Insight about Solipsism

[Someone here]

I want firstly to say that This idea of solipsism started haunting me since I was a child.. I always had this feeling from my early childhood.. That I am actually the only "real" one out there and everyone else are just characters in my dream. Zombies.."cardboard cutouts" in my world. However you wanna call it or think of it. Obviously other people exist as objects of perception in my direct experience.. That's undeniable.. I go out.. I see people everywhere. But are these things" subjects"? Do they have internal self-awareness as I do?   Is there someone behind their eyes?  Is there anybody out there other than me?.  The solipsism philosophy doesn't say yes or no to that question contrary to what most people mistakenly misunderstood it.. Solipsism states that one's own mind or subjective experience of the world is the only "certain" thing to exist.. And the existence of other individual minds is "impossible to verify".  In other words you are absolutely certain that you are aware right now.. But it's impossible to be certain that I'm aware.. In fact why I'm talking to "you"? .. I should say I am aware and "you" are the unsettled mystery.    

The problem with solipsism is not whether it's objectivey true or not(is it actually the case that I am the only one out there)..but is that it is absolutely true subjectively regardless of that.  You are trapped inside your own subjective experience in any case.. So even though I am aware right now from my pov.. From your pov that doesn't matter and there is no such thing.. There is only your awareness.. There is no such thing as "my awareness" in your awareness.. There is only these words in front of you right now and that's the actualilty of what is.. Anything else is just assumptions you add on top of it.."ofcourse there is someone there writing these words.. They couldn't just write themselves lol".. Really?. In your dream.. The entire dream and all the people inside of it..and their actions.. Are nothing but your creation.. They have no Reality of their own outside your imagination.. The only real thing in the dream underneath all the scattered phenomenon is YOU. 

To summarize.. Solipsism can't be proven or disproven objectively. Because all you have is your own subjective experience.  And this statement righ there (all you have is your subjective experience) means that solipsism is surely correct from your point of view.  From your POV there is only ever your point of view and nothing else. 

[RMQualtrough]

Even within our own selves we have multiple conscious processes. When the characters in a dream talk I'm rarely aware of what they're going to say. I don't consciously conjure the landscapes around me. And yet here it all is.

I know it is all me in a dream yet "my" consciousness does not appear to be responsible for everything being said and seen. It's like another me somewhere deep down is conjuring these things up and inhabiting the other characters in that dream.

I can't even say that the thing I call myself is even one self.

[Ry4n]

"your/my pov" is still imaginary. That's still ego, in fact experience isn't possible without ego. No self, no other, nobody is absolute. All experience is relative. A point of view requires a subject, which automatically creates an other. Instead getting hung up on this I would focus on realising that quite literally anything that can be experienced including the sensation of being a self with awareness is all part of the dream, all imaginary, all ultimately empty pure loving unlimited consciousness. Which is nice but....after a while that gets boring. Hence here you are. 

[BipolarGrowth]

Here are some contemplations I wrote down a few months ago. The bold text is the most focused on solipsism. You’re right though. If something cannot be measured, experienced, or verified in any way, how can we say anything of it? Can it really affect reality? Is it really there? Talking of another conscious experience is as real as talking about nonexistence. There’s no hard proof at least from an empirical standpoint for either. To experience nonexistence would be to make it exist somehow. To experience another consciousness right now would make it just another aspect of your consciousness. These are hard limits such as the impossibility of the something from nothing cosmology. 
 

 

When you go to sleep at night, you often find yourself in dreams. In these dreams, most people will still have a human body. In waking reality, there is an unsubstantiated claim or story given by people that consciousness is somehow generated by the brain. The experts aren’t so sure, or at least they don’t have any solid evidence. Look up the “hard problem of consciousness” to understand how this is unsubstantiated. In the dream, you typically do not think along the same lines. If you were to lucid dream, you would certainly not think you were the dream body or somehow generated by the brain in your dream head. I say you, but I need to clarify exactly who you are. 

 

You are consciousness. Consciousness is the only constant you can find in all realities. In the dream, you are literally everything perceived in the dream. It’s all generated by your consciousness. We understand fully that everything created in our dreams comes entirely from us and is an extension of us. Surprisingly enough, there’s no solid argument against this being exactly the same case in waking reality. Your brain, body, and mind are all generated by consciousness in the same fashion consciousness generates the entire reality in dreams. Beyond your mind, body, and brain, you as consciousness generate this entire reality. This entire reality IS consciousness and nothing else. It’s the same way in a dream; nothing is separate from you as consciousness. You as consciousness are the sole source for everything in the dream. No one thinks everyone in their dreams are conscious, separate entities once they’ve come back to the waking state. It’s the same in this reality. 

