Solipsism (spinoff of "personhood")

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: : 1.) Excuse my ignorance, sorry. I don't read much philosophy, I just think it. What is "solipsism"? From what you've been saying, it seems to be the consideration of reality as without real stuff in it. You'd never know it from my posts no far, but I DON'T think this, although I used to. I consider our world solely perceptions, unadulterated perceptions. They are truly real; the basic tenet of this part of my thinking is that information (perceptions) verify their own existence. : that's actually pretty close to what solipsism starts from. let's talk about what we know. i am certain, 100% positive, that there is the awareness of sense data. i'm also 100% positive that there is the awareness of thinking (processing teh sense data and memory in order to affect and predict the future and organize teh massive amount of data.) i lump these two awarenesses into the term "experience". i can say, with 100% certainty, that experience is happening. (and, since i'm saying that, i can say that teh awareness of experience is happening, and since im' saying THAT, i can say that the awareness of the awareness of experience is happening, and son on.) : (i should take a moment to clarify "awareness". i mean to say the recognition by the "thinking thing" of a certain bit of information.) : now, as descartes put it, cogito ergo sum. that is, since there is thinking, we can conclude that there is a thinknig thing. that thing labels itself "i." "i" think, therefor, "i" exist. it's all very semantic and straightforward, really. : you see, you can really admit more than just that there is information being recieved. you are also THINKING ABOUT the information. (or "acting in response to it", if thought is another sort of action or vice versa.) : so, experience exists, and it is being processed by a thinking thing. in shorter words, i'm experiencing. : descartes wrote this when he woke up one day and said, "wow, there's a tremendous amount of bullshit flying about. i wonder how many things i can actually believe? well, let's throw it all out and start over." i don't pretend to be a descartes scholar, but it's a valuable philosophy of mind discussion. : so, there are a number of possible theories to explain the phenomenon of experience. one of them is solipsism. (literally, "myself alone"-ism) basically it's the minimalist approach. there is a thinking thing, and a source of information. (quite possibly they are the same entity split into 2 or more parts.) just for the sake of convention, i'm gonna label the source of information "god." (don't get confused, it's not a magical super-person ghost in the sky, just a useful object in the theory.) basically, god is the rest of the universe which is not the thinking thing. god supplies "me" with information. "i" supply "god" with my choices (tho it's likely god already saw them coming.) god then supplies the thinknig thing with more information. and so on. when the thinking thing isn't experiencing something, god doesn't send the information TO the thinking thing, so, in a sense, it doesn't exist at all. all that exists here is information, the dream and the dreamer without physical stuff. : now, just cause there's no hard meat (only the information that makes the thinking thing THINK there is) doesn't mean that the dream is pleny orderly and that a rational being cant' navigate quite well within it. god's just nice like that, so it made a dream that's a big predictable puzzle. : some people feel that solipsism is too lonely, so invent other ideas. thatis, what if there's plenty of thinking things, and one god supplying information to all of them. unfortunately, this multiplies the amount of entities in the explanation greatly. (plus, it brings up the problem with dogs and antelopes, do THEY experience? so is there a thinking thing corresponding to all of them, in some sense? it gets sticky.) : all things being equal (and they are) the theory with the fewest objects is more likely. : now, another theory is that there IS no god, and the "thinking thing" is just a really cool computing automaton recieving information from a noumenal world. other persons are just other self-centered computing automatons. in this paradigm, there are exactly the same number of objects as in solipsism (it's a lengthy discussion i would not like to go into, cause it's also boring. several writers have written about this topic.) so, therefor, pure solipsism and pure realism are the two most likely theories. (neither is NECESSARILY true, of course. it's just that they are more LIKELY true than any other possible explanation.) : sometimes one is more convenient than the other, and i personally like to switch between the two paradigms from time to time. : : :Getting information means you know you get the information. I've considered this to be possibly false, too; the knowledge of getting the information must be information as well, and there must be knowledge of this as well, and so on ad infinitum. Seemingly, we don't have this much useless information kicking around. Maybe that argument is valid, though I have now discarded it. : you're talking about metathinking, thinking about thinking. well, thinking about thinking IS thinking. and