I readily admit that I don’t know philosophy, because I’m not interested in it, and that is exclusively because of this topic. The more I talk with solipsists, the less interesting philosophy is. We’ve had this conversation, and I was hoping to be done with it, because I’ve already given it more of my time than it will ever deserve. I would like very much for this to me my last word on the idea that the whole of perceptible reality might only be an illusion created within the imagination.
When I first considered this notion at 8 years old, me and another little boy were playing outside, like children used to do back then. I wondered whether that other little boy perceives the world only through his own senses as I do, as if I am no different, and no more significant than he is? Or is he just a figment of my dream along with everything else? Is there even a reality at all? Maybe I’m just dreaming everything and always have been, and that things that I should know from a far away or long ago are just filled in as need be to complete the illusion.
If any of that were true, then I can’t have imagined the universe, because I’m in it. So the universe must have generated me somehow, and I’m only perceiving my personal universe as a dream; if that’s so, and mine is the only mind there is, then why would it cast me as just one out of 3.2 billion lowly people at that time, with no perceivable importance and nothing special about me? Not only did that not make any sense, nor did any of the rest of it, but most importantly, there is absolutely no reason to believe that this foolish child’s self-centered wholly unsupported notion has any potential to be true, and there is no possible value in even considering it. I feels disingenuous to even discuss it! Why not waste several hours contemplating whether pigs have wings?
Even if it were true, there would still be no practical application to that assumption, especially since the only joy that anyone can derive from this is pretending that we can’t really know anything, if we imagine that this is absurd scenario is even remotely possible. No, the only assumption that has any actual factual support, (and yes it certainly is supported) is that the only reality that is practically or even theoretically possible also happens to be the only that is apparently real.
I know better than to assume things without reason, but solipsism doesn’t even have a theoretical construct to consider; nothing whatsoever to go on. Honestly the best that idealism can even get is the false assumption that “anything is possible”, but it’s not, because it is not possible that monkeys might fly out of my ass. Before we can know whether something is possible, there need be some precedent or parallel indicating that possibility, or at least some such example phenomenon which can be confirmed but not yet explained. Without that, there had better be some hypothesis as to how this imaginary answer could be correct, but there is nothing whatsoever, just fruitless naval gazing, the only goal of which is to undermine everything we know about anything at all.
If the universe is the product of a mind, then the mind cannot be a product of that universe. At best the mind and its perception of the universe are both products of the universe itself, in which case, the mind did not imagine all that it perceives. That illusion was created by the universe too, in an attempt to deceive us, perhaps for no other reason than to put all other unrealistic paranoid conspiracy theories to shame.
I hate the idea of presupposition. So I examined all of this as best I could to make sure that’s not what this is. I don’t like circular arguments or confirmation bias either, and I certainly know how to question my own assumptions, but after having done that, I have resolved that this is the only answer any sane person can come up with, because the alternative is literally insane by definition. That’s why everyone else -including solipsists make this same assumption I do. They have to, because that is the only conviction that is really completely supported in every possible sense.
