My critique of Solipsism (illustrated)

[Dodo]

[Leo Gura]

@Dodo That whole picture is in your mind.

You are strawmanning solipsism. Try steelmanning it.

The irony is that you are even imagining that poor solipsist.

[Dodo]

17 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

@Dodo That whole picture is in your mind.

You are strawmanning solipsism. Try steelmanning it.

The irony is that you are even imagining that poor solipsist.

It is a bit weird how I can imagine something that I am not aware of / never will be... 

I guess I do imagine my dreams without being aware of them beforehand, so that mechanism is possible. But it is just a bit too unbelievable haha!

[RMQualtrough]

It is an unverifiable position to state that the people around you have any perspective at all.

In a dream you see a lot of characters but generally you have a first person view inside that dream. We assume the other characters do not have a first person view of the dream.

It would not be possible to say that the other characters have a first person perspective.

I can completely kill my ego, and realize many elements of my own being are imaginary. But from my perspective this is where I return.

A stronger persuasion to a Solipsist should be the fact that even without our "self" there are multiple selves. Maybe the other dream people don't have a first person view, but some element of our mind that we do not even know exists and are seemingly not in control of, has generated them and their words.

So if there are evidently multiple aspects of my own mind which I cannot access, perhaps it is the same in the waking world.

Edited May 22, 2021 by RMQualtrough

[Dodo]

15 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

It is an unverifiable position to state that the people around you have any perspective at all.

In a dream you see a lot of characters but generally you have a first person view inside that dream. We assume the other characters do not have a first person view of the dream.

It would not be possible to say that the other characters have a first person perspective.

I can completely kill my ego, and realize many elements of my own being are imaginary. But from my perspective this is where I return.

A stronger persuasion to a Solipsist should be the fact that even without our "self" there are multiple selves. Maybe the other dream people don't have a first person view, but some element of our mind that we do not even know exists and are seemingly not in control of, has generated them and their words.

So if there are evidently multiple aspects of my own mind which I cannot access, perhaps it is the same in the waking world.

I get you. Many are using this analogy, it's the go-to analogy. 

Here's where it fails.

It's all fine and good to say what you're saying, yeah! It is correct. But you miss one tiny thing. If others do not have a perspective at all in real life, then why did you assume I have experience of dream at all? It appears you take it for granted that I experience waking dream and sleep such as yourself? 

How could I have an experience of waking dream and sleep, and you have an experience of waking dream and sleep? And how do we say which first hand reality is absolute? They either both are or neither of them are. 

 

Edited May 22, 2021 by Dodo

[RMQualtrough]

4 minutes ago, Dodo said:

I get you. Many are using this analogy, it's the go-to analogy. 

Here's where it fails.

It's all fine and good to say what you're saying, yeah! It is correct. But you miss one tiny thing. If others do not have a perspective at all in real life, then why did you assume I have experience of dream at all? It appears you take it for granted that I experience waking dream and sleep such as yourself? 

How could I have an experience of waking dream and sleep, and you have an experience of waking dream and sleep? And how do we say which first hand reality is absolute? They either both are or neither of them are. 

I give people the benefit of the doubt and have faith they do have perspective. But I cannot ever know it. It is merely faith on my part.

Vice versa too. You do not know I dream or have any perspective etc.

It would certainly be SIMPLER if very literally my egoic self is the only egoic self. Then I'd not need to even consider individuation etc.

[Dodo]

2 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

I give people the benefit of the doubt and have faith they do have perspective. But I cannot ever know it. It is merely faith on my part.

Vice versa too. You do not know I dream or have any perspective etc.

It would certainly be SIMPLER if very literally my egoic self is the only egoic self. Then I'd not need to even consider individuation etc.

Trust me if you did not have a direct experience you would not be able to function (and talk about direct experience like you are). Check out how robots are doing. 

Also it is not like everyone is trying to prove they have a direct experience to fool you. You can see some random normies outside and they are all going to give you a hint that they have direct experience even if they do not want to., 

Edited May 22, 2021 by Dodo

[Leo Gura]

1 hour ago, Dodo said:

But it is just a bit too unbelievable haha!

God is unbelievable

[Dodo]

1 hour ago, Leo Gura said:

God is unbelievable

But Leo, what if I imagine that reality is not imagined, but real? Does it then become not imagined and real? ?

Edited May 22, 2021 by Dodo

[RMQualtrough]

1 hour ago, Dodo said:

Trust me if you did not have a direct experience you would not be able to function (and talk about direct experience like you are). Check out how robots are doing. 

Also it is not like everyone is trying to prove they have a direct experience to fool you. You can see some random normies outside and they are all going to give you a hint that they have direct experience even if they do not want to., 

The point is that you don't know that I do. The characters in your dreams function just fine. You don't know that I am anything more than that.

