Solipsism – Parts Per Billion

Freedom = Courage (Now + Here)

When it comes to psychology – people consider Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung as the de facto rock-stars of the field of psychology. One unnoticed person whose findings deserve equal attention rather more attention was Alfred Adler. He introduced the Individual Psychology to the world which is relevant still today and is way more sophisticated to solve the “so called” troubles of our life. Individual psychology makes a successful attempt to reach to the roots of our suffering and allows us to become truly free.
Alfred Adler’s philosophy is beautifully explained in Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga’s book “The Courage To Be Disliked”. It talks about the feedback loop of self-acceptance, confidence in others and contribution to others to live a real and fulfilled life. The great thing about individual psychology is that it urges us to break the notion of causality and thereby determinism to come out of the painful, suffering inducing cycles of life & death, cause & effect. It shows us that we live in the universe with infinite possibilities and one needs courage to break the logic of determinism to truly appreciate themselves and the infinite possibilities universe has to offer. Individual psychology given by Alfred Adler thus asks us to bear the courage to lose the false-comfort given by causality – predictability and decide our life on our own terms fearlessly and with freedom. It teaches how one can be completely involved in everything but not attached to them at the same time.

On the book – The Courage to be disliked

‘The world is simple, and life is too.’

I have a question for you,

– How is life treating you right now?

Everyone knows that the responses to this question are diverse and dynamic. The answers obviously will be subjective and so it is normal to expect huge variety.

But you know what, deep down everyone (mostly the adults) know the most frequent type of the answer to this simple question. There is innate predictability about what the answer could be.

Life is not treating me fair

Life has become too complicated for me, life is suffering, there is no hope, why can’t I have a single moment of happiness to savor for some time? why do bad things happen to only me? what have I done wrong to someone that ‘everyone’ has turned against me? what should I do – now that I have not achieved what I was supposed to achieve in spite of putting all honest efforts? why is ‘everyone’ – the society always against me when all I have for others is good will?

Deep down we have this undeclared, unexpressed notion that something wrong happened to me which I didn’t deserve. I tried so hard but couldn’t achieve that thing. Trust me every one of us is an expert of hiding these unsettling feelings, overlooking them to move ahead. But it is important to understand that unknowingly they become part of who we are. When we truly and honestly would start inspecting ourselves, we will find these feelings being the reason for the bitterness we carry inside. That is why life is suffering for most of us, being free then is out of the question. First let me be happy for now!

Psychology has always been on the quest of resolving the model of how our mind works. A bigger portion of psychology directly or indirectly works towards understanding how we see happiness and suffering. Because, end goal of how we feel, how we think, how we decide, how we interact, how our personality is created is emerged from either a happy event or sad event which affect why our psyche is in a certain way.

I appreciated this in deeper sense when I came across a book called “The courage to be disliked”. A single book can change your life. Although I have been changed many times before, I couldn’t help but overstate the importance of this special book.

This is my attempt to reorganize the ideas from the book to instantly simplify the core ideas. So, the next discussion may spoil the book for you. (Although it’s not a story book having a climax at the end but the ideas are written in a conversational – dialogue format so, you peel out one layer at a time to reach to the core ideas of individual psychology.)

I am actually spoiling the whole book and my writing on the same heron with these few sentences:

The whole thing boils down how you honor this current moment and not let it be influenced by the fear of past and the anxiety of the future. This complete dedication to the current moment is only possible if you honor yourself first, because only you can experience how this current moment will turn out for you. The moment you start to respect this moment here and now – you will be free.

If you have the ability to love, love yourself first
Carl Jung

Now that I have already explained what life ultimately boils down to, it will be important to understand why these sentences hold some gravitas. So, thanks for continuing with me hereon.

Deny trauma – Deny the comfort of causality

The core of individual psychology is the rejection of the causality. Our complete understanding of ourselves and the world we live in is based on the notion of cause and effect. It does immediately feel silly to reject that exact notion thereby making individual psychology illogical.

