Solipsism - Quareness Series 126th "Lecture".
During this current unusual virus-dominated period of our history, there's a growing number of us who may be catching a glimpse of a central dilemma of human life which philosophers have tended to label "the problem of other minds". The solipsism viewpoint (= perhaps an extreme form of scepticism) in holding that you are the only conscious being in existence, can seem both totally nuts and utterly irrefutable all at the same time. It claims that the entire cosmos sprang into existence when you became sentient and it will vanish when you die. Despite this apparent conundrum, however, there is a core fact here which cannot be dismissed...each of us is sealed in an impermeable prison cell of subjective awareness. Each of us experiences our own minds every waking second, but we can only indirectly infer the existence of other minds. Other people may well seem to possess the same type of internal emotions, intentions, memories, perceptions, etc. as ourselves, but we can't be sure they do.
Based on my behaviour and utterances you can guess how the world looks to me, but you have no first-hand access to my inner life.
From an evolutionary scientific perspective, it could appear that natural selection has instilled in us humans the capacity for a so-called theory of mind encompassing an innate talent for intuiting other peoples' emotions and intentions. However, we also seem to have a counter tendency to deceive each other as well as to fear being deceived...a fact which has thwarted our efforts to adequately explain consciousness. Many scientists and philosophers have proposed numerous contradictory hypotheses about what consciousness is and how it arises
...from those panpsychists contending that all creatures (and even inanimate matter) have consciousness to the hard-core materialists insisting that not even humans are all that conscious. And the solipsism problem effectively prevents us from verifying or falsifying any of the claims. It seems that theories of consciousness may have to remain in the realm of speculation.
Now this solipsism problem may be far more than a technical philosophical matter. For instance, it may be a rather paranoid but understandable response to those feelings of solitude that lurk within all of us. Even if we reject solipsism on intellectual grounds, we still get to sense it emotionally whenever we feel estranged from others. It's starkly present whenever we have to confront the awful truth that we can never really know another person, and no other can really know us. The widespread attraction to religion all throughout known human history may have been (at least partly) a response to the dilemma. Our ancestors dreamed up some supernatural entities who bear witness to our innermost desires and fears and who always watch out for us, no matter how lonesome we feel or how alienated we be from our fellow humans...and they truly love us even as they know our most secret selves. The arts too can be seen as attempting to overcome the solipsism problem. When artists, musicians, novelists or poets say this is how my life feels or this is how life might feel for another person, they are helping us to imagine what it's like...but to imagine is not to know.
Perhaps a more alarming aspect of this "problem of other minds" is the problem of our own. We may deceive ourselves at least as effectively as we deceive others and thus may know ourselves even less than we know others! In mental illness, solipsism can become terrifyingly vivid. Victims of Capgras syndrome, for example, get to thinking that identical imposters have replaced loved ones. Those with Cotard's delusion ("walking corpse syndrome") become convinced they are dead. Derealisation is a much more common disorder where everything
(yourself, others, reality as a whole) feels phony, simulated, strange. But then again what if those afflicted with such alleged delusions actually see reality clearly? In the Buddhist doctrine of anatta the self does not really exist and if you try to pin down your own essence, it slips through your fingers.
Over time humans have devised some relatively effective "brainwashing" methods for cultivating self-knowledge and quelling our anxieties e.g. meditation, psychotherapy, etc. But rather than solving the solipsism problem, such approaches more likely amount to mere training of ourselves to ignore it and suppress the despair/horror it can trigger. We have also invented mythical places (e.g. heaven, nirvana, singularity, etc.) where we'd hope to transcend our solitude and merge with others into a unified whole. But maybe we can only "escape" our own cave here either by pretending it doesn't exist or by confronting it...knowing we are in the cave may be as close as we can get to escaping it?
In all the madness of societal disruption now engulfing us, the public mind could easily become more prone to manipulative programming designed to "deliver us" from the solipsism problem. Some influencers have already proposed that we all get brain implants with wi-fi so we can meld minds through a kind of high-tech telepathy. Others have suggested techniques that involve "brain-slicing"...transferring bits of your brain into mine, and vice versa. Gaining enough momentum this kind of thinking can lead to dismissing/ignoring of far more
fundamental issues of what it is to be human e.g. do we really want to escape from the condition of our subjective selves? Consider the case of the Borg...a legion of tech-enhanced humanoids (Star-Trek:The Next Generation) who have fused into one big meta-entity. Borg members have lost their separation from each other and hence all their individuality. When they meet ordinary humans, they mutter in a scary monotone "resistence is futile...you will be assimilated". Is this the nightmare coming down the line for us?
Solitude may be a difficult state to bear for most of us on the planet, but if the only viable alternative moving forward on our current trajectory is some sort of oneness or unification that extinguishes our individual selves, we may want at least to seriously consider crying halt before it's too late. And perhaps the best way to cope with the solipsism problem in this weird and lonely time is to imagine a world in which it has vanished.
Sean.
Dean of Quareness.
September, 2020.