Solipsism is the philosophical notion that you are the only consciousness in this universe. That might sound rather extreme at first pass, but we've all done our share of pondering: "what if this is all just a dream?" Yes, there's no way to establish for certain whether or not you're dreaming right now; solipsism is just one feature of that possibility. If this is all a dream, then you are the dreamer and you've created the world in your mind, and you are indeed the only consciousness, at least in the dream. Thus, solipsism doesn't necessarily have to be a lonely philosophy-- it may be that your friends really do exist, and you'll go hang out with them when you wake up, but right now you're just perceiving them as dream-friends in your head.
Before talking about deeper things, a word is in order about this article you're reading. If you're the sole consciousness, dreaming this universe up as you go, then that goes for me and the article as well. That doesn't necessarily mean you created this article; it might be that it exists in the "real world", where you live when you're not dreaming. Maybe in that waking life your dreaming brain has forgotten about, I'm a famous author and my blog is as famous as the Bible, and that's why it has enough gravitas that people manifest it in their very dreams. Or, alternatively, maybe you wrote this article. Knowing you were about to descend into a decades-long virtual reality (possibly during cryogenic spaceflight or something), you wrote this article and input it into some machine so your dream persona would find it. You knew that you'd forget everything, so you put this article here as a clue about the true nature of reality. Or maybe you spontaneously, randomly created this article. Spun it up using some deep subconscious random-number-generator you aren't even aware of, the same random number generator that spawns dreams-within-a-dream every night when you sleep.
Solipsism is a belief. It's unverifiable and unfalsifiable, almost more a matter of semantics than of metaphysics. Therefore, in a certain sense, the question "How can I be solipsistic?" is trivial: just believe that you're the only consciousness in this world, and that makes you a solipsist. A belief is all in your mind, and you control your mind, so you control your beliefs. But since I (or rather you) want this article to be longer than 400 words, I'll expound further on reasons to justify this particular belief, answer some common objections, and even list some benefits enjoyed by the philosophical solipsist.
JUSTIFYING SOLIPSISM
The most powerful way to justify a belief is direct experience. The best direct experience to justify solipsism is a known solipsistic reality. In other words, one way to convince yourself that life is a dream, is to spend some time in a dream, where you know you're the only consciousness. You've already done this, whether or not you remember it: it's called a lucid dream. A lucid dream is a dream in which you suddenly realize you're dreaming. Lucid dreamers become conscious during a dream; this usually leads to conscious control of the dream body. This is a lot of fun for its own sake, since once you know you're dreaming, you can do whatever you want.
If you've never heard of lucid dreams before, I wrote a whole article on them: Introduction to Lucid Dreaming. Every occurrence of lucidity in a dream lends further justification toward solipsism. If you've never remembered a lucid dream (you've definitely had them, whether you remember or not), you should definitely invest some time in training to have and remember them more. The article I just linked to has some pointers on this training. Part of what gives the lucid dream so much justifying strength is the fact that a lucid dream seems so real. The first time a person manages to hold onto the memories of going lucid, the universal reaction is always, "I can't believe how real it was!" Of course-- life is a dream, so it's no surprise a dream resembles life.
Of course, when you're walking around in a lucid dream, you're the only conscious entity in that world. Your friends might be there, but you know they're just dream-people. That whole world only exists because of you, the dreamer. So why should this world be any different?
The other big justification for solipsism is this: you've never experienced any world without yourself in it. You've always been here. You've never experienced this world after your death-- otherwise you'd be dead. And you've never walked around before your birth. In fact, you can't even remember your birth, despite the fact that, in theory, that's about the most astonishing thing that ever happened to you. As far as you know, the whole world materialized sometime around your youngest memory. Sure, you can place your birth on a timeline, and read about historical events thousands of years before you appeared, but how do you know any of that really exists? You didn't experience it!
You don't know whether people and places even exist when you're not directly observing them. In a video game, only the current map is kept loaded in RAM; if the game is currently taking place in the United States, there's no reason for the computer to calculate graphics for Antarctica. Why should this world be any different? If that sounds strange, consider how quantum events aren't determined until they're observed. Macroscale physics can be derived probabilistically from the notion of atoms bouncing around randomly. Thus, it's not that snow melts at a certain temperature, it's that the probability of the snow staying frozen is so small it's almost zero. If no observer is causing quantum waveforms to collapse, then it's not determined whether the snow has melted or not. Thus, Antarctica doesn't exist when noone's there.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST SOLIPSISM
You might wonder, if this is all a dream, why it's not your own private utopia. If it's all in your head, why does life still have uncomfortable parts to it? To which I answer: I dunno, you tell me ;) But seriously, there are a number of explanations. One possibility is that you decided how things would be in advance, before you "went to sleep". In a higher reality where you're currently sleeping and dreaming this life, you decided you needed the laws of the world to be the way they are, for some reason. Maybe you need there to be hunger in Africa because that will help you train compassion. Maybe you want financial insecurity because you've already "played the game" at "easier difficulty levels" and you want a bigger challenge this time around. Another possibility is that your life is already perfect: after all, in your current level of consciousness, you have no experience living a different life, and for all you know, they're all less happy than your current circumstances.