You will appreciate that not everything in whole can completely be justified or predicted with complete precision using the logic of cause and effect. There will always be some information that cannot be completely known for the given system (Heisenberg’s uncertainty principal points in the same direction). Our mind always makes decision, assumptions based on the current information, experiences we have till date and every one know that it is impossible to have all the information and all experiences that are there in the world for a person to understand his/her own existence.

So, in simple words – ‘who we are’ goes beyond the logic of cause and effect. You can be free once you break the chains of cause and effect. In the universe filled with infinite possibilities, there will always be something wrong and illogical, totally disconnected justification to the things happening to you and around you. It will be an injustice if you let that illogical justification define your whole upcoming life.

When we say that I became a person like this because something happened to me in past where I learned my lesson and changed myself into something else, we are just trying to convince ourselves to do things in certain way so that we will have less resistance to get things done in our ways. That is exactly where problems start emerging.

We crave for causality because it grants value to past; because it taught us some valuable outcomes and same causality can help us to predict what would happen in future. We always crave for certainty. But all of us know this by experience that we are rarely good at predicting our future. This furthermore unsettles the mind.

So, trauma is the pre-side-effect of causality (the post-side-effect of causality is the anxiety of the uncertainty of the future). We carry our traumas as badges to flaunt because these traumas feel very personal thus exclusive. The ways in which we carve out our personality from these traumatic experiences gives us a sense of special-ness. These bad experiences, traumas are a big part of our personality maybe due to a survival mechanism implying ‘I should be able to cope up with similar thing if they happen to me in future.’

See, the point is that if we stick to our traumas and fixate our personality on the same, we will never be able to explore the concepts that had better potential to improve our personality (and probably not be traumatic, bitter). We will be stuck in that loop of experiences related to that causality. Given that there are infinite possibilities, there is fair chance than we can be even better than what we were and what happened to us in the past. We are just better at finding reasons to justify our current position because we know we are comfortable here.

No matter what has occurred in your life up to this point, it should have no bearing at all on how you live from now on.

It might seem that when we are rejecting causality, we are choosing a non-nonsensical path. In reality, we are just avoiding the ways in which we are always fooling ourselves to remain in comfort of predictability. Using the excuse of causality, we are actually ‘inventing’ non-real reasons which hide the realest reality we can actually live.

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
Richard P. Feynman

Once you deny this causality which you think made you who you are, you will immediately see who you really are. You will leave that burden behind. You will accept yourself for who you are. You will see that you can instantly detach yourselves from your past and your future too. The untapped possibilities open up.

This is self-acceptance in individual psychology.

Once you see how important you yourself are to live your own life, you will say –

“Before past and future let me at least appreciate my own current moment”.

That is now and here. Once you come to the terms with yourself you will realize how everyone is just like you even though we are separated by many aspects of life. Then you will appreciate how others have their own current moments to live and experience in their own ways.

All problems are interpersonal relationship problems – others have their own current moments to experience in their own ways

It is fundamentally impossible for a person to live life completely alone, and it is only in social contexts that the person becomes an ‘individual’.

Nobody can deny the fact that our surroundings make us who we are. Our baselines are our surroundings. A human being is the most basic unit of any society. Our understanding and awareness of self is impossible without a response from surrounding. How would you understand who you are if you never received any reaction, feedback from your surrounding? – It will be a delusional existence. You would have had an idea of who you are but would have been far from what is real.

Thus, when you start seeing that your surrounding will always be interacting with you, you will be able to see every reaction – feedback from surrounding especially people can never be completely cut off. This again feels senseless. If you are born alone, leave this world alone then why couldn’t me being alone throughout my existence be more justified? It is because we never had any sense of absoluteness right from our birth and this sense of absoluteness always remains un-achieved, it is just an ideal condition we are always trying to reach. Our core understandings are only possible with the relativeness, comparison of baselines.

That is exactly why even when you are trying to live your life alone, that ‘loneliness’ itself cannot be justified if there is no understanding of what being ‘together’ means. So, there will always be something connecting you to your surroundings. That is where relationship comes in picture. You cannot run away from interpersonal relationship. You will be surrounded by people (or at least what made them you even when you are sitting lonely).

