Solipsism Syndrome
 

it's a contagious disease so i don't feel comfortable saying too much about it, just curious if anyone else has had similar experiences? talk of synchronicities and singularities does seem to be on the rise... this has to be the most absurd topic in the world so let's talk about it... somebody

... what is it?

I don't know, on one hand I believe this is my life and everything is my love, or hatred and ultimately a manifestation of my own senses. But I think the world, as I know it (well not exactly as I, myself, know it but as we, as a collective species know it) could go on and will go on without me. I guess it's just as likely as anything that this all some clever ruse I've dreamed up but that's too hard for me to grasp. I guess I'm not egocentric enough (or maybe too self-loathing) to believe I have the intelligence to form a world like this, with all it's scientific rules and joys and sorrows and adventures. I'm not sure I have that brain capacity or creativity. I don't know eh, I'm certain of my insignificance, my simple intelligence and the universe's indifference.

there is a gap between solipsism and solipsism syndrome though, on the one hand we have a super-skeptical philosophical argument an on the other hand you have an intangible experience, a depersonalization from reality, the feeling that life is a dream, the feeling that, as someone on another forum put it, "to stay sane we must ignore"

don't watch this:

I think about this a lot actually. I didn't know there was a word for it. The most difficult part of this idea is thinking that you're capable of making a system so complex. Whether true or not it's probably not the best idea to completely convince yourself of it.

I agree, but one realization that scared me was that the system is only as complex as the complexity you read into it. People ask, so you're saying your mind could have generated Shakespeare and Beethoven? You are capable of such things? But their brilliance is only proportional to the brilliance your mind can read into their work, most of us just rely on other people to tell us that they were great which to a solipsist of course proves nothing.

If everything we perceive as reality is in fact a dream, then what are we?

Irrational ideas are irrational. Why would I want to believe this?

I've entertained the idea on occasion, mostly when trying to fathom eternity. I figure at the very least, I'm a part of the divine creation that couldn't handle eternity anymore, so a seemingly elaborate and endless system of life and death and illness and fear was created to make it all bearable. Other people might very well be real, but were created as diversions from the horror of neverending existence. This also goes in line with my recent, somewhat oriental line of thinking that everything serves a purpose, and I seem to be finding a lot meaning and obvious purpose in the things that happen around me...which could fit into the ego-universe theory, I think (it's all about me me me). Did any of that seem at all pertinent?

you don't. that's why i started by saying it's a contagious disease. best to just leave it alone.

yes, thank you, we're on the same wavelength.

figments of our own imagination?

But what is imagination? What is its source? Basically, what is reality?

It does get kind of mirrorical (yes I made up a word). I made something complex and great and the reason why it is complex and great is because of criteria that other people made up meaning that I really made it up meaning that it is only great because I'm the only one there is.

It.

I suppose you wouldn't. Why would anyone believe it? The concept of questioning everything.

Well to me solipsism leads in one of two directions, either dualism or monism. Either I exist and because there is an external reality, God must also exist, and reality is possible because God supports both me and it in his mind, or only I exist, and I am God, and have essentially split my own personality to escape from an all-engulfing loneliness. In that case the imagination is all that exists, and everything is a product of the imagination, and to produce meaning it also had to produce ignorance.

for instance, what produces my dreams? my imagination, my subconscious perhaps, but most people agree that it is themselves. and yet, i can't consciously access my subconscious. so how do i know my subconscious does not also generate reality? how do i know my subconscious isn't God? hmm...

Indeed, which is pretty much the sum of all Buddhist wisdom. Schopenhauer says it pretty well in The World as Will and Representation. It's like the will is in an endless hall of mirrors and the representations it generates are distorted views of itself. Nothin' but smoke and mirrors, as they say.

Right. There's an apt Lovecraft quote for this I think:

What is better (or worse), an end or no end (to existence)? Neither, the best would be a cycle of life and death, which gives you the illusion of end, yet the impossibility of knowing the real truth opens up hope. Also a hope that, in his (or our) infinitive wisdom, we crafted a foolproof system, which sort of precludes us (or me) from ever knowing the real truth (if you're inclined to have a darker mind, like me and H.P. here). That's why I don't think a simple thought exercise like solipsism could lead us to the truth. If and when we get close to it, someone will hit the reset button...:/

Ramble ramble...

neverending existence is the most beautiful thing in the world.


it's weird, i've actually been thinking alot about this topic lately. however, i had no idea that it was an established line of thought shared by so many people.

the idea that just because reality is one big dream, nothing truly exists in a permanent physical form is ridiculous. just look at the dreams you have now. do you always dream of things that aren't in existance? no, right? so why does it have to be that if life is a dream, then all things in that dream are automatically fictional? i don't see it like that.