Similar reasoning goes if you ask why you can't use superpowers. When I have lucid dreams, after all, I enjoy supernatural abilities like the power to fly. But again, those are the paramaters I chose for that dream; you might have chosen different parameters for the existence you're currently living in. And who's to say what is and isn't supernatural-- maybe in the "higher world" where you're sleeping and dreaming right now, there is no gravity at all, and fantasy authors invented the concept of gravity as some wondrous fictional supernatural force.
Another argument is that solipsism is morally wrong somehow. Isn't it selfish or something to believe oneself the sole consciousness in the world? What's more, won't it lead to criminal behavior, or at the very least, rejection of society? I dunno; the idea that this is all a dream, doesn't inspire me to acts of crime (anymore than I would be inspired anyway)... if the idea inspires you to such acts, then that says more about your character than about any inherent property of the philosophy. (And I say that quite non-judgmentally; this is your dreamworld, if you want to bludgeon me to death, go right ahead) Anyone who uses solipsism as an excuse for some kind of behavior, would just find some other excuse anyway, so moral objections are moot. Rejecting society? A game doesn't lose its fun just because the player realizes it's a game.
What about great literature? If all the world is a dream, how come it's so chock full of literature of all types, which you yourself don't remember creating? In other words, if you can create Shakespeare in your dream, doesn't that make you at least Shakespeare's peer? This relates back to the 2nd paragraph, when I discussed how this very article you're reading got into your reality. Maybe you're the one who wrote The Bible, only in a higher waking life, and then for some reason you projected it onto different authors in this dream-life. Or maybe you were familiar with it from your higher life, and that's how it got here. This all goes for advanced scientific knowledge as well. Incidentally, how much of the world's literature have you actually read? How do you know most the books at the library aren't all blank? Maybe words don't appear on the page until you turn to it.
APPLICATIONS OF SOLIPSISM
Ok, so maybe this is all technically valid, in the sense that you can't prove or disprove it one way or another, but why would anyone want to believe they're the dreamer? Here are some ways in which this unorthodox faith is actually useful.
* Increased courage. When you realize it's all illusionary, your courage shoots through the roof. It's like when you're playing a videogame, you're never scared to do whatever you need to do to reach the next level. Or maybe you are, if it's a really well-made horror game.. but then that's a feature, not a bug ;) In any case, you'd never think twice about asking for a raise or a date if it was in a virtual world where you were the only conscious entity.
* Full responsibility. It's hard to lay blame on the outside world when you're the ultimate being in whose head it's all taking place. Whatever scenarios you find yourself facing, it's easy to assume complete responsibility for them when you're a solipsist. Maybe you're not sure why, but for some reason, you chose this particular configuration of things. Not even things which seem beyond your control, like taxes or poverty, are an excuse to throw a pity party. And full responsibility is good because, even if it were objectively justified, you'd never actually accomplish anything by tossing blame around.
* Zero guilt or worry. Guilt and worry are pointless, useless emotions which never add any value to the world. Both are intimately tied to materialist ideas of the world as some arena where you interact with fellow conscious beings. This doesn't mean you should necessarily become a serial killer or something-- see the answers to the "morality criticism" above.
* Better connections with people. Paradoxical as it might seem, you'll actually connect better with people when you realize that everything about your relationship with them is in your mind. It's hard to hate or rage against someone when you know that you're the one who chose to have them in your life. Neither will you feel shy or reserved, or unable to get up the nerve to go talk to that cute person you've been crushing on. The solipsist stops worrying so much about other people, which is good, because whenever you're consciously thinking about the people you're interacting with, you'll come off awkward. The old saying, "Just Be Yourself", takes new meaning when there's nothing other than "yourself" in all creation!
FURTHER READING
Read about the Reticular Activation System, and think about it from a solipsist viewpoint. In the article, I write about how the system filters what you pay attention to, but in the context of the current article, it's not so much a filter as an active creator.