So, when you are appreciating your current moment, it is natural that others will be respecting their current moments. This understanding will make you appreciate the importance of everyone’s being.

This will make the world around you seem less hostile. You will be filled with kindness for others.

So, you must first accept yourself first otherwise you will not come out of the hideous cycle of comfort of predictability, once you accept yourself to remain in now and here you start seeing here and now of others. You start valuing their here and now. That is why you start allowing people to be who they are, you stop expecting from others. You stop expecting your recognition from others, you stop pleasing people for your own good in the end.

Now that you are free from the burden and pursuit of desirable and predictable, anticipated feedback from surrounding you become tolerant of criticism and even dislike from others. That is truly when you are free. I want to focus on my now and here and nobody can stop me from experiencing that. Then you see this as the basic requirement for others too. This is exactly here the person becomes tolerant towards others. People start putting confidence in each other to create that safe space – the real safe space. People start respecting each other’s boundaries because they themselves have understood that they have their own limitations. This creates the sense of camaraderie – society.

It is precisely because we lay a foundation of unconditional confidence that it is possible for us to build a deep relationship.

This is confidence in others in individual psychology.

Discard other people’s tasks – reject the desire for recognition and accept that you being disliked is not in your hands

When you are appreciating your own now and here to its fullest, you will notice how important it is to reject all other distractions to honor this moment. You will limit these distractions to focus more on this moment. This is where you will see that even though we are molded by our society we have limitations and so do the others. So, it is better if one sets boundaries.

Setting such boundaries helps everyone to focus on their ‘now and here’ in deeper and richer ways.

If you are not living your life for yourself, then who is going to live it for you?

When one develops this understanding, they will clearly see what lies immediately in their own control and what not. If you are busy in trying to control what cannot be controlled by you, how would you have enough resources to appreciate your ‘here and now’? That why it is important to not focus on what you can’t control. Those will be someone else’s to control, that is not you task. That is exactly why you cannot pressurize people to do things in your ways. People can have their own reasons, limitations to not do things in your ways. It has to come from their side.

Forcing change while ignoring the person’s intention will only lead to an intense reaction.

Building on this understanding, you will start appreciating how doing what you love and not expecting anything in return is more than enough. You did what you love. Whether to appreciate it and recognize it, praise it is in other’s control not yours. Now that you have accepted yourself, you do it for yourself, then you won’t crave for attention from others, then you don’t crave for superiority, dominance. You come on level to level with your surroundings. You appreciate that whatever one wants to become that journey has to be completed by only them. Then you appreciate how we are trying to please others to get things done in our way when they were never in our control. You let go of the things which you cannot control and start focusing on what you can. That is why it is normal that some people (who were trying to get things done from you in their ways) will dislike you for not doing them in their own ways. This shows that you are honoring your ‘now and here’

The cost of freedom in interpersonal relationship is that one is disliked by other people

Once you understand that it’s normal to be disliked, rather that indicates that we are doing our own thing you will appreciate what it really means to be genuinely be appreciated by society. Then you will feel like transferring this feeling to others too. Now that you have experienced this feeling for yourself, you would genuinely want others to feel that to. The things then you will do for others will have no intent of return because you very well know that returning favor is other people’s task.

If one’s means for gaining a feeling of contribution turns out to be ‘being recognised by others’, in the long run, one will have no choice but to walk through life in accordance with other people’s wishes.

The feeling and act of contribution has to be selfless and this selflessness is possible only when you are valuing your ‘now and here’. If you still are not valuing your ‘now and here’, it is very easy for you to get swayed by the likes of others and then you will end up in pleasing others and whether others will be pleased by what you did for that recognition is not in your control. This means the most probable fate is misery.

So, self-acceptance builds courage to do it in your way whether others like it or not. This detachment from opinions of others pushes you to do the things which were impossible before – what else is freedom them? Then you understand the value of self-acceptance. You will then have the selfless feeling to let others experience and understand this. This selfless act for others will feed back into your sense of own being. This will support your feeling of self-acceptance. Once you close this feed-back loop, you will see what others are missing. You will help others in the real way. This will create the sense of belonging for you which further creates the real sense of meaning in life.

