What is the Paradox of Solipsism?
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- čas přidán 25. 07. 2024
- An explanation of the paradox of solipsism, a key problem for proponents of Ockham's razor: that a solipsistic universe is always a simpler explanation.
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Excellent 'Cliff Notes" channel for learning about philosophy. Thanks.
That solipsistic scenario is identical up to isomorphism with empirical realism, qua the position that there is a real world, as in beyond our total awareness and control, that yet consists of nothing more than the ways that it appears. There's whatever one kind of substance -- it doesn't matter what we call it, matter or mind, neutral stuff, information or energy, whatever -- and that substance can be partitioned into two, the self (whatever one has awareness and control of) and the other (the rest of it). That *is* actually the most parsimonious view and the one that should be adopted. There's just stuff, of one type, it doesn't matter what -- really only of one token too, though that's highly divisible -- and that stuff is capable of both being the subject of experience and being the object of experience, with all the rest of the details concerning only what patterns of experiences happen between different configurations of that stuff qua objects and subjects. Those details will need to be replicated in both a realist telling of this picture and a solipsist telling of it.
And in the solipsistic telling of it, there's even an implication that there's actually *more* to the other (the deceiver) than merely some function of the underlying stuff that generates the patterns of experiences the self has, and that makes this solipsistic telling *less* parsimonious than a plainer telling of it like above. Calling the other a "deceiver" implies that there actually is something more than just the self and the other, there's some other *actual* reality that the deceiver is aware of and is hiding from the self, for reasons stemming from whatever motivational processes might be going on within the deceiver. If we remove those features, and leave the deceiver as the only other thing that exists besides the self, and leave the deceiver as doing nothing other than generating the experiences that the self has, from whatever complex function is running inside of it, then "the deceiver" is just a terribly misleading term for "the rest of the world".
And while I'm here, if we want to get even more parsimonious: once we're down to any one kind of substance, so that things only differ in form, we don't really need to posit substance at all, since it's not doing any of the work anymore: *all there is* is form. But, you might want to say, substance is still needed to differentiate those forms that are *substantiated* or actual, concretely real, from those that are merely abstract, potential, insubstantial. But we can do away with the need for that, and get even more parsimonious, if we render the actual-potential or concrete-abstract distinction as merely one of indexicality: the actual concrete world is just *this* form that we are parts of, and all other abstract potential forms are equally real in exactly the same sense, *we* just aren't part of them.
I could go on about how time can then be subsumed within the state space of all the potential forms, and how that yields a constant rate of change and therefore gives a maximal speed, which allows space to be derived from time, and so on... but I've rambled too long already.
@@PfhorrestThe simplest view under token simplicity is to say there's a complete lack of things
@@apollo-s7s Yes, strictly speaking there are no things, there's only stuff. "Things" are just arbitrary partitions of the stuff.
@@Pfhorrest i don't see the relevant distinction between stuff and thing here
@@apollo-s7s Stuff is not discrete, so there aren't specific instances of stuff that can be counted, you can just partition stuff up into arbitrarily many units, and then if you like you can treat those units as discrete things of which you can have some specific number. E.g it makes no sense to ask how many air do you have, only something like how many bottles of air do you have.
Excited for this one :)
Very interesting!
I'm not sure why they say it's a _"deceiver"..._ It feels to me that the weight of the paradox hinges on the use of that word. By _"deceiver"_ I suppose they mean the part of the solipsistic mind that gives rise to all the experiences outside of the other part's awareness. But this doesn't need to be a _"deception",_ neither does it need to be _"false"_ or anything else than _"true"..._
What does _"truth"_ mean anyway in solipsism ?
For example, instead of the _"deceiver",_ one can call it _"the subconscious",_ or _"the creative mind"_ (one could think about a solipsistic mind who wants to entertain itself, and therefore create a part of its own mind which is unaware of the activity of the rest, _"the creative mind",_ which creates the entertainment).
Then the paradox says : theories that are in line with the _"the creative mind"_ will be more parsimonious, and validated by Occam's razor... Sure... And they could be true as well... There would therefore be no paradox whatsoever.
And of course, parsimony isn't the only epistemic virtue weighing on the epistemic scale...
You're right, I also noticed this problem.
The "deceiver" seems to be something very complex disguised as something simple (like "God did it").
