So I think the issue of solispsism arises when mistake the way we exist, as some sort of Cartesian ego uncertain of the external world. When in reality we live our entire lives in an external shared world among others, and it is by conceiving of ourselves as this little private, cut off from the world experience, that the issue arises. We are part of a family, we were born and raised within the very language we are thinking about the issue with. We have a family/cultural/evolutionary(or religious) lineage we can trace. We exist within a particular social and historical context. We pre-theoretically inhabit and exist/live within a shared world, among/alongside others. It is only when we introspect and conceive of ourselves as this singular, cut-off experience that the issue even arises - but that's not how we exist in our everyday lives, or at all.

What was I before I was born?

A mental construct of what?

Don't we then need to say we behold a 'mental construct' of a chair, of a chair 'out there'.

But what does a 'chair out there' even mean stripped away from our own understanding of it as a phenomenal object. It's a mental construct of nothing we can coherently talk about. Even atoms and forces are mental constructs.

I think the phenomenal world just imposes itself upon as, as a sort of brute force 'hereness'. As in, there is no direction to our perception. There is no body -> out there perceiving an external world. Nor is there an internal body taking in data and creating an internal representation of an external world.

The entirety of our phenomenal experience is just brute force present. Perception doesn't really exist, in terms of sense organs and neurons. The world around us, our bodies, our sense organs, they're all in there entirety just presented as a cohesive whole. Nothing senses the other.

If you are claiming that you are justified to be this thief, you are making an assertion that such standards of moral behaviour is wrong; explain. — TimeLine

My explanation is simply that people can universalize their moral standards of behavior all they like. But there's nothing at all irrational in me personally opting out of this. Prove that moral standards for behavior should be universalized. Why should I not hold others to a population wide standard of moral behavior, while personally opting out of it. I get the best of best worlds. People choose not to steal from me, and yet I choose to steal from them. Is there a god saying we all ought act in x particular way? Is there some sort of mind-independent moral fact that must behavior ought correspond to? No.

To steal the property of another person could consequently lead to retaliation; do you want to take that risk? —

Are you going to stop me? There's millions of people just like me.

I think you need to make an argument for the value of being a thief without caring about the person or people or the ultimately consequences of this and not the other way around. — TimeLine

Why? You are taking 'universal standards for moral behaviour' as an axiom (as in, what's wrong for you is wrong for me), whereas I am not.

Why is the onus on me to prove my case? Simply because that is what your intuition tells you? Examine those intuitions.

At the risk of being condescending, I am going to say that I think it's probable that most people drastically overvalue the degree to which they actually experience life as a positive experience.

I like hard work. On Saturdays I volunteer planting trees, tearing out invasive plants, and carrying water buckets. It beats office work. —

Note how you qualify your enjoyment of this manual labour in relation to the negativity of office work. You aren't saying "this is good in itself", you're saying "this is good in contrast to how bad this other thing is".

I get that some people enjoy being lazy, but that just describes some people. Feel free to go about being lazy, and I'll go about feeling superior, —

You now get some sort of satisfaction about feeling better than idle people. Again it's not the hard labour you are enjoying, but the sense of superiority you have in your mind thinking you are better than others.

which is that some find the business of living a positive experience. —

Note the words choice, the "business" of living. You might as well be writing the "task" of living, the burden of living.

At no point do you discuss the joys of back pain slogging water buckets, the sweating and tiredness of hard digging, etc. Why?

Note here I genuinely hope to be completely wrong and you do genuinely enjoy life. I just have these deep suspicions that a lot of people have these walls of cognitive biases, optimism biases, entrenched pollyannaism - an almost religious fervor that life is above all good - nay great!

Perhaps we are just born on either side of the bell curve. Perhaps some people are just born with an innate ability to experience more pleasure than others. Perhaps not.

Also I apologize for being blunt and rude in my previous post, it was uncalled for.

This 'rule' always strikes me as nothing more than an intuition pump, that only people with conventional ethical standards would already be inclined towards. It seems redundant to me.

You ought not steal.
Why?
Because you wouldn't want someone stealing from you!

