Solipsism?

[gsmax5]

Any other Solipsists here?

For those of you who don't know, solipsism is when you are paranoid about being the only existing thing. For example, sometimes I get EXTREMELY depressed when I think about the possibility that my whole life, all the people I love (basically my family), and everything I know could be all in my mind; like a never-ending dream.

I have also had nightmares about me being an experiment where they test human-like robots to see if they can replace a human's role as companions.

The worst part is that there is no way to disprove the fact that nothing is real, after all, I have grown very attached to made-up people in dreams; only to wake up and realize they were all in my imagination.

 

[sleepysparrow]

That describes me. Sometimes I think nothing (I see, think, feel) is real and everything is an illusion. I fear becoming part of a goverment experiment some day, or maybe being abducted by aliens. Sometimes I feel i'm being watched in the mirrors in my house. Perhaps in the year 2012 when/if chaos begins, we will find out if any of this is true.

 

[Hoth]

Solipsism isn't really about paranoia, because it doesn't involve any conspiracies or anything, it's just about not believing in anything beyond the fact of experience. The paranoia is like global skeptical hypotheses, when you believe there is a real external world but that you're stuck in a fake one instead.

When I was little, I'd sometimes spend the lunch hour imagining that nobody else was real and everything was in my imagination. I don't think I actually believed it, I just hoped. If the world were in my head, that'd put me in control of it. The world being an illusion where I'm a brain in a mad scientist's vat would be kind of nice too, because it leaves the possibility of waking up to a better, "realer" world. No doubt conspiracy theories are so popular because people want there to be something exciting lurking behind the curtain, something underlying their life which will make everything make sense when it's revealed. Unfortunately, believing that everything will make sense in the end is irrational.

I'm pretty sure of the reality of the external world, but there is some truth to solipsism. Wittgenstein presents this by distinguishing between the microcosm (the solipsistic world of our experience) and the macrocosm (the actual external reality, which we presume to be coordinated with our experiences in the microcosm, but which we can never know in itself and so is really just an abstract concept).

What the solipsist means is quite correct; only it cannot be said, but makes itself manifest. The world is my world: this is manifest in the fact that the limits of language (of that language which alone I understand) mean the limits of my world.

The world and life are one.

I am my world. (The microcosm.)

- Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus

The worst part is that there is no way to disprove the fact that nothing is real, after all, I have grown very attached to made-up people in dreams; only to wake up and realize they were all in my imagination.

Nothing with content (meaning anything that doesn't boil down to a tautology) can be proved. You can establish that it's irrational to believe in these conspiracy theories, however, precisely because of how they maneuver to avoid being subject to evidence. You can have reason not to believe in things even when you can't present evidence against them, by examining the structure of the scenario. (I believe this is easiest to show with a coherentist epistemology, but I won't go into that here.)

 

[appletree]

i didn't think the concept of solipsism had anything to do with paranoia, although it is a term that I have come across myself, but then I am quite interested in philosophy generally.
i don't believe in it though.
i think it's a very interesting idea that's all.

 

[gsmax5]

mmmm sorry, I didn't know what paranoia meant. Maybe I should have used a different word.