So we ourselves must not be real, as who we are is, to a great extent, shaped by our environment and experiences. If this environment and these experiences are only products of our imagination, than our idea of the self must also be a dream. So we are in fact just... nothing. A passive source barely of life? This is the understanding im getting from it.

i don't understand why everyone deals in absolutes.

the idea that you can make something from nothing is very easily grasped, especially if you believe that everything is nothing. i don't really agree that we are defined by the setting we are in, either. a tree isn't shaped by the forest, the forest is shaped by the tree, no?

Really? How do you figure? How is eternity (which should include) of all encompassing knowledge a good thing? There is no progress, no goal to strive to, just stationary (eternity means the absence of time which only leaves space) bleakness. Nothing can happen to you, there is no fear, therefore only indifference which is a euphemism for death. Either way you lose. *party pooper* :/

I should note that this is all just philosophical. If I really believed this was how things were, I'd have gone batshit crazy long ago...I just can't seem to abandon hope.

Yes, the forest is the product of many tree's, just as society is the product of the people within it, but i also think we are influenced greatly by our upbringing, our relations with others etc. I dont think the self is defined from within, at least not entirely.

knowing everything means knowing nothing. knowledge is just the memories of past events, past answers, and past sequences. there is always something new to do, therefore creating more information. nothing ever stagnates because even decomposition leads to growth.

every moment is a lesson learned, but that doesn't mean it necessarily will apply for ever and ever.

Even though it's all new it's all the same.

I don't think you understand how life works. I am not saying that you should never question, but don't forget to look at the meaning of existence, your own happiness. How do we know this is what we strive for? Well to us there are certain things our brain likes and certain things is does not. Therefore, we strive for the things it likes.

You can't do that if you sit in a corner all your life sucking your thumb wishing there was more to life.

That's not to fun to think about during math class though...

I don't believe solipsism but it's still interesting to think about.

anyway this thread was supposed to be about solipsism syndrome, which is a bit different from an entertaining philosophical idea. i would endeavor to describe it but it'll just make me sound crazy so i'll leave it alone until someone else comes along who already knows what i'm going to say.

I am reading Murphy by Samuel Beckett right now and apparently he is a solipsist. I absolutely hate Murphy.

I think most people think about this every now and then, it's a pretty frightening concept. But my mind is prosaic enough to ignore it happily.

I don't really understand the counter argument that someone doesn't believe their brain could manufacture a system so complex.
Once you believe that existence is a figment of your imagination, it's the smallest thing to accept that your brain could generate something like existence. We would be approaching something like God and our human consciousness could be the smallest fragment of our mind.

l'enfer... c'est les autres!!

Well, you can't disprove it and even trying is a likely waste of energy. People tend to like that, I think. It is rather self-centered, maybe people like that as well .. And people can "feel" like it, so there you go.

Anyways, I think the pursuit of stuff like this is daft. It can't be disproven and also, I can't see what believing in something like that would give to me - or anyone (in a "more trouble than it's worth"-kind of way).

If everything, including you guys, were figments of my imagination, I would like to think I would have had more control over what goes on. Since I don't have control over most things in my life, like wether or not the buss should be late or what you guys write, I would then perhaps have to consider that I am also a victim of how my imagination works. It seems my imagination has created a world where cause, consequence and so on is allowed to interact work freely and I have to play by the rules. If I wanna take the buss, I have to be there in time. If I throw a rock up in the air, it will fall down. That means that the imaginary world behaves exactly like what I expect from a "real" world. What's the difference between the two then? I don't know.

Now, since I don't know if people are figments of my imagination or not, should I treat them like they are? The answer is an obvious "no" because based on my prediction, a "yes" here would probably have more negative consequences, both by the rules in the real world and the "dream world". Should I hit myself in the head with this potentially imaginary hammer? No, I don't think so.

Conclusion : solipsism can be safely ignored.


Appearantly, according to that wikipedia article, the feeling that everything is artificial is normally enhanced when people gain control over everything. It lists other interesting observations as well. Maybe people who have this feeling just need to get out more. ;)

Had an awful one-dayer of this after a rather vivid and confusing dream....