This literally doesn't even make sense. I'm not the one being stolen from. I am the thief. The argument only makes sense if the person making it *assumes* universal standards for moral behaviour. That is, stealing is wrong whether you do it, or I do it.

Where's the argument for this? Why should I hold myself to the same moral standard to everyone else?

Why can't I just decide it's okay for me to steal from you, but not you from me?

It's just assumed that the morality of actions are universally applied. Why should I accept this? Argue for it, or I steal your wallet!

I like hard work. On Saturdays I volunteer planting trees, tearing out invasive plants, and carrying water buckets. It beats office work. I get that some people enjoy being lazy, but that just describes some people. Feel free to go about being lazy, and I'll go about feeling superior, and we'll just carry on as always — Hanover

Awful, condescending post that entirely misses the point of the thread. Jog on.

I feel like your philosophy doesn't go far enough. Death is not bad for the one who dies. Because it ceases the thing (you) that it would be bad for. There is no 'you' to be harmed by death, deprived of the 'good' in life.

Suffering is bad. We suffer in various ways, near constantly. Sometimes very mildly (bodily discomfort, thirst, hunger, boredom,work, etc), sometimes majorly (mental illness, massive bodily harm, despair, abuse, exploitation, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc).

We don't want to suffer. Suicide will end your suffering, and the resulting 'death-state' will not harm you (because there is no you to be in that state).

So here we have suicide putting an end to a bad experience (life in general), with no real downside. There is no you existing anymore to be deprived of the good in life.

Why bother even caring about these non-existent 'potential lives' you are trying to prevent from coming into existence, when right now you could literally just prevent your future suffering from being experienced by necking yourself.

Life is mostly bad.
Death isn't.
Ergo, end it.

Why not just bite the bullet and advocate full blown suicide. Anyone with any shred of compassion already advocates for antinatalism. Why bother convincing the non-compassionate. Given that antinatalism is the right course of action, what's the course of action for the living? Suicide?

How does future humans who may or may not come into existence and have to work affect you?

It seems like your motivation to make this argument is not being based on you actually trying to prevent future 'suffering experiences' from coming into existence, but rather is a way of you trying to convince others that life is bad. As in, you don't primarily want to prevent suffering (acting out of compassion/empathy), rather you want to convince others that your view on the world is the correct one.

I mean do you really care possible future sufferings experienced by others you will never meet or know about? Do you weep now for all the suffering that will be experienced in the future? Are you really that compassionate?

Why do you care about the sufferings of others, especially when these people continue to inform you that they aren't actually suffering?

I think part of what causes this splitting of the world into object (that may or may not exist), and ones private perception of an object is this particular way in which we imagine other people's perceptions.

So as an example lets imagine two people, you and your friend, in a room staring at a painting. Your friend has taken LSD and is wildly hallucinating and you are sober. Now the way in which, if I was the sober friend, I would conceive of what my friend is experiencing, is to literally form a sort of mental image in my mind of what I imagine his visual field is like. Which of course leads to questions like, does my visual image correspond accurately to what to what he is experiencing? Is there anything even there that my visual image corresponds to (solipsism)? Is there an independent object that both of our visual fields correspond to?

We imagine, in our minds what it is like to experience the world as another person, which already splits the world into these private little individualized 'orbs' of perceptions/experience.

So you walk up to someone, shake their hand, start a conversation. And then you ask yourself "I wonder what it's like to be that person?" In your mind you form this mental image of what you imagine their perceptions and experience is like - which itself splits the world. You in your mental imaginings, have left the immediacy of your interaction with the other person and created this divide between the two of you, imagining the two of you as existing as these privately experienced 'orbs' of perceptions, that may or may not be embedded within a wider material world.

As in, it's completely incoherent to 'imagine' the way in which another person exists. A category error.

Is it so strange that you both look at the same tree and see something different? — Banno

Yes, it's absolutely baffling!

So if I am on LSD, and my friend isn't, and we both look at a tree over there, is it the same tree we are looking at, even though our visual perceptions would be wildly different from one-another?

