Your eyes, your hands, your body: that's you. Only crazy people would deny that, and you know you're not crazy. Anyone who'd doubt that must be dreaming. Oh no, what if you're dreaming? Dreams feel real. You can believe you're swimming, flying or fighting off monsters with your bare hands, when your real body is lying in bed. No, no, no. When you're awake, you know you're awake. But when you aren't, you don't know you aren't, so you can't prove you aren't dreaming.
Maybe the body you perceive yourself to have isn't really there. Maybe all of reality, even its abstract concepts, like time, shape, color and number are false, all just deceptions concocted by an evil genius!
No, seriously. Descartes asks if you can disprove the idea that an evil genius demon has tricked you into believing reality is real. Existential Being is self-evident: it is our consciousness of existing.
It necessitates ontological Being, but while vivid and apparently consistent, it is as indefinable and incommunicable as colour, and is accessible only in time. The space between Sein as absolute and Dasein is filled with Otherness, whether conscious or inanimate, knowable only by inference, or what is unknowable; giving rise to moral ambiguity. How these aspects of Being relate to physics is yet undetermined.
Such tipping events may underlie the specificity of consciousness, the sense of Being, even the attribution of meaning. A mental state induced by some input or thought process, producing a sensation of meaning and any consequent behaviour, need not represent any reality.
Concepts exist inasmuch as they can be expressed, and could be timeless in principle. However, they must be performed in time , and as some change is then inevitable, existence of conceptual forms outside space and time is doubtful. Yet the massless photon, propagating at light speed, is truly isolated in its own timeless moment until it interacts with matter. And all matter may be like the photon fundamentally: Being at its most elementary, acquiring time only through interactions.
Physics creeps closer to unified understanding of Being in the universe, a machine whose parts Are, but are not like anything familiar. I exist whenever I think, since there are no thoughts without thinkers. Thought is a sufficient, but not a necessary, condition for existence, because there is no reason to think my senses typically deceive me about the existence of un-minded, material entities and processes.
Thank you, Thomas Reid. Even in dreamless sleep, I exist: as do rocks, ribs, and ribosomes. Propositions are not the same as thoughts or spoken or written sentences. Propositions, therefore, are abstract objects, which give the meaning to all these expressions.
Without propositions, translation from one language to another would be impossible. Translation is possible. Therefore, propositions exist. Propositions exist in human brains, but are not identical to any brain state. For instance, my thoughts have intentionality or aboutness , which is not reducible to events in my brain, because material properties and processes cannot be about other material properties and processes. Thank you, Brentano and Husserl. When I view a Mark Rothko painting, I interact cognitively with this noncognitive entity.
It does not, and cannot, reciprocate. Moreover, a total brain scan would never uncover a thought, but only its physical surroundings and correlated mechanisms. Thank you, Leibniz. Thus, thoughts and brains are different in kind. But how do propositions, minds, and bodies exist? Since they have meaning, they must be meant. The place for meaning is a mind. Yet the truth or falsity of countless propositions are unknown even unknowable to any human mind, such as the exact time and place when the first chicken was hatched.
So, if propositions exist in human minds, but do not require human minds for their existence, where might these propositions reside? They cannot exist on their own, and cannot be orphaned. Thus, they exist in a super-human mind, which contains all propositions and which is the metaphysical support for their existence. Thank you, Augustine and Plantinga. The commonsense view, that reality consists of a multiplicity of things existing for a certain time then not existing, can be shown to be nonsensical.
Whenever we investigate the nature of a thing, whether empirically or through reason, we only find its constituent parts and relations, and those parts and relations can similarly be deconstructed until we are ultimately left with no-thingness [such as a quantum flux]. We make a series of fudges when we prematurely halt this investigation before we reach no-thingness, in order to settle for a baseline of supposedly fundamental descriptors that enable us to maintain the idea of a world of many separate things.
But you can never even step in the same river once! Things themselves have their origin in the basic complex structures formed in the cosmological events following the Big Bang about Panpsychists contend that all creatures and even inanimate matter— even a single proton! Hard-core materialists insist, conversely and perversely , that not even humans are all that conscious.
The solipsism problem prevents us from verifying or falsifying these and other claims. As long as we lack what neuroscientist Christof Koch calls a consciousness meter —a device that can measure consciousness in the same way that a thermometer measures temperature—theories of consciousness will remain in the realm of pure speculation. But the solipsism problem is far more than a technical philosophical matter. It is a paranoid but understandable response to the feelings of solitude that lurk within us all.
Even if you reject solipsism as an intellectual position, you sense it, emotionally, whenever you feel estranged from others, whenever you confront the awful truth that you can never know, really know another person, and no one can really know you. Religion is one response to the solipsism problem. Our ancestors dreamed up a supernatural entity who bears witness to our innermost fears and desires.
No matter how lonesome we feel, how alienated from our fellow humans, God is always there watching over us. He sees our souls, our most secret selves, and He loves us anyway. The arts, too, can be seen as attempts to overcome the solipsism problem. The artist, musician, poet, novelist says, This is how my life feels or This is how life might feel for another person. But to imagine is not to know. Some of my favorite works of art dwell on the solipsism problem.
Kaufman no doubt hopes to help us, and himself, overcome the solipsism problem by venting his anxiety about it, but I find his dramatizations almost too evocative. Love, ideally, give us the illusion of transcending the solipsism problem.
You feel you really know someone, from the inside out, and she knows you. The barrier between you seems to vanish. Inevitably, however, your lover disappoints, deceives, betrays you.
Or, less dramatically, some subtle bio-cognitive shift occurs. You look at her as she nibbles her pizza and think, Who, what, is this odd creature? The solipsism problem has reemerged, more painful and suffocating than ever. It gets worse. In addition to the problem of other minds, there is the problem of our own. As evolutionary psychologist Robert Trivers points out , we deceive ourselves at least as effectively as we deceive others.
A corollary of this dark truth is that we know ourselves even less than we know others. The same is true, I suspect, of our own deepest selves. For the mentally ill, solipsism can become terrifyingly vivid.
Victims of Capgras syndrome think that identical imposters have replaced their loved ones.
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