I was reading something about psychology and it was talking about solipsism. The more I tried to read into it the more I got confused. I’m just looking for an easier explanation or definition.
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Solipsism is the philosophy that your mind is the only thing you can be sure exists.
1. You can’t trust your senses. Your physical senses are infallible to begin with and are easily fooled. So you cannot trust anything you feel, see, taste, smell, or hear.
2. You can’t even really trust in reason, since people are fallible and can be misled in that regard as well. Not to mention that, dreams are false, yet when we dream we think they are true, you can’t be sure that what you perceive or reason now isn’t as fictitious as a dream.
Thus the only thing you can be sure of is that your mind exists. Because, true or false, your thoughts exist, ergo your mind must exist to produce them, for if your mind did not exist, you would not have thoughts to consider the proposition in the first place.
You think, therefore you are.
It is the philosophical idea that the only thing that you can be certain is true is that your mind/consciousness exists. Literally _everything_ else could be false except that – I could be an AI talking to you rather than a real person, you could be living in a simulation like _The Truman Show_, hell – you could just be a brain in a jar and every stimulus is fake.
It is generally dismissed as a pointless philosophy, because there is no way to learn anything about the world if you don’t take some observations as empirically true.
There are plenty of different branches of solipsism, but the center point of them all is this: I know that my mind exists, because I’m experiencing that. But everything outside of my mind may not exist. After all, what would be the difference between another person out there, living their own life, having their own thoughts, vs. my own mind creating the image of another person out there who *seems* to have their own life and thoughts, but is actually just a figment of my imagination? From my spot here in my brain, there’s no actual difference, so how can I know that anything outside of my own head is real?
Like I said, there are different branches – and I’m no solipsist, so I certainly couldn’t go in depth on them all. Some people believe that the entire world they experience truly is just a fake world put on by their head, and that they’re the only real person in it. Some people take it more as a philosophical point – saying “since I only know that I exist, I will prioritize my own benefit over others in all cases.” Some simply believe that the outside world can’t be *proven* to truly exist, but live their lives as though it does. It’s a messy epistomological question.
Have you ever seen *The Matrix*?
Well, how do *you* know you’re not living in some kind of Matrix? You can see and touch and taste the world, but how do you know your senses aren’t being lied to? How do you know if other people exist? How do you know you even have a body, and aren’t just a brain, or even a disembodied consciousness?
If you were reading psychology, you were probably reading about a personality disorder rather than about the philosophy — especially the word “solipsistic.” This is the belief that only your own experiences and existence can be known or are important. This may not be literally true, but solipsistic people focus only on their own experience to explain why everything happens. Lots of people view the band “Steely Dan” as solipsistic, for example, and there are a lot of neurotically solipsistic artists out there.
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