence. If you can make the perspectival leap to acknowledging the intentional nature of consciousness, you're out. This is more than initiating a shift in one's theoretical constructs through argument; this is inhabiting a wholly new perspectival domain. Once you -realize- that consciousness is not some thing, some concentrated nugget or ball or singularity -within- you, once you acknowledge that it is rather an event of a fundamentally transactional nature, that consciousness is "conscious-of," always, you're out. To produce such altered phenomenological evidence requires something rather deeper than argument or tinkering with conceptual constructs; it requires meditation. Descartes took us into the heart of thought - or rather of one aspect of thought, with his Meditations. The evidence he produced in us through our experience of running through his Meditations is binding in a way that none of the arguments surrounding the issue are. To alter that evidential power, you must produce meditations (like Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations, which I read as a reverse of Descartes' Meditations), that take the other route: not outside-in, but inside-out.

I agree with Tom's apt insight: "Descartes understood better than all the poor saps in science these days that without a mind independent of the world there can be no such thing as real objectivity in science -- objectivity is purely and simply impossible if the mind affects the world from within it."

Yes, naturalism involves this fundamental contradiction. Several great thinkers have noted that the scientists can (in theory) account for just about everything with their pictures - except for the scientists themselves, and for their activity. The Darwinian picture for instance has the stamp of objectivity, yet Pierce showed the consequences of taking evolution literally as an explanation of our activity as organisms - including our activity as knowing organisms. Truth becomes justified solely on pragmatic grounds. Gone are the pretences to objectivity for animals whose cognitive apparatus has evolved, not to grasp some unadulterated God's eye perspective on Truth, but rather for the humble creaturely purposes of survival, reproduction and control of the environment. Naturalism has thus to account for the naturalist - for the guy behind the scenes who makes and holds up the picture of nature known as "materialism." Efforts up to now to do so seem to suggest that you can't do it from within the picture of naturalism itself. Adopting some "transcendental" POV (a la Kant) seems logically necessary for the task. Wittgenstein then seems to have been right:

“The philosophical I is not the man, not the human body or the human soul of which psychology treats, but the metaphysical subject, the limit - not a part of the world.”

It's from that limit that we make our pictures, and the limit can't be described by the pictures themselves. This is part of the logic of our situation in the world.

[Elena]

BTW, thanks for the heads-up, Tom. You always seem to have a treasure-horde of wonderful philosophical works to suggest. I only read a few vague passages -about- this work, and from the description, I was somewhat astonished that the arch-analyst chose as his fundamental ontological metaphor the very Romantic image of vortices. I think though here we're talking about the legacy of Descartes. Tradition seems to focalize only a facet of a thinker's world. Aristotle, for instance, was watered down during the Middle Ages, and lost much of his complexity and richness when he became pedestalized as a canonical figure, and became instead a poster-child for medieval schoolmen's pet notions. Descartes, and later Kant, who (obscenely), became co-opted by the idealists, suffered a similar treatment. Such seems to be the fate of many (most?) of the greatest thinkers. Their original richness becomes distorted and obscured by partial interpretations later thinkers make of their work for their own special uses.

[Marlin]

yes test are now being done to link another person mind or brain to another so far very simple reactions can be transfered to another being. Earlier work was done on rats to transfer knowledge about food, water, body movement etc. I however hope it fails for I have enough problems with my mind alone.

[Duffy]

What puzzles me is: Who wants to know about solipsism?

[Peter]

Icarus wrote: "Schopenhauer once said that solipsism "could only be found in a madhouse: as such it would then need not so much a refutation as a cure." Yet, if you take yourself into the madhouse and think about..."

The Perennial philosophy states that solipsism is neither exactly true or false. It would be true in one sense and false in another. This would be the reason why philosophers cannot decide which it is. This solution would generalize to all metaphysical questions.

[Peter]

Eric wrote: "I think this is a great question. I think solipsism is here to stay. And we probably will never know why. *p..."

Lots of people know. It's because solipsism is not exactly true or false. As a consequence we cannot falsify or verify it. To understand this view requires a grasp of Buddhism's 'Two Truths' doctrine. If you have this then you can explain why all metaphysical problems, and not just solipsism, are undecidable.