Pretty much. Too many word games, didn't like the smell of the guy.

See my response to Piers for a solipsist interpretation of that claim. It is certainly not "all there is to solipsism."

I'm not going back to the simple concept of the mind. Why do you think I am?

On the contrary, it is you who places a layer between you and reality that need not be there. Your own worldview suggests that you were a solipsist as an infant; you had no conception of reality "outside" of yourself. So where did that conception come from? Thin air? How did Tao the infant solipsist become Tao the child realist?

It explains everything realism explains, while invoking fewer assumptions and creating less conceptual clutter. It's just good housekeeping.

Again, I have no more reason to mistrust my memories than anyone else, and the problem of induction is no less a problem for the realist. I went into detail with PairTheBoard above.

More or less. Language is clearly self-constructed. The capacity for language is "just there," whether it can be explained I don't know, but at this juncture I am not able to explain it. The sensations that led to my perceptions of language are part of my model of reality, I can describe them as inputs but I can't logically suggest any "source" from which those inputs have been delivered.

If you believed a a god of your concepton existed solipsitically based on your perceived experience of it, then it would see reasonable to claim this god of your conception existed solipsitically based on your perceived experience of it.


Uhm! Was that a trick question?

Self-constructed seems like a bad word here. Language seems to be a reaction just as much as it is an action, and talking about the self understanding it as laying judgement to "what does what" seems to be a rather unjustified position. Even talking about the self is not justified, because you have to be the self (and even assuming that one is can't be certain anyway).

I think this is what bugs me about solipsism. In the hunt for the "most justifiable of all" you have to surrender the base assumption every time you have to explain or model a phenomena.

I don't have to reference the base assumption, I can understand how that looks like a "surrender."

If the idea that interaction is a form of role play seems disturbing, just recognize that we have have our mask and our personas. And sometimes we all have trouble knowing where the mask ends and the self begins.

Well, I don't know whether you want to admit it or not but the simple matter is that solipsism makes rather brutal assumptions that say...mere rationalism does not, or empiricism for that matter. Both rationalism and empiricism are thus more "justifiable" than solipsism as per your own logic.

Truth be told everytime you speak in defence of "weak solipsism" it sounds identical to Kant's idealism rather than resembling solipsism, but you claim Kant's idealism makes too many assumptions. I don't get it to add up.

The Mask - The Fugees

Kant's idealism invokes God and other minds.

Excuse me, but that is complete and utter BS. Kant even used the fact that you can validly prove and disprove a creating force as part of his dismantling of logic as an instrument suitable for attaining "ultimate" truths.

Please god, don't let this interesting discussion deteriorate into an analysis of Kant.

And if he had stopped there and gone no further, it would have been just peachy.

Your prayers have been answered. That rotten genius Kant and his diatribes are hereby excluded from this thread by fiat. Kant and solipsism is the title of the separate thread that should be created for those that wish to discuss that Uber-German and his shaved logic and deluded philosophy. After all, Wittgenstein was booted out into the snow; Kant will be shoved out also, and good riddance to both of them.

-Zeno

I suppose it would be in poor taste if I mentioned Leibniz?

Not referring Kant while debating solipsism is like banning the mentioning of Newton's works from mechanics. It's essentially what he wrote that is the basis for this entire philosophical subject in modern time.

But an analysis is not necessary. I'll ask how this: "The assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining" differs from "weak solipsism" however.

Buuut, it's not dreadfully important to answer as I'm out of this thread due to censorship. My apologies if this was my fault to begin with.

You are of course taking things too literally, that is if you are even being serious. Kant is no more banned than Hume or René Descartes or even Spinoza, though if anyone brings up Jacques Derrida they must suffer the consequences. Carry on....

-Zeno

Let me elaborate on my 'tease' because it a recurring issue here and in RGT. You guys had a great exchange going explaining and countering madnaks stance on 'solipsism'. somewhere around 100 it was turning into a "kant said", "no he didn't" exchange and my comment was to say "who cares what kant said" ...steal his arguments, or use a postion as a reference point but if you don't agree on what he said then the thread becomes either a twinned argument from authority or an analysis of what the hell he did say... to MY loss, since I was interested in the madnak-tame deuces exchange that was going on. philosophy is local.
But, it's your exchange and I have a black belt in skim reading so ... g'luck with whatever twist you take.