This is contribution to others in individual psychology.

Where the center of the world is – there is no absolute cause and effect – there is no such thing as the first start and the last end

If you are ‘the center of the world’, you will have no thoughts whatsoever regarding commitment to the community; because everyone else is ‘someone who will do something for me’, and there is no need for you to do things yourself. But you are not the center of the universe and neither am I.

Adler’s individual psychology thus focuses on a feedback loop of three key things:

One – Self-acceptance – you are who you are ‘now and here’, not what made you who you are

Once you accept yourself you give yourself better chances to live an earnest life

Two – Confidence in others – now that you have appreciated how valuable, irreplaceable and incomparable living in ‘now and here’ is, you let people do their own thing because they have their own ‘now and here’. You put confidence in others, you do it not because you want something in return because returning the favor is in their control. This builds the real sense of community, belonging, safe space.

Three – Contribution to others – Once you start believing in people just like the person you are you appreciate what it means to be felt accepted. You try to support this feeling by contributing back to your safe space. You want it to be done by yourself because you now know that contributing back is in your control – your task. This further crystallizes your sense of self-acceptance.

Now that you have appreciated what it means to become truly free, it is normal to reject the false sense of superiority, false sense of being special. Every moment becomes same to you. This does not mean that you become numb to sadness or happiness. It just means that you appreciate that this too shall pass, all I have to live and experience is ‘now’. You lose the idea of a goal to be achieved and accept the real goal, the real target is to become the process.

Life goes on

For a human being, the greatest unhappiness is not being able to like oneself.

Although our existence is bound by birth and death, cause and effect. The reality filled with infinite possibilities does not follow that logic and we fail to notice that difference. Just to make the sense of the infinite possibilities we resort to certain assumptions, prejudices, reasons, past events, future expectations. We never question them with complete honesty because questioning them will bring existential crisis. We all know that our foundations really are not pure or absolute. Once you accept this you will see that it is very easy and important to accept who you are now. This further induces kindness for others. This creates the community. This is called Holism in individual psychology.

You must appreciate how causality brings in determinism in our lives. This determinism is kind of responsible for the lack of freedom in our lives. When we are suffering it is this exact determinism imparted by causality that builds helplessness. One must carry the courage to break out of this determinism. The courage is necessary because we never want to let go the comfort of predictability which determinism offers.

We resort to certain version of our life story when we are completely aware that we can totally change our life story. We are always taking the support of ‘I am like this because this happened to me’. This is how everyone’s story is. There are very few people who have dared to say – ‘I have gone through this for long but not anymore.’ This requires for you to appreciate yourselves first, when you accept who you are you move on to the path of improvement whereas when you are trying to act according to the like of people around you, you are actually proving the point that you don’t like the version that you are that is why you are ready to become the one which people would like and tragedy of this path is that the task of being liked by others is not in your control.

That is why whining about why we didn’t reach there would never help us to reach there or even embark on journey in that direction. We are hesitating to make our own move.

As long as we postpone life, we can never go anywhere, and will only pass our days one after the next in dull monotony, because we think of here and now as just a preparatory period.

Be real, not a hypocrite

People want to like themselves. They want to feel that they have worth. In order to feel that, they want a feeling of contribution that tells them ‘I am of use to someone’. And they seek recognition from others as an easy means for gaining that feeling of contribution.

The main reason Adler’s individual psychology didn’t receive enough attention is because it feels completely self-contradicting and hypocritical on surface level.

You will find these seeming contradictions everywhere in Adler’s ideas. It will say that we are social animals and are defined by society but in next moment it will say that you need to have the courage to be disliked by the people around you.

One time it says that you should not interfere in other people’s tasks and next time it says that you need to have a feeling of contribution for the same people.

One time it will say that you have to sever the relationships where others are not realizing their own tasks and making life difficult for you and on the other hand it will say that you should be unconditionally confident in others endlessly.

One time it will say that you should completely focus on yourselves and then it will say that you are part of a bigger family, bigger universe and you will be happy when you contribute to this bigger community to create a sense of belonging.