For more insight into the morality criticism, read the article, Kindness and Cruelty. Here I explain why the best way to be kind to others is to be kind to yourself.
I keep hammering how life is like a dream or a game. There are tons of these analogies. Read about some more in: 10 Life Metaphors.
Before talking about deeper things, a word is in order about this article you're reading. If you're the sole consciousness, dreaming this universe up as you go, then that goes for me and the article as well. That doesn't necessarily mean you created this article; it might be that it exists in the "real world", where you live when you're not dreaming. Maybe in that waking life your dreaming brain has forgotten about, I'm a famous author and my blog is as famous as the Bible, and that's why it has enough gravitas that people manifest it in their very dreams. Or, alternatively, maybe you wrote this article. Knowing you were about to descend into a decades-long virtual reality (possibly during cryogenic spaceflight or something), you wrote this article and input it into some machine so your dream persona would find it. You knew that you'd forget everything, so you put this article here as a clue about the true nature of reality. Or maybe you spontaneously, randomly created this article. Spun it up using some deep subconscious random-number-generator you aren't even aware of, the same random number generator that spawns dreams-within-a-dream every night when you sleep.
Solipsism is a belief. It's unverifiable and unfalsifiable, almost more a matter of semantics than of metaphysics. Therefore, in a certain sense, the question "How can I be solipsistic?" is trivial: just believe that you're the only consciousness in this world, and that makes you a solipsist. A belief is all in your mind, and you control your mind, so you control your beliefs. But since I (or rather you) want this article to be longer than 400 words, I'll expound further on reasons to justify this particular belief, answer some common objections, and even list some benefits enjoyed by the philosophical solipsist.
JUSTIFYING SOLIPSISM
The most powerful way to justify a belief is direct experience. The best direct experience to justify solipsism is a known solipsistic reality. In other words, one way to convince yourself that life is a dream, is to spend some time in a dream, where you know you're the only consciousness. You've already done this, whether or not you remember it: it's called a lucid dream. A lucid dream is a dream in which you suddenly realize you're dreaming. Lucid dreamers become conscious during a dream; this usually leads to conscious control of the dream body. This is a lot of fun for its own sake, since once you know you're dreaming, you can do whatever you want.
If you've never heard of lucid dreams before, I wrote a whole article on them: Introduction to Lucid Dreaming. Every occurrence of lucidity in a dream lends further justification toward solipsism. If you've never remembered a lucid dream (you've definitely had them, whether you remember or not), you should definitely invest some time in training to have and remember them more. The article I just linked to has some pointers on this training. Part of what gives the lucid dream so much justifying strength is the fact that a lucid dream seems so real. The first time a person manages to hold onto the memories of going lucid, the universal reaction is always, "I can't believe how real it was!" Of course-- life is a dream, so it's no surprise a dream resembles life.
Of course, when you're walking around in a lucid dream, you're the only conscious entity in that world. Your friends might be there, but you know they're just dream-people. That whole world only exists because of you, the dreamer. So why should this world be any different?
The other big justification for solipsism is this: you've never experienced any world without yourself in it. You've always been here. You've never experienced this world after your death-- otherwise you'd be dead. And you've never walked around before your birth. In fact, you can't even remember your birth, despite the fact that, in theory, that's about the most astonishing thing that ever happened to you. As far as you know, the whole world materialized sometime around your youngest memory. Sure, you can place your birth on a timeline, and read about historical events thousands of years before you appeared, but how do you know any of that really exists? You didn't experience it!
You don't know whether people and places even exist when you're not directly observing them. In a video game, only the current map is kept loaded in RAM; if the game is currently taking place in the United States, there's no reason for the computer to calculate graphics for Antarctica. Why should this world be any different? If that sounds strange, consider how quantum events aren't determined until they're observed. Macroscale physics can be derived probabilistically from the notion of atoms bouncing around randomly. Thus, it's not that snow melts at a certain temperature, it's that the probability of the snow staying frozen is so small it's almost zero. If no observer is causing quantum waveforms to collapse, then it's not determined whether the snow has melted or not. Thus, Antarctica doesn't exist when noone's there.
ARGUMENTS AGAINST SOLIPSISM
You might wonder, if this is all a dream, why it's not your own private utopia. If it's all in your head, why does life still have uncomfortable parts to it? To which I answer: I dunno, you tell me ;) But seriously, there are a number of explanations. One possibility is that you decided how things would be in advance, before you "went to sleep". In a higher reality where you're currently sleeping and dreaming this life, you decided you needed the laws of the world to be the way they are, for some reason. Maybe you need there to be hunger in Africa because that will help you train compassion. Maybe you want financial insecurity because you've already "played the game" at "easier difficulty levels" and you want a bigger challenge this time around. Another possibility is that your life is already perfect: after all, in your current level of consciousness, you have no experience living a different life, and for all you know, they're all less happy than your current circumstances.
