AI for Breakfast

Post 175 - Word Wednesday - Solipsism

I asked Perplexity. Here's what I got:

Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one's own mind is sure to exist. As an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one's own mind is unsure; the external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist outside the mind.[1]

There are varying degrees of solipsism:[1]

- Metaphysical solipsism maintains that the self is the only existing reality and that all other realities, including the external world and other persons, are representations of that self and have no independent existence.

- Epistemological solipsism is the idea that only the directly accessible mental contents of the solipsistic philosopher can be known. The existence of an external world is regarded as an unresolvable question rather than actually false.

- Methodological solipsism is an agnostic variant which exists in opposition to the inference from the nonexistence of proof of other minds to the conclusion that there are no other minds. A solipsist's investigations may not be proper science, however, since it would not include the co-operative and communitarian aspects of scientific inquiry.

Some examples to illustrate solipsism:

- An infant who has not yet developed an understanding of the world outside their own mind could be considered a solipsist by default.[1]

- The philosophical zombie thought experiment proposes beings who look and behave like people but lack conscious experience. A true solipsist would say philosophical zombies are the reality, and everyone else is just a product of their own mind.[5]

- Descartes' famous line "I think, therefore I am" touches on solipsistic ideas, as the only thing he felt certain of was his own mind and thinking.[5]

- The brain in a vat thought experiment, where a disembodied brain is stimulated to produce experiences of an external world, is a solipsistic scenario where only the brain is sure to exist.[8]

So in summary, solipsism is the view that the only thing you can be certain of is your own mind, and everything else - the external world, other people, etc. - is unsure or may not exist independently of your mind. It's an extreme form of skepticism, rarely adopted wholeheartedly but still important for revealing the difficulty of truly proving anything beyond one's own mental experiences.

Citations:
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solipsism
[2] https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/solipsism
[3] https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/solipsism
[4] https://www.britannica.com/topic/solipsism
[5] https://blog.homeforfiction.com/2019/02/13/what-is-solipsism-simple-terms/
[6] https://iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
[7] https://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy/comments/2nc4g2/solipsism/
[8] https://www.thecollector.com/what-is-solipsism/
[9] https://philosophyterms.com/solipsism/
[10] https://www.collinsdictionary.com/dictionary/english/solipsism
[11] https://www.dictionary.com/browse/solipsism