If I am being disliked then how the hell would I be happy?!?

If you inspect each of these seemingly contradicting ideas you will find one simple fact – the fact that we are walking living paradoxes and in spite of that we demand sense and logic about who we are.

The sense of self or individual cannot be appreciated well if you never know what it means to be surrounded by people. And there is always some interchange happening between individuals which makes it a society. We often see society as a group which is everything minus ‘I’. We fail to recognize that if I fix myself in certain way the others around me will fix themselves in response to that way and then most of the individuals who constitute the society will fix themselves in certain way. Means even a single person can effectively change the society.

What people actually miss when they come across the ideas put forth by Alfred Adler is the possibility that we can truly reject causality. I would call this unawareness the curse for the humanity. Our sense of ‘being’ inherently originates from some non-absolute attributes, relative references that we have to accept them as the ultimate truth right from our birth to make the sense out of all these infinite possibilities.

We are so entangled in the suffering and happiness waving between the life and death that we ignore that we are born, dead and again reborn every moment. The trick that causality plays in our life is that it tries to preserve the previous step to justify our current stage thereby freezing our present. Whereas what we should do is to just be in now and here which needs courage because there is no guaranteed layout, map to guide you. You have to walk your path all by yourself.

What people fail to notice is that the comfort of predictability is just in this moment but this sense of comfort has no control over future rather it intensifies the pain due to the randomness of the unpredictable future.

The secret to happy life is to be involved in everything and still not be attached to them.

Questioning Our Consciousness – Solipsism

Solipsism warns about the impossibility to know everything in absolute manner but if appreciated in a proper way it guides us to seek for continuous up-gradation from existing lesser absolute truths to newer and better absolute truths. A pure solipsist would be delusional, neurotic but a practical solipsist would bring about a revolution in his own world thereby in the worlds of the others and even in the whole world altogether!

The problem of other minds – do they exist in reality or the reality just exists in my mind?

Have you ever felt that words are failing to express the joy you have? Do you feel uncomfortable when you are unable to understand the vibe of your environment? Is it just you or is it the surrounding? Do you sometimes feel that everyone is treating you in a certain way and then you realize that actually it was you who was behaving differently? Do you get the feeling that someone is behaving in a way but thinking in a completely different way? Am I unable to get early in the bed because I don’t wish so or the weather is cozy? As if they are hiding something and you would never know what and how they feel? Could you make others feel your exact experiences in the exactly the same way? If yes, then how? If not, then why is impossible? How come our senses have practical limitations? Are those the limitations of our mind? Is empathy a real thing or is it just the construct of my mind to mirror the people in front of me? Why my experiences are so private?

The questions posed through Solipsism may clarify the origin of these ideas.

Where solus means “alone” and ipse means “self” in Latin

A philosophical idea that only one’s mind is sure to exist

Origin of Philosophy – Knowledge is power

Everyone of us is born with a tendency to have control over the surrounding. This is closely connected to our survival instincts. Though our survival instincts are mainly primitive what differentiates us from rest of the animals is our reasoning ability. Almost every animal is proven to have emotions, many of them can think logically at least from survival perspective, some of these animals have shown signs of intelligence closer to humans when trained properly. Our reasoning ability is some sort of highly evolved survival instinct. Reasoning introduces understanding, awareness of the surrounding in which we live, this understanding increases the predictability of the future thereby increasing the chances of the survival of the species. So, we can say that the better we understand the system which w are part of the better will be our chances of anticipating the risks of the environment; the better we anticipate the upcoming risks the better we can be prepared for to handle them to procreate further thereby ensuring the survival.

That is why we have many fields of knowledge to understand the establish different aspects of the reality we live in. When there were no boundaries between different fields of knowledge everything would start from simple question (even today single important and specific question can establish a completely independent field of knowledge) We are always one question away from a completely new perspective towards reality. (See Gödel’s Incompleteness theorem if you are interested in this idea)

Philosophy could be attributed to the most primitive, original, and the crudest field of knowledge. Although most part of philosophy is properly structured, it is crude due to the plethora of unanswered questions it has. Once the fundamental questions in any domain of understanding are answered, once the paradoxes lying at the end of an established field of knowledge are solved then a new field gets created and separates from the fundamental philosophy.