Similar reasoning goes if you ask why you can't use superpowers. When I have lucid dreams, after all, I enjoy supernatural abilities like the power to fly. But again, those are the paramaters I chose for that dream; you might have chosen different parameters for the existence you're currently living in. And who's to say what is and isn't supernatural-- maybe in the "higher world" where you're sleeping and dreaming right now, there is no gravity at all, and fantasy authors invented the concept of gravity as some wondrous fictional supernatural force.
Another argument is that solipsism is morally wrong somehow. Isn't it selfish or something to believe oneself the sole consciousness in the world? What's more, won't it lead to criminal behavior, or at the very least, rejection of society? I dunno; the idea that this is all a dream, doesn't inspire me to acts of crime (anymore than I would be inspired anyway)... if the idea inspires you to such acts, then that says more about your character than about any inherent property of the philosophy. (And I say that quite non-judgmentally; this is your dreamworld, if you want to bludgeon me to death, go right ahead) Anyone who uses solipsism as an excuse for some kind of behavior, would just find some other excuse anyway, so moral objections are moot. Rejecting society? A game doesn't lose its fun just because the player realizes it's a game.
What about great literature? If all the world is a dream, how come it's so chock full of literature of all types, which you yourself don't remember creating? In other words, if you can create Shakespeare in your dream, doesn't that make you at least Shakespeare's peer? This relates back to the 2nd paragraph, when I discussed how this very article you're reading got into your reality. Maybe you're the one who wrote The Bible, only in a higher waking life, and then for some reason you projected it onto different authors in this dream-life. Or maybe you were familiar with it from your higher life, and that's how it got here. This all goes for advanced scientific knowledge as well. Incidentally, how much of the world's literature have you actually read? How do you know most the books at the library aren't all blank? Maybe words don't appear on the page until you turn to it.
APPLICATIONS OF SOLIPSISM
Ok, so maybe this is all technically valid, in the sense that you can't prove or disprove it one way or another, but why would anyone want to believe they're the dreamer? Here are some ways in which this unorthodox faith is actually useful.
* Increased courage. When you realize it's all illusionary, your courage shoots through the roof. It's like when you're playing a videogame, you're never scared to do whatever you need to do to reach the next level. Or maybe you are, if it's a really well-made horror game.. but then that's a feature, not a bug ;) In any case, you'd never think twice about asking for a raise or a date if it was in a virtual world where you were the only conscious entity.
* Full responsibility. It's hard to lay blame on the outside world when you're the ultimate being in whose head it's all taking place. Whatever scenarios you find yourself facing, it's easy to assume complete responsibility for them when you're a solipsist. Maybe you're not sure why, but for some reason, you chose this particular configuration of things. Not even things which seem beyond your control, like taxes or poverty, are an excuse to throw a pity party. And full responsibility is good because, even if it were objectively justified, you'd never actually accomplish anything by tossing blame around.
* Zero guilt or worry. Guilt and worry are pointless, useless emotions which never add any value to the world. Both are intimately tied to materialist ideas of the world as some arena where you interact with fellow conscious beings. This doesn't mean you should necessarily become a serial killer or something-- see the answers to the "morality criticism" above.
* Better connections with people. Paradoxical as it might seem, you'll actually connect better with people when you realize that everything about your relationship with them is in your mind. It's hard to hate or rage against someone when you know that you're the one who chose to have them in your life. Neither will you feel shy or reserved, or unable to get up the nerve to go talk to that cute person you've been crushing on. The solipsist stops worrying so much about other people, which is good, because whenever you're consciously thinking about the people you're interacting with, you'll come off awkward. The old saying, "Just Be Yourself", takes new meaning when there's nothing other than "yourself" in all creation!
FURTHER READING
Read about the Reticular Activation System, and think about it from a solipsist viewpoint. In the article, I write about how the system filters what you pay attention to, but in the context of the current article, it's not so much a filter as an active creator.
For more insight into the morality criticism, read the article, Kindness and Cruelty. Here I explain why the best way to be kind to others is to be kind to yourself.
I keep hammering how life is like a dream or a game. There are tons of these analogies. Read about some more in: 10 Life Metaphors.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment