Solipsism: This Is All In My Mind?

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0:15Hey and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh and there's Chuck and Jerry's not here, we are. And we're pretty sure that both of us are here, but it's possible just me is here. And this is Stuff You Should Know. That's right. Diving into philosophy again. This one, solipsism, perhaps the most navel-gazy, sort of unintelligible aspect of all of them, which is that sort of old classic stoner college dorm room thing. How do we know if anything is real? What if it's all, and this part of it, what if it's all just a simulation? Yeah, that's one example of what it could be. But there's a couple of things about this.

0:59One, as annoying as it is, because if you're arguing for solipsism, and I don't want to say you're a solipsist because there's basically nobody out there who's an actual solipsist. Like you can just keep saying like, but yeah, how do you know? But yeah, how do you know? There doesn't seem to be any more reducted argument in all of philosophy. All other philosophy can essentially be argued against by solipsism. And the reason why is because the basis of solipsism is that there is no reality. It's just you. You hearing this, I don't exist. Chuck doesn't exist. This podcast doesn't exist. Nothing exists.

1:48except for your mind. And that's the basis of everything that you think is real. And none of us are actually doing anything that you're not projecting out of your mind. That's solipsism. And it sounds mind blowing. But like I said, it's also annoying. And it's also extremely simple, so much so that it can deceive you into thinking that it means more than it does. It doesn't. It's as basic as that. But again, as annoying as it is, it is in some ways a useful argument because if you really want to make a philosopher rigorous in their argument, have them take on solipsism or some form of it. Yeah, I think Livia found something online that said like no modern, like legitimate philosopher even takes part in these arguments because it's just such like, hey, get off the couch with your bong and maybe talk about something, some real philosophy.

2:43Well, also the other part of it, too, is if you were a genuine philosopher and you genuinely believe that nothing was real except in your mind, there is zero point for you to do anything like write a philosophy paper for solipsism because nobody's out there to read it in actuality. So what's the point? You're by yourself in the entire universe, so much so that the universe doesn't even exist outside of your mind. You're by yourself in some incomprehensible form of existence. It's just weird and depressing in a lot of ways. Yeah, for sure. We should mention the skeptics a little bit because that sort of lays the groundwork for solipsism a little bit.

3:27The skeptics started around the 3rd century BCE. The word itself came from the Greek term meaning inquiry or examination. and they were basically like, hey, it's not possible to have some knowledge to make definitive judgments arguing against the Stoics who said, no, you should be able to test claims using stuff that we can see and hear, using our senses. And the skeptics, and this sort of laid the ground of what was to come for solipsism, basically said like, hey, we can all be deceived though. What about the case of identical twins? You could be deceived there, or you could have a sensory experience if you're talking about trusting your senses that aren't connected to reality.

4:13Like, that's what a dream is. And dreams sort of play into the whole thing, at least at the beginning. Yeah. The skeptic said, you ever had a dream, dingus? Yeah. How are you going to trust your senses with that? And so skepticism, like you said, is kind of an extension of it, a basis of it. It's not quite there, but enough that solipsism is often thought of as an extreme form of skepticism. Sometimes it's also called global skepticism, like you're skeptical of everything. And then it's also sometimes called mondo-skepto. Speaking of the dreams, though, there was a Taoist philosopher named Zhuangzi that, and this also sort of laid the groundwork, was, hey, if I wake up from a dream and I was a wildebeest in that dream, how do I know that I'm not really a wildebeest and that this is the dream?

5:08Yeah. And all of this, again, yes, it does seem kind of bongish or bong adjacent for sure. But this is the kind of stuff that philosophers care about. It's called epistemology. Epistemology? Gee, I like to add a lot of syllables sometimes, so I'm not quite sure which one. But it's the basis of how we know what we know, how we gain knowledge. And the point of this, of all this stuff, as people were kind of building on it, is to say, like, we need to kind of figure out how we do know. Because if you really stop and think about it, we're not quite sure exactly how we know anything. And that whole thing was picked up in the 17th century by Descartes.

5:51And his very famous quote, I think, therefore I am, came out of this, right? Yeah. And that's, you know, basically saying like, hey, I know that I am real. I'm doing the thinking. I have a brain. But that's about all I know. Descartes was the first one that came in and said, hey, maybe we should get a system called Methodic Doubt, great band name, to determine if like, hey, you're saying something is truth, like one of the truths, we should be able to test this, but things are fallible. Like math, you can make mistakes in. You can't look at tradition of a culture because, you know, people might disagree with that kind of thing.

6:37And then the idea of an evil demon coming in and basically kind of taking hold of your consciousness and saying that you're having all these illusions and that's inhabited inside of you. Yeah, so that evil demon thing too, it's like, as we'll see, it's been updated in much more modern form. But Descartes was the first one to really kind of say, it's possible, especially we should say Descartes believed in God, that the extension of that, I think therefore I am, is also that anything I can just intuitively know is real, like God is real. So he believed that there definitely was God. So he was arguing like, okay, if we believe in God, then we have to entertain the possibility that it's not just, you know, our minds that are projecting this, but that we're being diluted, that we're like an entire universe is being created for us by this evil demon.

7:40This is his 17th century application of it. But it's like I said, it kind of formed these or it's been updated in modern forms. And that really kind of that's where it gets super tough because it's like, OK, yeah, it's ridiculous that you're the only person who exists and all the rest of us don't exist. or even more creepy. This is where it gets it to me. Okay. Like when you start to try to argue against solipsism, one of the ways that you're going to go is that other people have experiences and thoughts and emotions too. So that totally discounts the idea that you're the only entity, you're the only self in the entire universe, and that all of this is just in your mind.

8:30but then you have to ask like well wait a minute how do you know other people have experiences and thoughts and feelings like you do there's no way for you to know that and there's actually no way for them to get that across to you in any provable way and then you just kind of go like oh it's a little scary um at least i do it's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night Well, the word itself, if you want to break it down, it first appeared in 1869 from Kant. And I think it's Latin for solus from alone and ipsi meaning self. And this isn't the kind of thing where like at the beginning people are like, wow, this is really holds a lot of water.

9:15From the beginning, it was pretty ridiculous and philosophers thought it was pretty ridiculous. Oh, here's a quote. No great philosopher has espoused solipsism. Right. It's the quote that Livia found. Because, you know, if you believe that there's nothing, then you can't have an argument about anything. Because like you said at the beginning, a solipsist would just come in and go like, well, how do you know? Prove it. You can't prove that. Because even your proof isn't proof because it's not real. Yeah. One of the other things, too, just to kind of get this into perspective is, like, you can't even say that you have a brain because everything you know about a brain, you've basically, you're not born with the concept of a brain.

9:58You learn that from the external world. And if the external world doesn't exist, then maybe brains don't exist. Like, maybe you just don't even, can't even conceive of who you are. And that's the ultimate problem. You can just keep producing it. Like you can't prove how you know what you know. And I feel like that's really kind of set us up for a break. What do you think? Yeah, we'll be right back.

10:46So one of the things I kind of talked about earlier before the break, Chuck, was that as far as philosophy goes, like if you're trying to actually apply this to philosophical arguments or maybe like real world kind of stuff, is that it has to do with other minds and the fact that we can't ever fully understand what other people are thinking. And then as relates to solipsism, and we can't really prove that other people are thinking. And there's actually some, not just philosophers, but neuroscientists who've kind of investigated this, because it is an interesting question. Like, it's that same kind of question.

11:27Like, how do I know that we both experience the same color green in the exact same way, and that what you call green, I actually think is blue? Like, I experience it as what you would experience blue, but I call it green because I think that's what you're talking about, too. Yeah, and in terms of neuroscience, you know, you're talking about maybe a technology where you could brain splice and you could literally maybe get someone inside someone else's head. But even then, it's not like some sort of foolproof solipsistic argument, because even if you were sending signals from one brain to another, it's still going to be a subjective experience.

12:08And you wouldn't have any idea, even though you're getting the signals from their brain, like the subjective nature of it. Like you can't you can't gauge subjectivity scientifically. Yeah. And there's this there's this example of like, OK, one person that you're connected to the brain of is saying, like, I'm thinking of a red apple. And the other person with the other connected brain is like, yep, I can see the red apple that you're thinking of. But again, to that person, red is what the other person would think of as blue. And you can't possibly know that that person is thinking of what would be actually a blue apple and calling it red.

12:47But the thing is, you can. You can just be like, okay, person number two, now you think of a red apple. And we'll see what person number one thinks of it if it matches their conception. It'd be really easy to find that out if you ask me. Yeah. And if that was a test subject, they'd say, why is Chuck walking into traffic? What's going on? Yeah, I mean, we should say here, like, all of this does require brain implants, and I just don't feel like there's anybody trustworthy to put an implant in your brain right now. Yeah, that's true. There's also this concept of a philosophical zombie, right? They're called P-zombies.

13:23and it kind of ties in with what I was saying. Like we can't ever say that somebody else is thinking or emoting because we can conceive of something that looks like a human, acts like a human, has all the same thought processes of a human, maybe even has emotions and all that stuff, but they're missing what it means to be a human, which is the experience of experiencing something, right? So not like that person can eat an apple and taste what an apple tastes like, but they will never feel what it feels like to taste an apple that's like really delicious. You know what I'm saying? And so people came up with the idea of a pea zombie, a philosophical zombie, to try to investigate like what it is that makes humans humans.

14:10And that's kind of what they came up with. Yeah, and if you, you know, as AI comes on more and more, and I know you tackled some of this in The End of the World, your special podcast series. Thanks for the part. But the idea of like AI becoming sentient or conscious or whatever, like how are we going to know if that's even happening? Because it's not just if it knows so much stuff. I can you know I can learn facts and things but like it's that that subjectivity of a human or I guess just an experience because it wouldn't be human. And like how do we know if that's happening to an AI. Yeah. Or a person to you know like it's just and again like I think you kind of nail it on the head like all this seems like navel gazing but there is like some utility to it.

15:00Well, let's talk about some of the, I guess, varieties of solipsism that they've come up with over the years. There's one called metaphysical solipsism. That's basically that an individual is like yourself is all that there is. Nothing else has any independent reality at all. Then there is epistemological solipsism. And that is it is not even possible to know where anything outside our individual consciousness exists or is real. And that one is actually like kind of a step down from metaphysical. They're like, we're not saying that nothing else in the universe exists but your mind. But we're saying like you and I were just talking about with P-Zombies and AI, like we can't prove that anybody else has those thoughts and feelings besides the thinker.

15:54Right. Not the famous statue, but, you know, a real thinker. There's methodological solipsism. I got that extra O in there. And that means it's not possible to even start to analyze the world except through your own individual consciousness and lens, which that makes sense. Yeah, it does. But I saw that it really gets tricky with research because that base methodological solipsism says you don't need to mess with data or other people's research. Just what do you think about the subject? And that doesn't really hold water for like a research paper because, yeah, I mean, that's a good place to start.

16:35You can't just dive in or you I guess you can. But it's also like, what are your conceptions about this? And let's start from there and then go figure out if that's correct. Like this is just sticking with the what do you think about this and write the research paper. So it's not a really good idea, frankly. And then also, Chuck, there's just a straight up bad idea. Ethical solipsism, also called POS solipsism. Yeah, I think there's a professor from MIT named a philosopher, rather, maybe teaches philosophy, named Casper Hare. and he had a book in 2009 called On Myself and Other Less Important Subjects where he was arguing a lesser version of ethical solipsism, which is the idea that other things and people might exist, but we have no obligation to any of those people or ideas except for our own.

17:31No, and I think ultimately at the end he's like, but for us, for the person, the individual to lead a fuller life, You kind of do need people here or there. So you don't want to just completely screw over everybody for yourself. But that's the basis of what's called ethical solipsism, that you have no moral obligation to anyone except yourself. And then the other thing that really stuck out to me, Chuck, was that you have no moral obligation to anybody but yourself right now. So you don't even have to look out for your future self. All you need to care about is your present self. And that's why I called it POS solipsism.

18:09Yeah. Piece of what? Piece of S. There are also lots of little sort of side ideas that come along if you're going to gaze at your navel about solipsism. And one is the famous brain in a vat or the Futurama or the Matrix idea, which is all you are maybe is a brain floating in a jar with some life-sustaining liquid. And it's hooked up to a computer and everything you see is a simulation. Yeah. And this is where we kind of get into the modern updated versions of Descartes' evil demon, right? Like what's keeping you in the brain in a vat? What's running that simulation for you? Yeah. There's also the simulation hypothesis, which came from Nick Bostrom, which I did do a whole episode on End of the World on because it just fascinates me.

19:02But it's a lot of people confuse it with the brain in a vat, but it's different because in the simulation hypothesis, which is that if a civilization becomes advanced, like say we're their ancestors, they're our descendants, they just keep getting more and more technologically advanced, that they can invent simulations that are indistinguishable from reality. And they run a bunch of simulations over and over again, like say they sell copies of the simulation game, so 100 million simulations are ever created over the course of history, then mathematically speaking, since we can't distinguish between reality and a simulation, it makes, it's much likelier that you and I exist in a simulation rather than the actual one version of reality that the simulations are based on.

19:55Right. And the thing that people get mixed up with the brain in a vat is that the brain in the vat, in reality, your brain in a vat. In the simulation, in reality, your reality is simulated. But to you, it's reality. There's nothing different. There's no other like reality that you could wake up to. That's just reality. It's essentially like a techno version of creationism, essentially. Like if you replace whoever came up with the code for the simulation with God, it's essentially saying the same thing. Yeah. There's also, and this is sort of along those lines, the experience machine idea. There's a philosopher named Robert Nozick in a 1974 book that said, how about this for a thought experiment?

20:42I don't think that people are just basically hedonistic in life. And what would people choose if they could be attached to a machine that can simulate any experience, like as if it were identical and real and you thought it was real. Like, would it be hedonistic? Would you choose falling in love? Would you choose to write, you know, create a great piece of art or something like that? And then that, you know, there are different versions of that. Like, what if it's for two years at a time? What if it's your whole lives? And the counter to that usually is somebody saying, yeah, but people, it's not reality and people aren't engaged in reality and humans inherently want to engage with reality.

21:21Yeah. And like to sweeten the pot, Nozick was like, like you will have nothing but pleasure for the rest of your life. All you, all the pleasure you want, you will never be able to distinguish it from what life was like before. You won't remember that there was a life before, like it will be amazing. And something like 74 to 80 % of people who are posed this thought experiment say like, nah, I don't want to do that. Even though life is suffering in a lot of ways and sucks and it can be boring and is definitely not 100 % pleasure all the time, most people still want to be engaged in reality. And that's, again, like it's not just a cool thought experiment.

22:03They use that to argue against the idea that humans are at bottom just nothing but hedonistic creatures who seek out nothing but to increase their pleasure. Nozick really kind of demolished that with that thought experiment. Yeah, I think in The Matrix, wasn't Joey Pants fully on board with the simulation? I don't remember. I don't remember that. I think he was, because I think he was, like, eating the steak. And they were like, yeah, but the steak's not real. And he's like, yeah, but, you know. It tastes real. Tastes real, tastes good to me, something along those lines. But, yeah, it was pretty interesting.

22:37Do you want to take our second break and come back and talk about our favorite part of this, criticisms? Yeah, let's journey into Act 3.

23:07All right. So when it comes to criticisms of solipsism, not from us, there are some famous stories, one of which, very famous story in philosophy circles, that is at least. If you're not a philosopher, you're probably going to be like, what's that guy kicking the rock for? But it was an 18th century story about writer Samuel Johnson, who was in a, I guess, debate with a philosopher named George Berkeley. And Berkeley said, hey, Descartes' mind-body dualism is faulty, and everything that appears to have existence is just made up in your mind. Well, first, Berkeley said it's impossible to refute this, and that's when cheeky old Samuel Johnson came in and kicked a very large rock and said, I refute this.