I also fail to see how solipsism has any meaningful predictive power. If an experiment fails, you can always say this proves the deceiver.
@@gergelymagyarosi9285 that's the ponto thought. Taken as a standard, the razor contradicta other standards that we have. It would prefer thia solipsiait world over other models due to it having fewer components
@@gergelymagyarosi9285 *"The "deceiver" seems to be something very complex disguised as something simple (like "God did it")"*
Yes. It tries to limit the quantity of entities (and maximization of explanatory power) at the price of complexity (the term *"simple"* can be a _mereological_ consideration, in which case it only deals with parts and entities, independently of their "complexity"). However, if one feels like one is more "virtuous" than the other epistemically, then I guess one is justified in taking that route.
*-"I also fail to see how solipsism has any meaningful predictive power. If an experiment fails, you can always say this proves the deceiver."*
Correct (see my first comment under my OP).
I see at least two problems arise, the _"problem of old evidence",_ which strikes all abductive approach. And *"likelihood rigging",* which is that the more your theory approaches the data set of observations itself, the less probable (a priori) your theory is.
Personally I've always hated Occam's Razor because of the reasons stated. Being more often wrong than not. But I believe it is mostly a tool of the demystified to make everything seem simple and mundane. Only that which they cannot explain falls under Occam's razor and they use it in turn to explain those things that they cannot understand, accepting it as near fact and rejecting any more fantastical explanations out there.
I think it is generally utilized by small minded people to avoid having to think about the many complex possibilities out there. To simplify their lives. Which I think in turn actually makes their lives more miserable as such a view ultimately turns to nihilism. Because from the demystified perspective, nothing is fantastical, life is boring and pointless.
I wholeheartedly agree. I grow a grey hair every time I hear the term occam's razor.
What is more simple? A- the external world exists and works independently of any human subject, and therefore we perceive it in such a way. B- the external world is purely a subjective projection that, for some mysterious reason, coincidentally behaves as if it existed and worked independently of any human subject.
"B" is a "theatre" theory, in which the subjective imitates the appearance and functions of an objective world, without any good reason for doing it. That makes "B" a much more complex theory than "A" at least, because "B" is not capable of explaining the regularity of our diverse experiences with a single unifying reason for them.
This is not how it works. The solipsist can account for the regularity of certain experiences by positing some conceptual scheme which grounds these regularity. Also u js overly complicated the solipsist theory to make it seem as if they are less simple lol. One could say solipsism is simpler bcoz whereas the solipsist would say I have these mental representations which is from my mind, and so only these exist, the realist would say I have all these mental representations from my mind, and these exist, but let's also posit that these exist because there are things outside my mind that exist etc etc
@@apollo-s7s "The solipsist can account for the regularity of certain experiences by positing some conceptual scheme which grounds these regularity."
Can you describe such scheme? And then we could discuss if it is in fact simpler than "A" as described in my previous comment.
"Also u js overly complicated the solipsist theory to make it seem as if they are less simple lol."
I don't think so. I'm just describing solipsism in a way that incorporates the consequences of such theory, the implications that are often omitted.
"...the realist would say I have all these mental representations from my mind, and these exist, but let's also posit that these exist because there are things outside my mind that exist..."
Yes, in the sense that such things exist and work independently of my specific mind; but also no, in the sense that such things do not need to be "made" of a substance other than the mental. In that case, you would be simply saying that not all the mental substance, which is the only thing that exists, is part of my own subjectivity. Objectivism (in that sense) can be monist, not only dualist.
What is more probable - that trillions of coincidences occured for you to exist, or that it is just a made up story, so you can explain your existance and don't catch on too quickly?
@@godq3 Let me rephrase your dilemma:
What is more probable - that trillions of coincidences occured for you to exist, or that it is just a made up story that coincidentally appears to have a trillions of coincidences that occured for you to exist?
I like this. A lot.
The only objection I would have to the solipsistic hypotheses being simpler is that it is still relying on all of the scientific explanations while adding on that this is the will of the deceiver, which means it is the exact same explanation as what we currently have plus a few assumptions therefore more complex. Though I still understand it as an objection to Ockham's razor which I don't take as a criteria myself but rather as a guide for selecting candidate explanations from available data (as opposed to the "correct" or true explanation from numerous hypotheses) and even in that it is not an exact measure.
The series has been brilliant though and I enjoyed watching and learning.
