How do we deal with the issue of other minds? What are others? How do others exist? In what way? If they are outside myself, how are we communicating? If I am this body and the world is independent from me, where is my experience of my body and others located? Doesn't it constitute the world, and is not say an object within it? How do I know there's anything other than what I'm presently sensing/perceiving/feeling?
I think I've finally come to an understanding of others and I'm going to present my ideas here. My writing style is kind of questioning, of myself, in a sort of conversation, so please bear with me.
Subject: Solipsism and conceptual schemes
Is the existence of anything outside your direct experience a semantic dispute? Is the existence of other minds a semantic dispute?
To be honest I don't know the answer. To say other minds don't exist, what am I actually referring to? Isn't it just this idea in my own mind I have of 'other minds' and so I'm denying the existence of something which doesn't even really exist in the way I think it does?
Can I even deny the existence of something transcendent from myself? How am I even talking about it?
Maybe it's not a semantic dispute but rather a dispute which comes down to the way in which I experience others. This philosophical 'problem' would never have even arose if I had never grew up with naive realism (wouldn't it?).
What the non-solipsist really wants to say here is not just some answer to the 'problem of other minds' but rather to say that the people he knows and interacts with, that it is them who are conscious, who feel things, who 'look back'. But that position requires one to accept that when one sees one is in direct contact with a world as it exists, independent of oneself, as if one’s eyes are windows onto an outside world.
>>1200627
And if they aren't then what of others? The people you know and interact with, known about through (or constituted by?) your sensory experience. If those people aren't external then they can't somehow 'posses' internal experience of their own - that's the crazy thing about the direct realists position, or really any non-solipsistic position; it's absurd. Perhaps more than absurd solipsism itself. As if the people you see walking around have this undetectable amorphous 'mind experience' that sort of hovers around (?), or within (?) their body. When others walk does their 'internal experience' get carried along for the ride? Where are other people's experiences located? If we say it's within the brain you're left in the absurd position of understanding your own experience of others is actually entirely located within a brain, you and the world around you and the others in it, is an experience and so must be already be located within a brain. Your experience of feeling a head and thinking there's a brain in it, must itself already be located within a (real?) brain.
If I scrap that and accept that the people I interact with are private to me, I could say yes but they indicate the existence of something which truly transcends my experience. That two transcendentally existing minds somehow communicate to each other because their experiences correlate (somehow). I wave my hand at a person over there, with that person being entirely made up of my visual experience, with this all in my mind, but then transcendent to my mind exists another mind which contains the visual experience of a person waving. And because the experiences the two transcendentally existing minds undergo correlate with each other in this way, one is not lost to solipsism entirely.
>>1200628
Or, I could simply accept that the consciousness of things in the world is nothing more than a quality of my own experience. And I understand that things being conscious or not always was nothing more than whether I experience the thing as being conscious. It's a qualitative difference between my experience of a brick wall, and of a human being. A difference in the quality of my experience. And this quality is not something which is part of my visual field or some sensory modality. It's a sort of pre-reflective understanding that one has a subject of consciousness and the other doesn't. When around humans I don't have to grapple with the 'problem of other minds' wrestling with whether to posit 'internal experience’ to them. Rather when around others it's as if my experience automatically (although not always) assumes this nature of being almost predicated on the existence of other people's 'looking back'. It really sort feels as if to doubt the existence of this is completely incoherent. That it's just a sort of absurd, strange thing to doubt. As if that's a misuse of doubt, doubt does not apply to things like that, if you try and do it you slip into incoherence. "If others don't exist, then why am I communicating with them, right now, with this post" sort of thing.
But then if it's not wrong but rather incoherent to doubt the existence of other minds, why is that? Why can't doubt coherently apply to the publicity of the world? If the world being public was a sort of true fact then surely it should be the exact sort of thing one could coherently doubt. But if one can't coherently doubt other people watching them, then their gaze mustn't be, a fact?
>>1200631
What I think here is that the publicity of the world, down to the self-conscious feeling of being watched when others look at me, is a sort of conceptual scheme. To be a solipsist is for me to slip out of that conceptual scheme and into another, wherein the world is not experienced as public, where instead of the doubt of other minds being incoherent, rather the positing of their being someone looking at the back of your head is here not wrong but incoherent. And so for myself to not be a solipsist is to stay within this conceptual scheme wherein publicity is coherent and the doubt of it not.