I think part of what makes these questions so confusing and leads to all these two world, two object paradoxes, is that our visual fields really feel like naive realism. It's hard for me to look around myself and not have this distinct sense that my eyes are windows upon an external world, as if I were looking *through* my eyes.

Is it coherent to ask something like, "if I am on LSD and my friend isn't, and we stand in front of a speaker playing a song, is it the same song we are listening to even though it would be sensed totally differently? Is there a song 'in-itself' separate from our experiences of hearing? What would it mean for a song to exist outside of someone's perception of hearing it? It's incoherent to imagine there's an externally existing song playing, with two internally experienced 'mental construct' songs existing within the minds of me and my friend.

It just feels odd to apply this same logic to the visual field, because it just feels so real and external. Naive realism is a hard feeling to overcome.

We see (to speak in the overused modality of sight) exactly what appears, insofar as appearance just is the result of a perceptual process. It could not even in principle be otherwise: there is nothing to 'compare' it to, there is no appearence-that-is-not-an-appearance, no perception which is not a result of a perceptual process. — StreetlightX

Wait what? So the world around us is the result of a perceptual process, the process itself being part of world around us (our bodies, brains, etc - known about only through perception), and therefore is also itself the result of the perceptual process? Our nervous system causes a world to appear which contains the very nervous system causing the world and itself to come into appearance?

Or are there two nervous systems/bodies? One generating the appearance and the one perceived?

Perception is loop that runs from body to world and back again; when the loop is broken or interrupted, there is still alot that goes on, but it does so aberrantly, in fragments. Hence the weird phenomenology of dreams, the general tendency to 'float' (unconstrained by a fixed body!), the general fragmentary nature of dreams, etc. — StreetlightX

When you talk about "body to world" here, do you mean within the 'world of appearance'? The body we perceive ourselves to be and the external world we appear to inhabit? As if your body and the world are just generating themselves into existence as an appearance, because of a feedback loop between the two appearances? Appearances just cause their own existence somehow?

1. appearance just is the result of a perceptual process
2. this perceptual process is itself contained within the appearance
3. ??!

I recently made a thread along these lines:

https://thephilosophyforum.com/discussion/2241/is-the-world-around-me-really-public#Item_4

Anyway, we definitely interact with trees as if they are really 'out there', as if our eyes are windows upon a public world that we happen to be located in a particular part of. It's really only when we do philosophy that we even consider that our interaction with the tree might be entirely relativized to ourselves. I mean it's extremely hard to get in conversation with someone, touch someone, kick a ball back and forwards, etc, and seriously consider that their body, and your entire experience of the interaction, the world around you, and your body are entirely relativized to just your own conscious experience. Other people sort of impose their otherness on you. Consider being in a room alone, and somebody bursts in. Suddenly there's a distinct sense that you (your body) is being seen and you can't rationalize this self-consciousness away in the moment, it just imposes itself upon you. Or when you are on a train, and you accidentally meet someone's gaze, then both of you quickly look away and pretend you didn't just basically stare into each others soul lol.

I think perhaps with these sorts of questions there's either something fundamentally wrong with them (as in, they don't make sense), or they're just too hard and there's no way to know the answer. Maybe it's just nonsensical to see a tree over there, and ask something like "am I seeing a tree over there because there really is a tree over there?" Because already with this sort of question you've relativized the perception of the tree to yourself, already the tree has become thought of as your particular visual perception of the tree, and what that may or may not correlate with. But in our everyday lives, and especially during our perceptions of other people, that we have sensory organs and perceive things is completely transparent to us. The greenness of the tree is just out there, my eyes just allow me to directly gaze at the colour as if my eyes were like windows.

These sorts of questions arise based on conceiving of oneself as being 'ones experience', as if you exist as a sort of 'experience orb', a little private world of sensation that may or may not correlate with other people's little worlds, both existing within an inaccessible external world. But outside of philosophy we perceive the world around us nothing like this, we experience ourselves as a body in an entirely public, given world that basically is just there imposing it's externality upon us.