Quickly saw sense however. Never been a keen thinker into the matter. Mainly because I don't like the thought of it happening to me. There was a famous Philosopher who believed this, can't remember his name, But his pupils used to have to stop him from jumping off clifs. Dangerous theory...

Oh yeah, I can see how that is a real worry .. ;)

Let's hope the homeless and the starving don't suffer from solipsism.

The way my brain works my friend...you'd be surprised :p

Must know his name...

Most idealism seems pretty solipsistic to me, but obviously there's different levels to it.

Those lucky bastards have so much distracting them...

I have been reading Ludwig Wittgenstein's work - the dichotomous idealism was what initially intrigued me - which has led me to further study linguistics and language in general to work through some things. I am prefacing this now because I'm going to passingly reference some of Wittgenstein's ideas and this is, in many ways, the building block of the rest of my what I'm going to say and my mindset in general.

There's this argument presented, we'll call it the Image Theory, and the basis is that for language to have meaning and the ability to connection to reality every word has to be associated with a picture. To expand on this, language in general has to be associated with some sort of emotion. Which means that language is strictly an associative thing, which would of course amount to language being no more than the outcome, or to be more specific giving coherent noises, than a singular individual perception of reality (solipsism basically.)

But there's the second argument (here's the other half of the dichotomous bind) that for language to even exist it has to happen between persons, which means language is now dependent on the community. This of course, could mean that you are still alone but I'm not inclined to believe that. This would require a sort of schizophrenia I believe myself to be incapable of. I understand the argument that you could only enjoy things as your perception of them is but certain things, particularly language, that expand and alter perceptions to an extent that I would find impossible to do with my own mind. There are conversations I have had that have uplifted me to a certain point or brought me down to a certain point that I, no matter how extremely bipolar I could suddenly become, could create that kind of emotional ecstasy/depression. By making language dependent on the community (this of course, could point towards a bisolipsism or communal solipsism but I believe that to be increasingly improbable depending on the amount of people within the community which would continue to grow with the more people you encountered) this leaves up with two options.

Those two ideas leave us with two options obviously. One is to treat language as mimesis and nothing more then that. Option two is to expand the trap, making the linguistic subject (since we can create words and assemble different noises to sound out these words) infinite and everything.

I prefer to follow the latter option, with the former Image Theory approach, of language being something of individual expression and forced manifestation, it still leaves you with the problems of solipsism. The latter of course, makes the language the basic for existence/community and multiple persons in a world. This avoids the problem of solipsism but leads to the classic postmodern and poststructural problem of having no existence outside of language (so essentially this doesn't eliminate the horror of solipsism but rather it shifts the specifics and makes less likely.)

I don't know if any of this makes sense; it's nearly four in the morning and it's basically a quick summary of my attempt to understand language, in regards to the necessity and importance of it. I've basically tried to deconstruct it, and reconstruct it in order to understand how it operates and it's constraints as well as lack of constraints. However you can't objectively study language since you are trapped inside of it and living within it and from the moment your born into a community you can't even attempt to escape it or maybe I've been busy with too many substances lately and I'm full of shit.

sounds like a whole lotta stupid to me

As always your intelligence is unparalleled. I want to thank you for your constant valuable input and insight.

Lets all stand by for the best person in the world

Hey man I just wanted to say I appreciate you. Don't let it go to your head.

Their is nothing scientifically sound that suggests that what we loosely refer to as reality is anything more than the manifestations of our thought processes and whatever subsequent biases we have as a result of them.
Now, having said that, there are people in this world who use this theory as a way to compensate for the fact that they have no control over their lives, as if they could simply wish there Ideal life circumstances into existence. It's not quite that simple.
Do I believe that "Life is but a dream"? absolutely and unapologetically. I also believe that this philosophy does not alleviate one from taking full responsibility for ones life, in fact I believe if understood correctly it makes one more mindful of their actions and the subsequent consequences, good or bad, that result from them.
Understand that this is not new age fluff. It is, in fact, science. It may contradict our present paradigm of understanding reality, and it is certainly signaling the end of physical science as we have come to know it.

I don't think solipsism is a scientific theory or even hypothesis; as there's no way to prove or disprove it through the scientific process. The idea, or rather fact, that everything you experience in your life is ultimately your experience is but that isn't solipsism exactly as it doesn't necessarily point towards everything's existence being dependent on your own mind.