On Solipsism

 Day 8

Everything here was written in October-November, 2022. There are 52 posts total, one for each day I wrote.

I've never felt that solipsism is really a problem. If I am alone in the world, I don't think that changes anything about what I do. Solipsism as has been called a detestable thing, and it has also been claimed that while solipsism cannot be logically refuted, nevertheless it is a foolish choice. It has also been said that there are no people who actually believe in solipsism. After all, if you believed in solipsism, why would you talk to other pretend people? I feel that much of the issue that people have with solipsism is because of the moral issues that a solipsistic world seems to have to them. If only you are real, is not anything whatsoever permitted? Physically, if only you are real, then what is the point of understanding other minds, of trying to understand the world and the way it works? If the world is solipsistic, then what happens to love, to art, to death and sadness, or to worth and virtue? Indeed, the idea seems to me to be that solipsism is next to absolute nihilism, for all the good that it does. If absolute nihilism says that there is no real point to anything, then solipsism says that there is no real worth to anything besides yourself. These are all general concepts, and solipsism is felt by various people to have all, some, none, or more of, these problems and issues. I propose that these issues are not problems.

The center of solipsism is the self. That is, solipsism is the belief that in the world there is no other person but yourself. The first issue is the issue of other minds. However, I don't see this as an issue. There are other minds in a solipsistic world, it is just that these minds may not be persons. Remember that in our concept of the world we identified ourselves with our will, not our mind. This is because we can understand the mind as a gem-object in the world, a sort of physio-logical thing. It is a thing because it can be modified and influenced. If we believe everything, then certainly we believe that our environment has an effect on us, on how we think. The language we use, the worth we believe that things have, the attachments we have to people and ideas – all these are influenced by our environment. It is simply that these are also influenced by us, by our will and our choices. The method in which this happen is still mysterious, still unknown, but that is to be expected after all – it is the unknown at the core of the world, and will not be figured out until the world is closed, and we don't know how to do that yet, without simply being intentional ignoramuses.

We called the self a series of world-objects, and suggested that the further the object was from the core of free will, the less we thought of that object as ourselves. Thus, the body is further away in the world than the ideas in our head, though both are made of pieces of the world and relate to each other in some way. Because they relate to each other in some way, they are connected to all things in the world. We can say the same of a rock. A rock has some existence in the world. We experience the rock, can understand that it exists, and can pick it up and throw it. If we leave the rock where it is and don't touch it, if the rock is underground and we aren't even aware that it exists, then it is still discover-able. It still touches things that touch us, and by digging down and investigating the world we find the rock. We can crush the rock, but we cannot totally destroy whatever the rock is made up of. We can certainly dissolve it, but the atoms are left and we can find them again. We can obliterate the atoms, but that just transforms the rock into energy, into some movement or change – and that was what the rock was in the beginning, as a thing in the world. We can modify the existence of the rock, but we cannot actually destroy the rock's reality. That is, we can certainly change the rock-gem in the world, but try as we might we do not know how to get to the unknown thing at the heart of the rock.

We can say that the rock has no free will, is not a person – but how do we know this? Indeed, if there is an unknown thing at the center of the gem that makes up the rock, then I do not know what that unknown thing is. It might very well be a will, be the core of a person just like me. Who is to say that rocks don't act, that planets don't think/ After all, we believe everything, and know nothing that is impossible. It is of course absurd to think so, to go so far, but there is nothing stopping us. Indeed, well I don't expect the sun not to rise tomorrow, it seems like it is possible. While I don't expect a rock to talk to me, I wouldn't be utterly surprised if it did. It would just be something that I had to fit into my world. Now it has a hypothetical existence, a gem of a dream that I have about a talking rock, but this might not be. All dreams might be revealed to exist in the world, or something like them in reality.

While mere existence isn't an issue, or at least is an issue of world-to-reality fitting, if you think of essential self as the will and not as the regular self of the world-object, there remains the moral issues. These are not as hard as they are imagined to be. After all, we do not know what there is at the core of even such a thing as a rock. We do not know what lies at the heart of a human. We do not know what lies at the heart of us. If could very well be that we are the only person that exists, but that does not mean that other people are not us. That is, if what we normally think of ourselves as is a world-object, a mind and body, then other people are also this most of the time. We can understand that what we think of as other people are what we think of rocks as. There is no actual difference. However, there is also no actual difference in the world between the structure of a rock, and the structure of ourselves. The worries about solipsism are based on the idea that we know ourselves, and that we are alone. However, as far as I am aware we do not know ourselves. I have certainly had experiences where I did something, or said something, and knew not why I did what I did or said what I said. We are easily surprised by ourselves, and surprise means that something has happened of the world that we did not think could or would happen of the world. Or at least that it was very unlikely, just as seeing the sun not rise tomorrow would be – not impossible perhaps, but definitely a possibility gem really far away from a foundation pillar.