So questions like this thread are either based on a misconception about how we exist, or we really do exist as a sort of 'experience-orb' (that just happens to be felt as if we inhabit a public external world) and therefore the question is just too hard. If you really do exist as a 'experience-orb' there's just no way of knowing if there really is a tree (or more importantly, other orbs) out there beyond your experience.

Cioran: "Suicide is a sudden accomplishment, a lightning-like deliverance: it is nirvana by violence."

There is a definite dichotomy here. It usually falls somewhere like this:

Instrumentality vs. Net Positive Experiences or Subjective/objective Goods
Instrumentality vs. Some sort of Eastern Zen-like Way of Being
Instrumentality vs. Progress — schopenhauer1

Instrumentality vs. Suicide

Suicide is not an option because most people have a strong impulse to live despite pain or negative view of life. It is instinctual to not want to harm your body and to be afraid of the unknown (death), even if intellectually as an exercise we can view death from "afar" as simply like what it was like before we were born (or non-existence, or dreamless sleep, etc. etc.). — schopenhauer1

I mean, suicide is always an option right. Over a million people do it every year. That's between 2500 and 3000 people just today.

If life is bad, and we're nothing more than rats on the wheel staring at hope in the distance, why not just end it? What's keeping you here? Like you say, even (philosophical) pessimists are trapped in the hope cycle. But those rats who lose the ability to imagine the hope in the distance hang themselves from the wheel.

Is hope really an 'opiate of the masses', when it's what keeps us in this world of suffering? Death is the ultimate pain relief, maybe lack of hope is the true opiate.

But then it is over and time moves forward. What is at the end of this? — schopenhauer1

But you only ask these types of questions because you are not enjoying yourself. "What is the point?" "What is the end?" These questions only arise because of the larger issue at play here - your anhedonia. Philosophical pessimism is a consequence of depression/anhedonia, and not the other way around. People don't get depressed because the world is bad, the world is seen as bad because people are depressed.

The most important issue is not whether the world is good or bad (and what follows from that - whether one should suicide, whether one should have children, etc), but rather whether one is enjoying their existence or not.

It is hope that is the opiate of the masses. Existence is an instrumental thing. We survive, to survive, to survive. We entertain, to entertain, to kill time, and not be bored. We are deprived and need to have our desires fulfilled to have yet other desires. What keeps this whole instrumental affair going? Hope is that carrot. The transcendental (i.e. big picture) view of the absurdity of the instrumental affair of existence is lost as we focus on a particular goal/set of goals that we think is the goal.. We think this future state of goal-attainment will lead to something greater than the present. Hope lets us get caught up in the narrow focus of the pursuit of the goal. But then, if we get the goal, another takes its place. The instrumental nature of things comes back into view as we contend with restlessness. Then, we narrow our focus (yet again) to pursue (yet again) what is hoped to be a greater state than the present. The cycle continues. — schopenhauer1

This strikes me as totally anhedonic. In my experience people only turn to hope when they suffer. Hope arises from suffering, a sense of 'there's a reason to endure this negative experience', 'I'm enduring this negative experience because of x' is produced. But, you naturally lose that hope when you are presently enjoying yourself. There's no need to imagine a better future when the present is good.

We entertain, to entertain, to kill time, and not be bored. —

I think what's missing here is that things entertain us *because* they are pleasurable. And not say, as just some means to escape suffering. Why am I listening to music right now? As some sort of contemplative loss of self in order to escape the dreariness of my existence? Or because it genuinely sounds good? It seems self-evident to me right now that it is the latter. Although in the past when I could barely feel pleasure I would have said the former.

My own judgment is the source of moral fact. If your moral opinions do not align with mine then you are wrong. If I judge an action to be wrong then it is objectively wrong. If you are unsure or concerned with whether an action is wrong or not, just ask me and I'll give you the answer.

Having laid that epistemic foundation, it can then get on with developing theories that have maximal objectivity - ideas that are measurably the most viewpoint invariant. — apokrisis

But that's not what people mean when they talk about scientific objectivity, including within this thread. When people talk about the Big Bang, they talk about it as if it was an event that really happened, out there in some independently existing past, billions of years before the existence of humans (and the concept "billions of years").

