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by tsimionescu
987 days ago
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1, solipsism, has the advantage that there is a solid argument to be made for it - I only have direct access to my own mind. That is why I am calling it coherent. The other flavors don't have this advantage at all. It is impossible to trust my senses to arrive at the conclusion that other minds exist without first trusting them that they are correlated with features of a non-mind physical world. So, you can't use sense-based observations to claim that the world is made up of many minds. Even in something like Hinduism, which could be called a form of idealism at a large stretch, the physical world exists as a shared mirage that our minds are made to experience, maya, but the true world is still a single thing, Brahman. And their claim is that this can be directly experienced by you through self reflection - so if we call it idealism, it's still a form of solipsism ultimately, albeit more interesting than I would normally give this credit for. |
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In saying that, you are assuming certain standards for judging whether an argument is "solid". How do you justify those standards? Many would answer that they are axiomatic. But, if our standards for judging arguments are ultimately axiomatic, why can't the existence of other minds be axiomatic too?
By Münchhausen's trilemma, all arguments are ultimately reducible either to circularity, infinite regress, or dogma. Choose your poison, but I think dogma is least the poisonous of the three. I suppose that's another one of my axioms.
Of course, argument by axiom is sometimes very non-convincing – it can be used to defend any position whatsoever. However, most would agree that there is a big difference between defending as an axiom "1+1=2", versus papal infallibility, or the uncreatedness of the Quran, or whatever. The question is, is the axiom "other minds exist" more like the former kind of axiom or more like the latter? Surely, more like the former.
> The other flavors don't have this advantage at all. It is impossible to trust my senses to arrive at the conclusion that other minds exist without first trusting them that they are correlated with features of a non-mind physical world. So, you can't use sense-based observations to claim that the world is made up of many minds.
You can't use sense-based observations to make metaphysical claims–and materialism is just as much a metaphysical claim as idealism or dualism are. There is no possible experiment or observation that could distinguish materialism from idealism, and any possible sense data is equally explainable under other theory.
> And their claim is that this can be directly experienced by you through self reflection - so if we call it idealism, it's still a form of solipsism ultimately, albeit more interesting than I would normally give this credit for.
That Hindu position is arguably closer to my options (3) (open individualism) or (4) (pan(en)theism) than to classical solipsism (my option 1).
In classical solipsism, my mind is truly real, but yours isn't. In the Upanishads, both our minds are equally real (as Brahman), and equally unreal (as maya and karma); in their equal reality they are identical to each other, in their equal unreality they are distinct