(The primitive man survived on whatever nature provided then the humans realized that one can sow the seeds to get certain crop from certain soil in certain season in this much quantity thus came farming – Botany, Geography, Mathematics and many more. When we were unable to understand the Newton’s theory of gravitation to some heavenly bodies (the perihelion of Mercury) then Einstein’s theory of relativity disrupted our existing understanding of the universe. It has literally affected every field of modern knowledge.)

Skepticism – Keep on questioning until you get consistency in understanding

So, in nutshell, the job of philosophy is to ask those questions which would challenge the complete domain of a certain field of knowledge, once you get the proof of this question then it becomes the part of that field of knowledge or a completely independent field of knowledge. They detach from the Philosophy. Philosophy was never meant to provide answers, if certain philosophy is providing proper answers, proper predictability then it is a field of knowledge.

What happens to the questions which remain unanswered?

What if there are unresolved paradoxes at the end of the a fully established field of knowledge?

I would say the philosophy carries the unanswerable, paradoxical nature – the imperfections in our understanding until they are formally, satisfactorily, and most importantly – coherently answered. That is exactly why philosophy always seems crude, as if it is carrying all the imperfections in our understanding of the reality.

Skepticism lies at the base of the philosophy. Once you get consistent answers to the questions posed, you keep on questioning that consistency. Everything (and I mean it) will end at a point of paradox or inconsistency. (If one finds exceptions then it is better to upgrade that theory otherwise soon it will get replaced with better theory.) There are ways to deal with such paradoxes/ inconsistencies (See Agrippa’s Trilemma if it interests you.)

Solipsism – Extreme skepticism – Questioning the existence of the question and the questioner!

So now we that we are familiar with the nature of questioning everything to establish consistent answers thereby to create knowledge, it is important to know how we do so. What make us answer these questions in a consistent manner. Our experiences, observations of the surrounding, our interaction with one another and the results of these interactions give us the fundamental model of reality. This model is developed by our minds – bunch of neuron connections physically per say – the collection of the sensorial feedback from the body.

Now the question is, as we go on questioning the reality, the final question is come like this –

If there are still some gaps in my absolute understanding of the reality which are creating this uncertainty somewhere, which is creating paradoxes, inconsistencies; what exactly is absolute? What exactly is the most certain thing in the world? What is the most real thing, real measuring scale with which I could measure and understand my surrounding?

Solipsism says that only the existence of your mind is certain, the existence of other minds will always be uncertain. As the presence of other minds is uncertain, you can be sure of only what you experience as “the reality”. As only you absolutely and fully realize the reality through your mind, the reality is just mere figment of your mind and imagination (when stretched too far!) When you try to transfer your minds realization of the reality to others you will always see that something got lost in translation. If reality is just the construct of my mind, then what exactly is existence?

Why Solipsism stands strong? – Why idea of living in the Matrix fascinates us?

Is the creator playing with my mind to show me a false reality for something different which is beyond my access?

The earliest evidence to ask such question is found in the writing of a Roman skeptic Sextus Empiricus quoting Gorgias (c. 483–375 BC) as follows:

Nothing exists
Even if something exists, nothing can be known about it
Even if something could be known about it, knowledge about it cannot be communicated to others.

Then René Descartes (the one who established Cartesian coordinates) came up with one of the famous quotes/ ideas about the absoluteness of the reality.

Cogito, ergo sum.

I think, therefore I am.
René Descartes

Simply put, Descartes argued that, the most certain knowledge one can have is through personal experiences because knowledge transferred from others are never perfect also there is no way to measure where the translation was perfect. The existence and experience will always be discrete – separate; it will vary mind to mind, so what is reality for you is the only absolute reality; that is why absolute knowledge is private property. As you can be only certain of your experiences only your mind is the reality, everyone else’s minds don’t exist. (OR should I say others are mindless! Jokes apart!)

