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WillowOne's Positions

Solipsism

My Positions

  1. I regard solipsism and hard solipsism as unfalsifiable.
  2. I accept hard solipsism in principle as the logical boundary of what can be known with certainty, while remaining open to the possibility that even this level of certainty may be illusory (see Certainty).
  3. Since I understand Knowledge as the attempt to map sense data in order to reduce surprise, the inability to determine the true origin of that data does not concern me. Whatever the source, the data behave consistently, and consistency is all a model needs.
  4. I take the existence of an external reality as a presupposition because it is the simplest model that explains why my experience is consistent, independent of my will, and frequently surprising.

Notes

  • Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is certain to exist. On this view, all experiences, sensations, and perceptions could be projections of the self, with no evidence that anything external truly exists.
  • Hard solipsism is the stronger form. It claims that knowledge of anything outside one's own conscious experience is impossible. You cannot know whether other people have minds, whether the physical world exists, or whether your memories reflect anything real. All that can be known with certainty is that you, the thinking subject, exist.
  • Solipsism cannot be refuted, but it also cannot be used. It makes no predictions and forbids nothing. By Popper's Razor it is not a scientific hypothesis, and by Occam's Razor it is no simpler than realism, since it still has to account for the full complexity of experience, only now located inside a single mind.
  • There is a practical self-refutation: nobody who sincerely held hard solipsism would bother to argue for it, since there would be no one to persuade.
  • The same structure applies to the Brain in a vat, the Evil demon, and the Simulation hypothesis. I treat all of these as reminders that certainty is unavailable, not as live alternatives to realism.

Also see

  1. Popper's Razor
  2. Certainty
  3. Cogito, ergo sum
  4. Brain in a vat