So here the major point is that the world being public or not comes down to whether the conceptual scheme I'm within contains publicity. The shared world only exists through a conceptual scheme. When the scheme isn't there, neither is publicity. Other minds aren't something which either exist, or don't, rather they form part of the structure of my conceptual scheme which I experience the world through, as if the world being shared forms the frame of the glasses through which I see the world. Solipsism is not a metaphysical position, rather solipsism is when the world loses its publicity. Where the frames aren't there and positing other minds wouldn't be wrong but incoherent.
Thoughts?
>>1200637
You're the reason why people think philosophy majors are giant faggots.
>>1200654
This
Get a joh OP
>>1200624
>How do I know there's anything other than what I'm presently sensing/perceiving/feeling?
You don't. Humans have adapted to an environment where interacting with what is directly in front of them is the most efficient method of survival. Abstract concepts like philosophy, fantasy, and expression are not important for short term survival. I've always seen this as the drop off point for human intelligence because the average birth rate of a population tends to decrease as their average IQ increases, and they start to become disconnected from their base desires like breeding or eating constantly. You don't have the capacity to accurately guage something outside of your current senses because that kind of ability would require a higher level trait that either never existed or was never passed on.
bro dude what if nothing's real wow mind blown
>>1200624
Two things
First, your writing's hard to follow. I write incoherent stream of consciousness when I'm having a dialogue with myself too, but I clean it up before I present it to people. Writing like this justifies posts like >>1200654 and >>1200698.
Second, there are 3 kinds of solipsism you seem to be talking about.
>1: Metaphysical solipsism. Do other consciousnesses exist?
>2: Subjective solipsism: We (or I, at least) am always-already experiencing my own consciousness and nothing else. My existence is solipsistic
>3: Psychological solipsism: Essentially neurosis vs. peace of mind, where peace of mind is solipsism.
The first Solipsism is probably beyond humanities epistemic limit, the second is how we (or I) experience reality, and the third is trying to redefine solipsism as something entirely different from solipsism.
What you're doing is similar to some compatibilist versions of free will. Free will, like Solipsism, is generally assumed to be a metaphysical question. Compatibilists, like you, will redefine it as a mode of action; ex. first order volitions (I want a hamburger) lining up with second order volitions (I *want* to want a hamburger). Which puts us in a weird position where our actions have no metaphysical freedom but are somehow "free."
Its just a bullshit word game you're playing. Most people will never be satisfied with sophistic compatibilist versions of free will, and most people will never be satisfied with Solipsism being a psychological state. People want to know the deeper reality, they don't want you to assign "solipsism" to a set of vaguely similar, but fundamentally different, circumstances.
>>1200801
Have fun teaching whatever you majored in dude.
A soulless automaton wouldn't spend so much time asking the same questions I would, about what experiencing qualia is, how we understand things as more than abstract concepts, the hard problem of consciousness, and whether other fleshbags are sapient beings like myself. The fact you people came up with solipsism long before I was born probably disproves solipsism.
>>1200801
>Its just a bullshit word game you're playing.
No it isn't.
>Most people will never be satisfied with sophistic compatibilist versions of free will,
compatibilism isn't sophistry
>and most people will never be satisfied with Solipsism being a psychological state.
you've missed the point entirely, read my post again, 'not-solipsism' forms part of the structure of the conceptual scheme in which converstions like this take place. 'solispsism' is not some psychological state but rather a total shift in the way reality is experienced to be structured.
Here the major point you guys are missing is that solipsism is not something that is either true or false ontologically. Rather solipsism is false under the current conceptual scheme. And when the publicity of this conceptual schema is lost, one is a solipsist wherrein "other minds" don't 'not exist' as a fact, rather it's simply incoherent to posit them.
People want to know the deeper reality, they don't want you to assign "solipsism" to a set of vaguely similar, but fundamentally different, circumstances.
>>1202449
>People want to know the deeper reality, they don't want you to assign "solipsism" to a set of vaguely similar, but fundamentally different, circumstances.
I'm explaining the deeper reality. And also I don't really care what people want
>>1200624
The short of it is that everything is Śiva. That is the most natural conclusion to the argument of solipsism. We are the universe experiencing itself subjectively and everything is us but we are not everything.
>>1200624
I'm fine with everyone else being meat zombies and me being the only observer in the universe.
To be fair, if you want to feel the same way I'm fine with that too.