14th-century friar William of Ockham that says that if you have two competing ideas to explain the same phenomenon, you should prefer the simpler one. This is different than the starting statement.
Solipsism doesn't look like a good explanation to me, as far as theoretical virtues go. You can't start with solipsism and derive any facts about what you're going to see. All you can do is go the other way -- you start with things you see, and then you just declare that solipsism did it. And you can't leverage that new 'result', since solipsism doesn't suggest things will or will not continue broadly in the same way. So that leaves it seeming entirely empty.
nothing 'suggests' whether anything / what specifically will happen next.
So you are trying to say solipsism lacks predictive power.
A problem with the solipsism hypothesis is that not even the question being put under scrutiny, such as the color of the sky being due the the properties of atmospheric chemistry, are themselves reliable. In other words the existence of the light and the atmosphere is itself are questionable, our perception of it is questionable, our very thought process is questionable until eventually it all just descends into circularity... unless of course one is a presuppositionalist then it all makes perfect sense.
I would argue that our perceptions are only questionable if there's an objective world against which to compare them. If there's nothing besides one mind, its perceptions are exactly what is.
@@doctorinternet8695 That's how I lean.
@@deepashtray5605 Oh I see
What is Simple?
It's not clear to me that the Solipsism view is any better. Maybe a deeper discussion about explanatory power and predictiveness would be enlightening. Or maybe there's another axis that solipsism lacks. Inspiration, perhaps? That is, grounds for additional exploration. How do I explore further questions if the answer is always the same, right?
To be clear, the video doesn't seem to be arguing as such. I'm just thinking out loud. As I understand it, the goal here is to show the inefficacy of the razor, which is a different issue.
the principle of parsimony simply tends to invoke less primitive entities. Since solipsism has the fewest entities (only my mind) while the existence of other minds requires many entities (all people have minds), it turns out that solipsism is a simpler explanation.
Do I believe that? Of course I don't, occam's razor is garbage.
How is a contrived deciever entity who continuously intervenes in every persons awareness a simpler model? Reminds me of the concept of ether.
Under solipsism there are no other people, just you.
It's not. Solipsists take the position that we should not believe what can not be proven . The goal they had in mind was that we could make a true philosophy about the world if we start with only true premisses. They would find the true premisses by tossing out the impossible and dis regarding what could not be proven for certain as it may be wrong. If there are two exclusive explanations for something that can not be proven impossible neither should be taken as absolute truth. The deceiver was a thought experiment saying that since it could be true that an all powerful deceiver is creating the world around you it is an alternative explanation to the real world existing. Neither the real world nor the deceiver can be proven or disproven. Therefore you can't know that the world is real and therefore should not believe it. There is no reason to believe your Sense are accurate or that they are lying to you. Therefore they do not believe the world exists. You could substitute the deceiver with anything this is possible. You could say you are in the matrix. That you are a god creating the universe around you. You are in a Truman show senerio. You are dreaming and this reality simply seems real till you wake up. The point is no explanation of the outside world is provable nor is there any evidence for it being real. Basically they are like atheists that do not believe in God for lack of evidence and that any explanation for God has an alternative explanation. They apply the same logic to everything.
The Response while putting solipsism at par with scientific theories involves an extra element on the side of solipsism. Supposedly, the moment we put a deceiver behind the scientific phenomenon, we are actually introducing an extra element, i.e. the deceiver, which makes it unlikely to be considered as the truth according to William of Ockham because it has more elements than a scientific reason. I solemnly swear that I am not a supporter of Occam’s razor because pragmatically, we tend to identify something as the truth if it has a voluminous explanation attached to it, when various nuances are explained with the most detailed descriptions of all the elements surrounding it provided we are not taking the razor to explain transcendental reality. :)
If my parents have not met, then there would be nothing forever, or I would be something else?
I agree that ockham's razor is an easy-to-defeat principle, but I disagree that solipsism is such a powerful attack on it. Whatever you are trying to explain with solipsism, it's harder to do so than without solipsism. For example if we are trying to explain moon's rotation around the earth, simplest explanation goes somewhat like this:
The deciever seems to like creating his illusion in such a way it looks like a universe within which the general relativity is true.
This explanation is strictly longer than:
Looks like the general relativity is true.
That’s what. I mean we are anyway not shaving off the deceiver which to my surprise is altogether an extra element.