Ok, my apologies for the drama. I'll repost my last statement and we can take it from there.

Madnak:
Is this description "The assertion that we can never be certain whether all of our putative outer experience is not mere imagining" very different from "weak solipsism"? The followup question is also rather self-evident. If invoking other minds is a fallacy, is not then a fallacy to invoke one's own mind AND assert that it is the only mind in existence? (this in regard to strong solipsism)

The last point is that one of the original points of solipsism is that you can't know the minds of others, but I would say the discovery of mirror neurons counter this very well. Sure it is not a "fullproof case", but I would say it is interesting nonetheless.

I'm not saying that invoking other minds is a fallacy. I'm saying that invoking other minds is not solipsism. What you've presented here is Kant's definition of idealism. Solipsism is a subset of idealism. And yes, I think Kant's definition is fine. So if that makes me a "Kantian idealist," then I am a Kantian idealist.

But I would not characterize Kant as a solipsist, because Kant believed in God and other minds.

What mirror neurons establish is that when we feel we are in contact with "another mind," we are really only in contact with our own mind. The neuroscientific perspective that the mind is the brain supports solipsism fantastically. The real problem with idealism in the 20th century is that the assumption of everything existing in the mind was unsupportable. However, modern neuroscience shows us that everything within our experience is, in fact, within the brain.

The idea that when I feel empathy I am in actual, direct contact with another human being is falsified by a view of the brain as the "house of the mind." Mirror neurons establish that empathy is actually a localized function of my brain. It is not direct contact with anything "external." Modern developmental psychology also supports Kant's notion that reality is internally constructed - infants . If we accept that reality is internally constructed and that we only have access to that which is within the mind, then the result is idealism. The main opposition to Kant's idealism came in contradicting these two premises, so the fact that modern brain science supports those premises gives new life to idealism (if only by showing the contradictory nature of empirical realism).

Wittgenstein's counterargument to weak solipsism is not contained in the passage Zeno quoted, but in the so-called private language argument, which culminates at § 201. Weak solipsism denies that the assertion of an external world is logically justifiable; or rather, it makes no assertions about whether a given input can correctly be classified as internal or external. Wittgenstein's counterargument to this position is not to point out that it employs language, which is necessarily contingent on actual enculturation. It is easy to see that that notion can simply be reconceived consistent with the weak solipsist's terms ("I don't know how I acquired language"). This mutual consistency cannot be achieved vis-a-vis the private language argument, since the meaning paradox can be shown to occur for all concepts in the "mind" of the weak solipsist, thereby implying that, unless he or she wishes to concede that "there can be no such thing as meaning anything by any word" (Kripke 1982), the weak solipsist will be forced to rely on intersubjective confirmation for meaning.

Sure, but intersubjective confirmation does not imply an external reality. That there are multiple characters in a story doesn't imply the story has multiple authors.

The wiki page mentions the Hindu "Advaita" as an ultimate extension of this:

But all we really need is this: Different "parts" of me contain different information, and these "parts" communicate by language. Nowhere is it necessary for each "part" to represent a unique subjectivity. All parts might share a single subjective context, or only one of the parts (say, the madnak part) may possess the subjective awareness, while the rest only "emulate" subjective behaviors.

I don't think that gets you around the Kripkenstein paradox. § 202:
"Hence it is not possible to obey a rule privately, otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it." In other words, by creating multiple characters without externality, there is still no such thing as meaning anything by any word, as the skeptic has shown.

So far I think Tao made a good point that this seems to be a difference in labeling. What I call reality you would call part of your mind separate from your conscious mind if I understand correctly.

In what I call reality, I can find a brain with neurons and signals that corresponds with my conscious mind. I can do stuff to this brain and have an effect on my conscious mind like booze, drugs, lobotomies. From these observations I would conclude that my mind is just patterns in this brain in reality.

If all that is part of your mind separate from your conscious mind, would you conclude from these observations that your conscious mind is just patterns found in the other part of your mind?

read Miles Davis' hilarious autobiography "Miles". Here we have a man who, aside from musical interaction, is completely unaware of othe peoples' feelings/needs. Miles abandons and disregards family, friends, musicians, and women, in an endless pursuit of pleasure. Solopsisim at its best/worst.

Some people say some crazy things. Sometime I wonder what they're on. But I think the thread title says it. They're on Solipsism.