we do it. some would say (and have) that metathinking ability is a qualification for personhood. we can even metametathink, like i'm doing now by discussing metathinking, that is, we can think about metathinking, ad infinitum. of course, it reaches a point where we just say "this is silly, it's ALL thinking." we don't get caught in an infinite loop and go crazy. (evolution likely picked those freaks out of the herd long ago :) : :It's just more intuitive to me to think of everything as perception. In this context, the question "Is reality 'real'?" just means "does the nature of the information I receive through my senses agree with the information I receive from my thoughts/worldview?" Not necessarily, but this is fairly unimportant. : you'd be answering the question "is the thinking in line with the perceptions?", not "is reality real." from any paradigm, reality is real. in a solipsist world, the question could be restated "am i getting information from god?" of course you are, tho. from a realist point of view, "is the stuff that's there really there?" of course it is. : a much better (or at least, more interesting) question would be "am i experiencing reality?" in a realistic paradigm, this is a question regarding the quality of my information gathering devices (eyes, ears, skin, the parts of my brain responsible for talking to these organs, etc.), but in a solipsist paradigm, this is a much more interesting question. is god "lying" to me? (of course, since there is no "truth" besides what it gives me, how could it "lie"?) more appropriately, the question becomes, is my experience of the sense data actually in line with the sense data itself? here, it's a question of whether perhaps the desires and memories of the thinking thing are influencing its ability to accurately understand what god is "telling" it. or, in other words, is the thinking thing somehow MAKING itself experience something that god is not supplying it. : so, the question becomes, in either paradigm... : am i making myself experience something that is not really there? : it's funny how that works, aint it? : : : 2.) Your stuff about thinking: I discard it entirely. In this perception-oriented view of the world (Is it solipsism or not?) all action, including thinking, is just certain types of perception or information. The actual action is not necessarily there. The actual action is just what our worldview tells us is happening. We do NOT know we think, despite however much it may seems so. As a matter of fact, right now I am perceiving a memory of practicing meditation last summer until I could stop thinking completely for a second or two at a time - sort of mentally holding my breath. : all thinking *that you are aware of* is a certain sort perception. if you're not aware of it, it's not percieved. a great deal of information is processed, tho. : not-thinking is a very interesting sort of experience. if you never have, i suggest you read laurence leshan's "how to meditate." it's really just such an amazing book. meditation is so essential to having a sharp and functional mind. : : 3.) Your stuff about forgetting philosophy and living normally: : i never said to forget philosophy. i said to switch paradigms when it's convenient to do so. : if anything, you should get more into philosophy. you are so SO not done with what you could do with your mind. plus, while you may have been able to come to a lot of the same conclusions as a lot of philosophers, reading philosophy can be a wonderful shortcut. plus, if you read somehitng that's wrong, you can figure out WHY it's wrong, and that's anothe rshortcut to understanding your world. it's great for you. : if you define person to be any information-gathering object, then yes, computers are people. but, i think that this is a useless definition, because computers ARENT people, in the conventional sense. for this reason, if we include a lot of not person things in the definition, then i have to come up with another definition, and a whole other TERM, to mean what i want it to mean, and that's awhole long of work. what i'm looking for is a definition of personhood that is both useful and clearly defined. (and, i have a feeling, as i have mentioned, that it is a fuzzy characteristic.) : what you talkingabout here is something that some philosophers of mind have talked about, called the "something it's like to be" something. that is, what is it like to be a rock? well, it isn't like anything. now, what is it like to be you? i could imagine that, especially casue you're a 5. is there a "something it's like to be" a computer? or a dog? : i'm not a big fan of the "something it's like to be" classification, cause we're all automatons. : : 6.) Ya know, we don't have any other basis for deciding what personhood is other than what we are. We are the only examples we have to observe, and we have to deduce the existence of other people from ourselves; thus, if stuff isn't like us, we won't call it a person. (By the way, since a lot of people define themselves by their thoughts, alien thinkers MIGHT be classed as people by some humans, even if they don't look like us, if they think like us) : until god tells me about another one of these messages, : isaac :)

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