23:55In other words, hey, this rock is here, and this is just an absurd idea because I can kick that rock and it hurt my toe. Right, exactly, yeah. And so if you're a philosopher, you're like, Samuel Johnson doesn't get it. And if you're not a philosopher, you're like Samuel Johnson gets it. Like philosophers are very famously maybe overly engaged in perfectly crafted, totally airtight arguments. And the idea of just kicking a rock and being like, see, it's real. It doesn't really hold water with them. But for everybody else, it's like, yeah, this it kind of gets to what Wittgenstein. Is that how you would say it in German?

24:37Yeah. Ludwig Wittgenstein. I'm going to say his name again at least one more time because it's fun. He was a philosopher of the 20th century. He basically was like, man, philosophy, this is not a quote, I'm paraphrasing, has some like real hangups with having to just like the fact that solipsism is actually it exists and people feel the need to argue against it sometimes says all you need to know about how uptight philosophers are about philosophy. and essentially we just need to take some things as fact as granted or else all we're doing is spinning our wheels but if you say like okay i believe that the world is material that it exists apart from human consciousness that if there were no humans around and nothing no life to experience it everything would still be the same like let's just take that as fact if that's what you believe and just move on from there.

25:32You need to have some sort of foundation that you can say, this is real, this exists, and then you build off of that. And if you don't, then you're just shooting yourself in the foot, essentially was what Ludwig Wittgenstein was saying. Yeah, I think, unfortunately, Wittgenstein. Well, I didn't see it, but I think the second letter in the E-I in German is the one that's favored. Oh, so how would you pronounce it then? I think it would be Wittgenstein. Well, I still like Wittgenstein, so I'm going to stay with it. Like Frankenstein. Oh, I had it backwards. So I thought that Stein was like the anglicized version of it and Steen was the German version.

26:23I'm pretty sure the second letter in German is the one that's pronounced. No, I believe you. I'm not positive, but I do know that Frankenstein was the doctor. You mean Frankenstein? Not the monster. Yeah, that's true. So let's talk about Stephen P. Thornton. He's a philosopher at the University of Limerick, the most sing-songy university in all of Ireland. He has an argument that, hey, guys, it's a big mistake to view these mental states as just something we experience subjectively and then, you know, relate to others like, hey, I know how it feels to get my toe stubbed because I've done it. So I see that's happened to you.

27:02So I know how that feels. He says, no, we learn what these mental states are in what he called an intersubjective world. Like we learn like a kid when it's born understands what being sad is by looking around at someone crying or something like that. And that's how they know what sad is because of a behavior they witness in a context they witness it in. So if you, you know, Olivia used a great example, if you're grinding your teeth and if you're, you know, snapping at people in your life and you can't sleep, then you probably know you're experiencing stress. Right. This guy's argument to me is the one that makes the most sense just refuting solipsism, which is like, yes, you have internal feelings and thoughts.

27:49Like the experience of feeling sad is not the whole of sadness, that there's other stuff. And all the rest of it essentially comes from interacting and learning from the external world. And so the whole idea of solipsism is based on a faulty premise that the entire world could possibly just be in your head. because how are you going to learn from something that's not actually there in the first place? I like Stephen P. Thornton. He's my new favorite philosopher. There was one other guy, too, we have to bring into the conversation. Bertrand Russell, he's a very famous philosopher and mathematician, I believe.

28:30His whole thing was like, if we might be like, what was it, Zhuangzi? him saying like how can I tell if I'm a man dreaming of a wildebeest or a wildebeest dreaming of being a man and Bertrand Russell was like if that were true dreams are just weird and freaky and anything goes real like waking life is not like that so if waking life were a dream it there would be measurable ways that it veers off of like physics or whatever and we would notice that and these days it's called a glitch in the matrix you would notice glitches in the matrix and there's actually a really cool Reddit, um, subreddit called Glitch in the Matrix.

29:09And it's people's like stories about just how, just weird, inexplicable, strange, small things that they've noticed here, there in life, they'll, they'll post them. And every once in a while, there'll be like a picture too. This is kind of fun to go through. What would it be of like, give me an example. Um, do you have any? One that I saw a couple of times is something like seeing somebody like go out a door and then And like 30 seconds later, they come in a totally opposite door that they physically couldn't have possibly gotten through. So how do you explain that? Just stuff like that. Yeah.