But you implicitly have in the second part "The external world exists and in that world it looks like general relativity is true" The solipsist doesn't have to claim the external world exists (functionally the same as the deceiver).
Ockham's razor applies to scientific theories only. And sometimes even the simplest theory does not explain enough.
Thank you the Deceiver for protecting me from nothingness. I know you are not evil❤
Seems to me that solipsism is the way religion works.
You don't seem to understand the difference between "is" and "is more likely." It's more likely to pick out 5 red tokens from a bag of 100 red and 10 blue, but it is still possible to pick out 5 blue. Regardless, simply because an explanation _has the fewest assumptions,_ as is the key element to Ockham's razor, not "simplest," doesn't preclude that an explanation that still makes some or many assumptions _can't_ be correct.
I’m a fan of Rorty, and I would say that while you can’t disprove “solipsism” (and by extension the solipsistic paradox) as a meta narrative or capital T Truth, it’s not particularly “useful”.
As a pragmatist, I find solipsism a “useless” way for operating in the world.
Just one way of interpreting this.
I get the spirit of this argument but in my opinion the device of the "solipsistic scenario" is kinda badly constructed here. It could really easily have been simpler: the deceiver is an unnecessary entity, to start, and the fact that it "wants" stuff implies that it has a whole mind with very specific properties. Its very name suggests that there is a whole reality besides us that is the "real" one.
One way to steelman this and make the solipisist world even simpelr is the following:
The is only mind which is consciousness and its contents. It has no limits whatsoever for what contents it can hold. Its contents are completely random. Among an infinite amount of random qualia our experience as it is would inevitably simply pop out, no explanation required.
That's exactly what was said, minus the randomness
@@KirurUwUand minus the deceiver, and minus the whole other "real" reality implied by it
How does solipsism provide a better explanation? I can’t be proven and it has no practical application.
that's the point. according to ockhan's razor, we should prefer it.
It doesn't appear simpler at all as it sounds like the deceiver invented all the laws of physics. So we have the laws of physics plus the deceiver. And you would need to explain the power of the deceiver.
Yes monism is simpler than dualism but you don't need a deceiver you just need idealism. I get that the concept of self and outside world is a duality, but you can have a world without that difference as many spiritual worldviews suggest.
I’m not sure if I agree that the evil deceiver is simpler to believe in
It's not. The deceiver is a thought experiment associated with solipsism. Really solipsism is the logical end of not believing what does not have evidence. We can't prove that the world outside our mind is real therefore the do not believe in it. The deceiver is just the idea that an alternative explanation is just as likely. You could replace the deceiver with the matrix or that you are dreaming and simply thing the world is real cause it's a dream. Or any number of possibilities. Basically take the logic atheists use against God and apply the same skepticism to reality
Aren`t you saying first that the solipsistic scenario is simpler and than that it isn`t (in the place where you say simplicity doesn`t imply truth because deceiver`s will can be arbitrary). So the solipsistic scenario isn`t really simpler. Also you need a whole disembodied theory of mind and qualia to explain how a deceiver works.
No, solipsism, though has "two thigns" and two things are less than billions of things, those two things in solipsism (me and the deciever) are way more complicated than the billions of things of the scientific realist.
also, excuse my spelling.
I don't understand this.
I don't understand why you consider solipsism explains anything. Solipsism affirms fewer things than "science." But the few statements it makes do not correspond to any type of explanation.
What science does is build a model of reality. Each aspect of this model represents each phenomenon noted in reality and describes the relationships between the elements of that reality in terms of causal relationships.
The phenomenon "seeing" corresponds to an event that occurs between certain elements with certain properties and under certain rules of reality. The phenomenon is described comprehensively and the model of that event can be used to make predictions with a high probability of certainty.
Under the solipsistic interpretation, there is no explanation of the "seeing" phenomenon. Nothing is known about it. It is assumed that it occurs generated by something but no comprehensive explanation of elements, factors, relationships, rules, etc. is provided.
Discarding aspects of a phenomenon is not giving a simpler explanation.
Ockham’s razor is a rule of thumb, not a law of physics. If one wants to say that X happened because magic, then great, that’s simple enough alright, but it’s not using Ockham’s razor in good faith, but rather turning to philosophical semantics, which eventually leads to someone being forced to drink a nice cup of hemlock.