George Berkeley – Bishop Berkeley is also one famous philosopher who developed the ideas of immaterial-ism. He is known for the famous analogy of “a falling tree” although his writings never explicitly mentioned such analogy but let us say in a crude way, he pointed towards it. (See, even here we can see the gap that is created during the communication of an idea, a simple analogy someone established before us!)

So, the idea is, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody saw it falling, nobody heard it falling, nobody felt the vibrations of fall how come we be sure that a tree fell down somewhere? Unless and until someone observes the fall through their senses one can never be sure that the really fell. So, if no one noticed it and in the end even you didn’t notice the fall, then the tree never fell down!

Your mind, you consciousness and you had to exist absolutely to observe, experience the fall of the tree. If you weren’t there to see and experience the fall, how could you be so absolutely sure that the tree fell?

Solipsism – Trust no one but yourself!

Now, you would have understood what may be going wrong with Solipsism!

Modern day answers would be like “I would have been presented with a video to prove the fall.” OR “I would have been presented with the person who cut down the tree”

But the counterargument would go like this “What if the video was faked? (by using deepfake!!!)” OR the witness found to be forged – I wouldn’t know if the person is lying with confidence (even polygraphs tests can be fooled, false alibis can be created!!!)

Jokes aside, these are mere representative examples to demonstrate the point. When you start formally questioning the nature of reality by using the most consistent tools that we have in modern science, then this question again peeks out in a bizarre way!!!

According to quantum mechanics, the moment we measure the state of a quantum object, its state changes. So, the measurement of that instance will never refer to the actual state of the quantum object. Meaning that you could never be sure of what actually happened before or at the instance of measurement. You can have a probability but you will never be sure.

Your observation had to exist to define the state of the quantum object, if you weren’t there were infinite state of the quantum object to exist. Your observation assigned it a definite, objective, absolute state. Your observation made it a real “reality” otherwise it was always possibility rather probability of many events. Please note that these are not just the flights of minds by the most compelling specimens of humanity, these are actually mathematically, experimentally proven ideas.

The one liner to understand solipsism is –

Your personal experience is more dependable than common sense!

I understand that how is it even possible to question common sense, common experiences. Solipsism is such a foolish idea rather the most foolish idea one can have! But, bare with me when we try to answer the paradoxes which lie in solipsism. Any person who is having existential crisis has been warned hereon!

Different ideologies in Solipsism

Metaphysical solipsism – the most extreme solipsism – the external world doesn’t exist. My mind creates the reality for me. (A rude adamant philosopher made it clear!)

Quick Joke – Unless I didn’t observe the tree falling, it is still there (and maybe giving fruits if it is a Mango tree!)

Epistemological solipsism – The reality around me is absolute and objective, but we cannot know it directly as it is through our sense and experiences. It is the limitation of my senses which inhibit my understanding of the reality. (This is a humble approach I would say!)

Sensory organs are not the experiences from the reality rather they are just the interpreters of the reality with practical limitations. There is no direct agency to experience what others are experiencing, to know other minds.

Quick Joke – A person drinking tea finds a fly in his tea asks the waiter to replace the tea. Waiter helplessly trying to convince his of not having any fly in that tea gives up and replaces the tea. After few same complaints from same person and replacing many cups, it is discovered that the fly was in the guest’s spectacles!

It’s like I cannot hear certain sound frequencies but certain animals can hear those frequencies. I can see only the light in visible spectrum, but other animals can see in another spectrum. It’s the limitation of my senses which dulls down the objectivity of the reality. You have to be ‘the God’ to understand all the spectrum of the reality! (excuse my introduction of some spiritual power here but we will come back to this again!)

This is the most practical, plausible and calming version of solipsism.

Methodological solipsism – Every logic is fallible, that is why you could never know what the absolute looks like. There is nothing like ‘the God’, if there is something supreme you won’t even understand how supreme it is and why it is so! (I know we are getting spiritual to go away from early religious epistemological solipsism but that is how it works)

It says that even our brain, our mind is the part of external reality. (I am feeling uncomfortable here.)

Quick Joke – A criminal was convicted for murder. He went scot-free because he didn’t do that murder, his had hand – rather the knife did the murder.