Thus, something like the golden rule, or something considering the worth of people as sufferers, or life, or citizens is still possible. Because we do not totally know anything whatsoever, anything whatsoever is permitted. Yet this is exactly as it was before, that anything is permitted to be moral. Anything can be justified – it only happens to be that what can be justified depends on the world. If a foundation of your world is the apparent fact that people suffer, then you can make moral judgments based on that. If a foundation of your world is the idea that all human life has value, and human exist and are alive, then you can make moral judgments based on that. If a foundation of your life is that contacts must be upheld, life is worthless, or god is judging us, then you can make an entire moral system filled with moral judgments in that world. The claim that there are intrinsic morals in the world is either the claim that there are intrinsic morals in reality; which we don't know, the claim all people have the same basic moral values; which is the claim that all human worlds are similar to each other iin this way, or the claim that morals are guidelines for better living because of the rules of the world and that morals are simply based on something like evolution which is a function of the real rules of reality; which is the claim that there are definite rules of reality, though not moral ones, which we do not know. We can certainly suspect, and there might be great and powerful evidence for any of these, but there is no proof I have ever seen that any of them is correct. Moral systems are 'should' systems, and what should be done comes after what is. Morals are gems in the world, and subject to the same constraints as any other gem. A solipsistic world or not, it doesn't change how gems are. You can still have morals in a solipsistic world, it is just that these morals are shown to be, ultimately, possibly arbitrary. Whither you follow them or not depends on what world you live in.

There is also the issue of value, of things like love. We believe everything and so we believe that love exists as well. A solipsistic world simply suggests that love is more complicated than we think it is. The Greeks had several different words for types of love, and we might say that there are many possible types of love, from the love for a friend , to erotic love, family love, love of an idea or an object, to love that is strait or love that is twisted. If love exists then it is a gem in the world, and part of all things in the world. If worth is based on our point of view, if what things are depends on where we are looking – first of all, isn't' that what we've said already about gems? However we have also said that gem have many sides, many aspects to them. That something is ephemeral like 'love', or has great worth only when seen from a certain angle does not mean that it is not real. It only means that a certain relation of gems in the world related to us in a certain way. After all, if love is a part of everything, then we can see love anywhere, although perhaps it is extremely difficult to see love everywhere at once, though it might be possible. We may only be able to see it from a certain angle, or it may simply be easier to see from a certain angle. Again, it depends on the world we live in, what things are and how we relate to them. It may be that a world with no love or nothing worthwhile or valued is the one you live in, and you are perfectly able to do so. However, if you once see love or beauty that is worth your soul, then you can never unsee it as long as you believe everything and are not an intentional ignoramus. It is a rock or a person, a shard that is real.

At the end of the day, solipsism permits everything that we can have in a non-solipsistic world. These things may take a different form, and the world may be construed differently, but the same things, beliefs, morals, claim, and so are just as possible in both types of worlds. The resistance to a solipsistic world-view is more about inertia than anything else, more about the way in which we stubbornly persist in constructing our worlds. Allowance of a solipsistic world mean that, because solipsism is so strong and generally acts as a foundation pillar of a world, that the way we set up our regular worlds is revealed to be just a fancy, just a way of thinking that we do not have to have. All the iron-boned structures we have for our worlds are not certain after all, and may be melted and re-formed into a new lattice, without actually killing anybody or anything, but simply having them appear in different forms. It is uncomfortable to face, much of the foundation pillars of our worlds are themselves parts of the world that are based on parts of the world. That is, that worlds are very self-referential, and that the existence of things in the world is relative, is uncertain. It is a way of thinking that is like leaping into the void and falling away from the world. A very unstable sort of world, but one which is prepared for anything to happen, that believes in everything because anything might be possible. It is a world which can treat with unicorns just as it treats with rocks. It is a world of chaos and order playing, a world where you may “Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict everything you say today. - 'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.' - Is it so bad then to be misunderstood?”*

*Self-Reliance by Ralph Waldo Emerson