What does it even mean to talk about the world and the way it existed before human experience, language, and concepts? This scientific view of the world just assumes there was an already laid out, independent world, which we just by happenstance have a view upon, almost like an external observer from another reality 'looking in'.

We can only talk about this supposed pre-human physical world, using language taught and passed on through people's, cultures, practices, and histories - all entirely human. Is there some sort of independently existing past out there in some void beyond this 'lifeworld' we inhabit, to which our words fly out and refer to?

I feel as if this scientific, materialist view of the world is tantamount to religious delusion. People talk about the big bang the same they talk about God's "let there be light" - it's a creation story. Yes, this scientific approach toward the past has explanatory and predictive value, but that does not mean the unobservables used within the approach actually exist out there.

So that's my two cents. Anything at all in your brain, no matter how horrible, is legal, moral, and ethical. That's why by the way I oppose hate crime laws. It's already illegal to hurt people. If you do it while thinking a particular thought, that is nobody's business. You are allowed to think your thoughts. Hate crime laws are literally Orwellian "thought crimes." We're going to punish you for what you think.

No. That's wrong. It's a basic human right to think what you think. It's what you DO that we judge. — fishfry

I share this opinion up to a certain point. But fantasy is also something that one does, and is therefore up to be judged. I can't, for example, not judge someone as sick and immoral who self-pleasures while thinking about raping and murdering a child. Surely you can't either.

In the morning when I awake, I come to already understanding myself as a human, with it's own personal history/narrative, itself a small part of a wider family (I am a son, and my mother a daughter, etc), within a country, within a wider human history, within a geological timescale. History is sort of embedded within my/our experience of the world. I'm not sure it's material in the way OP is describing. As in there is a sort of 'before now timeline' existing independently, in some sort of experience-independent void, from the present that we could (hypothetically) access and alter. I think it makes more sense that conceiving history in this material sense is just part of the particular way in which humans experience and conceive of the past (as in, we just think and conceive of the past in this way, not that it actually does exist independent of these experiences in that sense). Sort of how we perceive the world around us in a naive realist fashion, but that's just the way in which our experience is structured, and not that the world around us is actually there materially and we are directly accessing this independent world. Experientially the holocaust happened in an independently existing past, but materially there's no reality somewhere that contains the facts about the past (that could hypothetically be accessed).

Either everything you've just said is only what you would like to be true, what you'd prefer to believe, it is coincidentally both what you'd prefer, but also true, or it is truth completely, and entirely regardless of what you'd prefer to be true. In the first case, which you seem to be suggesting, there is no such thing as truth at all. In the second case, my preferences coinciding with the truth is a happy accident, which is swell and all, but in the third case is when the truth becomes more difficult. When it isn't how you'd prefer, and allowing your preferences to determine you beliefs is called wishful thinking, self-deception, and things of that nature. — Wosret

I see my own judgment as the objective source of moral facts.

I see emergent patterns due to an excess of something in the system that is breaking constraint. When an isolated system suddenly begins to interact with another system to form a more complex system, the interaction happened because there was a capacity or tolerance in the system that allowed this indulgence — MikeL

So is this just a development over time in the way we speak? Or rather, is this language over time better corresponding itself to a world? Is language itself the system, or is language itself couched within a wider (material?) system? Is semiotics itself an emergent phenomenon? If so, what did it emerge from? Can this question coherently be answered?

(I have no idea).

The only true dilemma is why shouldn't I act only in accordance with my whims? If truth and morality are man made, and not objective, but merely someone else's arbitrary impositions on me, for ultimately selfish, deceitful, and or antiquated values. If it's all motivated, power struggles, identity politics, and tribalistic allegiances, then why shouldn't I behave only in accordance with my own preferences and benefits? —

You already are. Your 'preferences' also include your 'moral vision' for the world. Moral imposition is not just authority imposing itself upon you - it's also you deciding for yourself how you and others ought act, and imposing that upon the world (in particular ways). You already do this. How would you act when seeing someone helpless being assaulted? Perhaps step in, call the police? You yourself have a moral vision for how the world ought be, and you impose this upon yourself and others all the time. You are already acting according to your whims.