On a tangent, I think many robots display awareness which I can gladly discuss.

[Dodo]

14 minutes ago, RMQualtrough said:

The point is that you don't know that I do. The characters in your dreams function just fine. You don't know that I am anything more than that.

On a tangent, I think many robots display awareness which I can gladly discuss.

All I know is that having you around is an asset to me, because humans help each other and achieve things together that one individual can't alone. 

I don't know, but I intuit and that is a type of knowledge. I can verify by observing. I know you cannot program this. Its so real. The now

 

 

[Tim R]

You guys don't f*cking get it. Aren't you kinda tired of this? 90% of the solipsism debates here are absolutely nothing but mental masturbation. 

You don't exist. Solipsism is not a thing. "Other people" don't exist, there are no "other bubbles" and "you" don't have any bubble either. Consciousness is not this 3D bubble that keeps changing its content. Consciousness is without any boundary, it is not solipsistic (at least not in the way you think it is), and if you would become conscious of what consciousness is for only one second you would see through it immediately. 

If you recoil at the notion of being alone in the universe, that's only a problem so long as you think that you exist. 

I mean, what's really the problem with solipsism anyway? Why are you afraid of "it"? And what is it that you're afraid of and who is afraid? To be alone in this universe, trapped inside a bubble that is mostly limited by your visual field? Isn't that the real bogeyman here?

You want "other people to be real/exist", right? But what the hell do you even mean by that? I'll tell you what you mean by that and what you want, you want there to be egos, located inside other people's bodies/sculls, just like you think you are located behind your eyes. 

The dream analogy is good. But if you think that "you" encounter "other characters" in the dream, you still haven't understood. You are the dream, there are no characters, there is no "you" and there is nothing "other". 

So long as you think you exist as an ego, solipsism will scare the sh*t out of you and take a toll on your psyche, until you either see through it or stop caring anymore. 

[Mason Riggle]

Consider: is this forum real, or does it just seem like it is? 

Does it make ANY difference which it is? 

[RMQualtrough]

@Tim R I don't feel that's right, there are multiple experiences happening simultaneously and I can directly verify that there is an ego existing as I type this, as well as thoughts existing.

Leo is an ego, I am an ego, and you are an ego. You can wipe out the ego COMPLETELY for brief periods as you probz know.

If you, Leo, and I all smoked a release dose of 5-MeO-DMT then all that would be left is one and the same during that period. Then we come back into being a Leo a me and a you. You can't tell me what my living room looks like and vice versa because these ego selves create apparent separation within oneness... A blanket with a bunch of stripes on it, it is literally one thing but you can say "here's a blue stripe, here's a white stripe", there is still distinction despite total Oneness.

What you call God is imagining Leo and ego etc just like any thought. It does not mean they do not exist and are not happening.

Solipsism cannot be disproven. You cannot ever know egos other than your own are occurring. It's impossible.

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Dodo said:

But Leo, what if I imagine that reality is not imagined, but real? Does it then become not imagined and real? ?

You are imagining the difference between real and imaginary.

[Mason Riggle]

@Leo Gura

12 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

You are imagining the difference between real and imaginary.

^this is why it's frustrating as times to hear you say, '______ is imaginary'. It 'creates', in the minds of some readers, a duality that isn't there. 

And that really matters to me, even if it only seems to. 

[Leo Gura]

6 minutes ago, Mason Riggle said:

@Leo Gura

^this is why it's frustrating as times to hear you say, '______ is imaginary'. It 'creates', in the minds of some readers, a duality that isn't there. 

And that really matters to me, even if it only seems to. 

All words create duality.

If you don't want duality, stop wording.

[The0Self]

Oh dear...

When there's no one dreaming, no one else is dreaming either.

Multiplicity is singularity.

Edited May 22, 2021 by The0Self

[Mason Riggle]

Wording can happen in such a way as to not create imaginary dualities. 

Questions, for example, are great at dispelling dual fantasies. 

Or sentences like, '______ is neither real, nor unreal.'

"Who am I?", imho, 'works better' to eliminate the 'self/other' fantasy, than say, 'You don't exist.', which implies an 'I' who doesn't exist. 

 

[The0Self]

16 minutes ago, Mason Riggle said:

"Who am I?", imho, 'works better' to eliminate the 'self/other' fantasy, than say, 'You don't exist.', which implies an 'I' who doesn't exist. 

^^

Do this intensely enough, as a habit that goes on all the time, and what my be revealed: there's only what is, there's nowhere else, and everything you thought you knew was in fact...not known at all. This unmoving timeless everything is actually not...anything at all, and it lacks the solidity to carry a so-called individual "through" it.