Thanks for making videos eh.
Man, your comment is total obfuscation!
Eschew obfuscation.
Lol this is js wrong. Solipsism isn't simpler than an external world realist view, at least based on how u cash out simplicity, since there's no means through which one can be able to tell that there are more entities posited in the solipsist world than in the realist world. The "I" can be broken down to js a category of sub entities, which would be all the contents of our senses/imagination. How would one know whether these entities are less than the amount of stance/mind independent + mental entities in a realist view to be in any spot to make the claim that the solipsist wins on token simplicity? Like for all we know the realist could claim that a lot of our mental representations dont reflect something out there whereas another set of mental representations do.
If u want to drop token simplicity and argue type simplicity there's still not going to be any way in which the solipsist can infer that there view is simpler. On one hand, they could say their view posits less ontic categories, insofar as it only claims a mental realm to exist, whereas an indirect realist for example posits both a mental and extra mental world existing. But under some different type they couldve the same lvl of entities in the sense that the indirect realist who might be like let's say a physicalist could say something like "only the universe exist" which at face value doesn't seem to be less simple than the solipsist view.
Solipsism doesn't have any good explanatory power whatsoever either lol, that's false. For one, the theory is unfalsifiable; can't be proven to be false in virtue of the empirical data we have. When a theory is unfalsifiable or easy to vary to accommodate new observations, that is suggestive of the details within the theory not playing any functional role in the truth value and coherence of the theory; the details shares a weak connection to the details of the phenomenon of question.
Solipsism makes zero predictions. None of the things we observe in the future is expected under the hypothesis of solipsism. The fact that if I let go of an apple tmr it falls to the ground isn't something expected under the solipsist theory, but rather under a theory of gravity.
The indirect realist can offer more details of causal relations regarding why we have these observations, leading to a higher accuracy and prediction of the description. Also solipsism is unable to explanatorily account for what the definiendum "true" means in language. The statement "solipsism is true" is unclear. If by true one is referring to correspondence to reality, which is just I (my mind), under the solipsist framework,then there's some ridiculous consequences which follows from that concept of truth,insofar as the statement would be uninformative. Solipsism is true would just mean that "The idea that only I exist conforms to what I is or what I represents" which doesn't for one fit the intuitions we have when we use the word true, which is to refer to some stance independent fact or notion. If the solipsist is using some mind independent notion of truth, and saying that solipsism corresponds to this standard,then that directly contradicts the entailments of solipsism, which is that theres no fact of the matter which is mind independent since the only thing that exist is I to begin with
The author of this video does not know what "simple" means. A conscious being who creates a universe in detail must of necessity require more information, _sensu_ Shannon, to specify than the universe itself (since every byte of information in the universe is also in the creator's mind). The simplest hypothesis is that which requires the smallest amount of information to specify. Occam's Razor then is simply a mathematical consequence of Bayes' Theorem.
Premise 3 is false. The deceiver hypothesis has no predictive power at all, because we have no way of inferring the deceiver's intentions. If the deceiver's plan all along has been to have gravity stop working and the sun turn black tomorrow, then the deceiver hypothesis predicts that that will happen. The deceiver hypothesis predicts everything and therefore nothing.
Assuming the universe has time-dependent laws that will remain consistent is the same as assuming the deceiver wants to tell an engaging story.
It's not simpler, because it introduces an unfalsifiable entity (the deceiver).
Thus it explains nothing until we can prove that such a deceiver actually exists and acts upon reality.
It's exactly the same as God - explains nothing.
You do not even need a deceiver.
You can say that there is a regularity in the succession of phenomenal events and leave it by that.
Any chain of explanations must end in a brut fact, go on forever or is circular anyway.
Solipsism doesn't have the same explanatory value as our scientific theories. In fact, as Wittgenstein has shown in his Philosophical Investigations, solipsism can't even explain how words can have meaning.
You don't understand what "simplicity" means, it means that the computer algorithm to simulate the situation you see is as short as possible. The solipsistic nonsense is not even a theory, it has exactly the same complexity as a non-solipsistic idea, it's nothing at all. This video is very ignorant, and seems to be made to deceive.
We cannot know if the solipsistic theory is true or not. It very well might be real. Frankly I don't find the idea that there is a pre-existing devi of evil intent which creates lies is a simple solution. In fact it strikes me as a pretty complex idea.