Why shouldn't I just take everything I want from everyone in every moment? —

Because that isn't your whim. Your moral whims are already aligned towards not doing this. It's you yourself that is personally deciding that you and others ought not act this way.

Everyone is personally always-already their own source of what is right and wrong. You can't escape not deciding your own moral values. Even external moral authority must first be vetted by your own judgment before it's accepted. One must first decide for themselves to choose to believe in God, and decide that his word on morality is correct before coming under his authority. You can't help but being your own source of what is right and what is wrong.

It's up to you to decide what is right and wrong. Only you can answer "why ought I not do x?"

And even if someone typed out a convincing argument, it would only be convincing because you personally decided that it was. You can't escape your own judgment. So just own it, your own judgment is the source of what is right and wrong, you decide.

Semiotics is great for local explanations of occurrences. By local I mean explanations at the level of examination- So, if we are talking about cells, then semiotics would be talking in terms of plasma membranes, cell walls and transport molecules. If we’re talking about atoms then we would be talking about electrons and protons. Any level beneath the local level could be considered a global level. We don’t talk about cell function in terms of up and down quarks as this more global semiotic language doesn’t fit. —

If I am understanding correctly, the closer something is examined, the more global the level is? Quarks are the local level for the physicists gaze and talk, whereas it's experience for the phenomenologist, but what's the reasoning behind placing these at the ends of a 'scale of examination' (where the closer one examines the world the more 'global' the talk is)?

Why is it not the reverse, where the closer we get to phenomenology the more global the explanation?

Why do disparate types of explanations and modes of examination sit upon a sort of objective scale? Don't you only think this way because you assume a sort of metaphysics of emergence from the smallest quarks to the largest objects (where does consciousness fit - being that which examines both the quarks and the widest scales in the first place, including itself when doing phenomenology)? Isn't this assumption about the nature of the world in-itself a local examination (it's you, examining and explaining the world in a particular way or mode) - just another way of talking about the world?

Thomas Metzinger

You might be interested in the "cyrenaic" school of Greek hedonism, which appears to share the same ideas as you.

Why not just shoot heroin all day?

nonetheless can have the effect of educating within an individual a set of personal values corresponding more accurately with reality? — Robert Lockhart

Not sure there's a 'mind-independent' mood or view of reality that these personal values would correspond with.

A happy person sees life as generally worth living, and good.
A suicidal one sees life is a literal hell, and bad.

I don't think either are wrong, because it's the quality of one's life/experience that determines the value of the world to that particular person.

Going by idealism, and keeping it consistent, there’s no difference among you and my experiences of you. (On a non-idealist account it’s impossible for me to experience your self-awareness, since then I’d be you instead.) You = my experiences of you. But I’m not omniscient, since otherwise I’d know that I were. I don’t have to experience someone else’s self-awareness to take it’s independent existence for granted, I don’t have to become the Moon to take it’s independent existence for granted — and I learn of both much the same way, by interaction, observation, coherence, whatever. Attempting to escape solipsism by declaring that others also are selves would be textbook special pleading. There’s no more experiencing some supposed “transcendent reality” of others’ self-awarenesses than of the Moon. (For that matter, you experience someone else’s body/actions, not their mind.) The non-solipsist may have no choice but to accept others’ self-awarenesses as examples of a kind of noumena or ding-an-sich (in a very broad sense), always just over the horizon. Fortunately we have language to share our poetry. — Jorndoe

I think there is a difference here, and a case can be made for 'special pleading'. We experience the world around us as a public space, in principle accessible to others inspections/senses. "Look at that!" and we point, sort of thing. We don't infer the existence of other minds through perceiving bodies in a private space around ourselves, rather the world is pre-theoretically (or, 'before inferring') lived in as a public space, inhabited always by myself and others, as the leaders of lives, rather than us being 'masses of perceptions' lost within ourselves.

I think solipsism arises from misunderstanding the way in which others actually exist for us, seeing them as bodies - objects like the moon that can be mentally 'stripped away' into nothing more than perception, rather than as a fundamental structure of the world.