Jokes apart, but consider cognitive dissonance. Many things which we learned in our childhood as the absolute concept, as the ultimate truth gets replaced by something life changing and even more true and absolute. So, what is real truth is beyond our understanding.

Paradoxes at the end – Where Solipsism would break down!

The paradoxes of the solipsism are the most fun part which explain why solipsism deserves any explanation.

Here are some doubts,

If my mind is the absolute reality I live in, then why can’t I convince myself to survive by just imagining that I have eaten a lot today (while not eating even single crumb!)

I could just survive by thinking of eating the best food I could “think” of.

Everyone knows that this is not the real case. A person with that much will power and fasting will barely survive.

Now, the counterargument for this (and I love this part due to pop-culture reference!) –

What if your brain is kept in a container giving some electrical impulses exactly like in movie The Matrix. The matrix is programmed in such way that not eating will kill you definitely.

Solipsism ends in a matrix, a simulated reality beyond our experiences!

If there no such thing like matrix then how come all of us would die if we face the same degree of starvation? How come the experiences (even though not purely translatable to others but still the same based on the objective, consistent observations) we have in such cases match?

Many of the knowledge established as the most absolute, consistent and closer to the reality is developed because all of us had same experience (at least objective experience, ideally fully efficient translatable experience) in every one of our lives.

The answer is that we all share a common consciousness which enable us to experience the same scenario. We all are living a common and shared dream.

Our reality is a shared dream! Our consciousness is a shared dream! We all are connected by something so common and absolute thing. A spiritual person would call it the soul, a scientist would call it the energy.

This is technically known as the Solipsistic idealism – the best answer we have which will not blow our brains and will not give us the existential crisis!

The bizarre one comes here –

Even if the matrix is real, you would never be able to get the absolute understanding of it. Existence of external absolute reality is uncertain. You won’t even know if it is called matrix or a chewing gum or something else!

Pro tip – don’t over-love solipsism

You must understand that the arguments in solipsism are quite good. (It is just my failure of communicating those to you if you are not convinced till this point. I apologize for that.)

If the reality is just created by my mind/ in my mind then there is no way to verify that from external agency.

But, our experiences, emotions (at least some of them) always feel common. René Descartes Descartes posed that the experiences, sensory feed-backs are purely created by our mind but modern science proves that babies are not born with absolute ideas of reality (it is possible that they are exposed to certain sensorial experiences from their mother right from the conception) The absolute experiences they get are from their interaction with the surrounding objects and people. Our personalities, identities are created from mutual interactions. We cannot be ourselves without the people around us and the environments we are exposed to.

Only a completely isolated person would have the polarized inclination towards solipsism.

But again, what if it is just a construct beyond our understanding? There is no way for us to know that.

Even if there lies a construct beyond our understanding, there are some practical ways to purposefully ignore extreme ideas of solipsism rather leverage the ideas of solipsism.

If you are bound to the existing construct of reality which is practically within the reach of your experiences, your mind then you must abide by the laws of that reality. If you only stick to only the reality of your mind, then your so called “absolute truths” will immediately be challenged by the truth of others. It will be a blood bath but let your older absolute truths die to let the newer ones be born. They won’t be ideally absolute but at least they will be better than the previous one.

Even if the illusion of reality is shared among all of us as a common dream, we would never be able to escape that. Meaning, again play by the laws of the land. Ignore the existential crisis on the absoluteness of reality. At least try to get closer to the reality.

I think this is exactly why even though the pursuit of solipsism may feel worthless in the end but it’s understanding and appreciation gives us a hope to continuously keep on improving our version of the reality – private or shared whatever they may be.

Learn the rules to break them in a better and glorious way!

The acceptance of Solipsism (in a positive way) can also create an urge in person to seek for the real freedom. Solipsism in positive way urges the person to take that inner route in order to create the world of their desires through disciplined thinking (in a healthy way and not in a delusional way!) A pure solipsist would be delusional, neurotic but a practical solipsist would bring about a revolution in his own world thereby in the worlds of the others and even in the whole world altogether!