 

There’s absolutely no way you can actually be shown something outside of your consciousness. There will never ever be proof that other beings are conscious separately or outside of your consciousness. Even if you merged consciousness with another being in the waking state as a way to somehow prove the existence of another consciousness, guess what it would be? It would be fully engulfed in exactly one thing: you as consciousness or otherwise put your consciousness. You are the source of everything that exists in your consciousness, and your consciousness is the entirety of your universe and always will be. Nothing can ever exist outside of your consciousness. Existence relies completely on perception and consciousness to even be relevant. What is the difference between a fairytale land in a book, the black void people typically conceive of as nothingness or nonexistence, and a reality you imagine exists like heaven? They’re all just imagination. The only thing that’s real is what you can experience in this very moment. As soon as something exits consciousness, it exits existence. There’s no proof for something existing outside of consciousness, and there never will be because the most fundamental building block in any proof is, you guessed it, consciousness. Before using reason or logic or any other conceptual tool to prove something you use precisely one thing first: consciousness. 

 

Even if you and I are both conscious entities, we live in completely different “universes of consciousness.” Precisely, that is to say that one consciousness can never be shown another consciousness to exist without perceiving the other consciousness through the lens of the original consciousness. As soon as one consciousness comes into the other, the secondary consciousness immediately becomes an aspect of the primary consciousness. So if you were to completely merge your consciousness with mine, your consciousness would be held within my consciousness, and it would be the same for you if the process were done from your perspective. This is a clear mechanic of consciousness. We can never know if the person sitting across the lunch table from us is conscious. We can only assume one way or the other. 

 

Anything imagined to be separate from the perspective of the original consciousness will always just be one more aspect of the original consciousness. In this way, we are entirely alone as consciousness. We are not alone as human beings. There are plenty of humans walking around. You can clearly perceive that, but by the very nature of perception, consciousness cannot perceive another consciousness without it immediately becoming another aspect of itself. Consciousness cannot perceive another consciousness as some sort of separate thing. Once the “other” consciousness is viewed, it only exists as long as it is in contact with the primary consciousness - the point of perception, and it is only truly the primary consciousness the entire time. In this way, you can never truly share space with another consciousness. You cannot perceive another consciousness. 

 

Anything you perceive is just you. You are consciousness. Everything is you. Everything is consciousness. It will be this way for eternity. You as consciousness will likely visit innumerable dreamt up worlds that you’ve created. You’ll perceive yourself as some kind of avatar or character as far as we can tell. You’ll at first see all the rest of the characters in your dreamt up creation as separate from you, but in truth those dream characters are just as much you as your primary character is. They’re just characters held within consciousness. One, your primary character who you at first feel to live inside, simply exists in your consciousness more of the time than the others. Ultimately neither the other characters or your perceived primary character is you because you are the consciousness that permeates all aspects of the dream world including its laws of physics, characters, objects, and everything else. You aren’t the characters any more than you are the objects or the laws of motion that govern that reality. You are all aspects of that reality. You are all aspects of all realities. 

 

A reality can only exist within you. Something is only real to you if it is held within your consciousness. No realities exist outside of the one you are experiencing right now. This waking state planet Earth does not exist when you are in a dream. Your wife could tell you that the world still existed while you were asleep, but you have to see how this is exactly the same as if your dream wife told you the dream reality was there while you were asleep. It means nothing because you as consciousness were not there. That seems to be the pattern in what we can verify between both the waking state and dreams.

[RMQualtrough]

@BipolarGrowth Nice thoughts. When I read the bit about a person across the lunch table, it occurred to me that part of the experience of you or that other person, is the sense of BEING that self or other.

What we call "I" if it exists in both people here, MUST be identical and the same thing in its nature, and I can prove this.

But whatever that individual is, part of the experience of that individual is BEING that self.

You ARE experiencing me rn and I AM experiencing you in terms of what we truly are.  There is zero individuality. But "I" is also experiencing the brains and the "experience of brain" comes with the "sense of being -insert name-". It only has recorded memories of things relevant to your "self". So when "I" experiences "your brain", it experiences that limitation as part OF that.

[cookiemonster]

You're not factoring in the omniscient state.

Think of your 5-year old self compared with your adult self. Notice that they are two different states sharing one fundamental identity. The adult state knows 100% about the 5-year old state, but the 5-year old state knows 0% about the adult state.

Similarly, the omniscient state knows 100% about your current state, and your current state knows 0% about the omniscient state. However, the omniscient state knows all variations and permutations of all states.

That's what it means to be omniscient. To know all.

So just as I know my 5-year old state, and you know your 5-year old state, so too does the omniscient state know my current state just as it knows your current state.

Therefore, you and I are merely two different states sharing one fundamental identity, which is the identity of God.

[Someone here]

12 hours ago, Ry4n said:

"your/my pov" is still imaginary. That's still ego, in fact experience isn't possible without ego. No self, no other, nobody is absolute. All experience is relative. A point of view requires a subject, which automatically creates an other. Instead getting hung up on this I would focus on realising that quite literally anything that can be experienced including the sensation of being a self with awareness is all part of the dream, all imaginary, all ultimately empty pure loving unlimited consciousness. Which is nice but....after a while that gets boring. Hence here you are. 

Agreed. I should say your pov isn't really a pov. It's absolute truth. 

When you die the world will die with you. This is extremely radical and my ego doesn't want to accept this. 

Edited May 18, 2021 by Someone here