5.1.1.7 Solipsism

Solipsism is Idealism taken to its “logical” conclusion. It is an extreme form of Radical Idealism (denying external reality), or Radical Skeptism (denying practically everything). Denying the existence of a material world, it also denies the existence minds other than the “agent” or person experiencing their own thoughts and existence. It takes the position that knowledge of anything outside the mind of the thinker cannot be proved or justified. This doctrine opposes all forms of realism and materialism. It is so extreme that it also rejects most other forms of idealism because many of them grant some measure of existence to other minds or to a physical world.

Solipsism is difficult to argue against, because it effectively poisons the well against all opposition. It makes it impossible to distinguish between actual reality and a thought that looks like reality. Because it rebuffs all counter-arguments with this trick, it can never be proved or disproved, which makes any discussion of it fundamentally frustrating and pointless. This immunity from attack is its main charm, without which it would be utterly empty.

Solipsism is both unverifiable and unfalsifiable. There is no scientific technique that could be successfully used to attack it. It not possible, even in principle, to subject it to any form of test by reference to empirical data because the empirical data themselves are part of the solipsistic dream. Solipsism (like Omphalos, described in the next chapter) subverts any attempt at refutation, because all evidence brought against them is immediately rejected as being part of the dream (or false history). Likewise, it is not logically inconsistent, and so it cannot be defeated on purely theoretical grounds.

Despite its seeming invulnerability, it does have several weaknesses, two of the most damaging being:

• If solipsists creates the reality they experience, how can they create things they have never thought of such as new scientific discoveries, geography, history, poetry, art, or dance they themselves are incapable of conceiving or performing. It seems ludicrous to say that the solipsistic agent can mentally fabricate entities which are far superior, more intelligent, beautiful, deep, interesting, and skilled than the agent himself. If this were possible, why does not that agent give himself those skills?


• However the most compelling case against it is its philosophical sterility. It is completely empty and without power or content. It has no explanatory scope nor depth, and it makes no predictions. It preemptively destroys any attempt to refute it and can be neither falsified nor proved. It shares this property with many other weak philosophical positions such as Omphalos (described next) and similar Special Creation arguments.

Simply because a philosophical position is difficult to attack does not grant it any depth or strength. Adherents of this peculiar brand of thinking have only shallow satisfaction. They are left with a philosophy that has no use, no applicability, no morality, no ethics, no metaphysics, no aesthetics, and not a single interesting problem to solve. It renders all experience of beauty, joy, fear, attraction, and enthusiasm meaningless and arbitrary, as nothing more than illusions that never really happened. This paucity of substance, which immediately terminates any discussion, does not necessarily discredit the philosophy, though it leaves one wondering what possible use it has.

Philosopher Massimo Pigliucci has written and spoken about this in his "Rationally Speaking" podcast, and in his online magazine, "Scientia Salon". His take on Solipsism, as on all philosophical issues I have heard him discuss, is clear and enlightening. "Radical skeptics have been around since pre-Socratic times - it's not a new position. Radical skeptics doubt any and all knowledge because there is no certain foundation for anything." Solipsists take that doubt further, doubting that anything exists except the person having the experience, that nothing else is certain. "They ask, 'how do you know that you are not the only person in the universe, and everything else is a figment of your imagination?' The short answer - you don't!"

And then you either become mired down, or you move on. Dr. Pigliucci is "a skeptic in the David Hume tradition. Hume often posed questions that were, in fact, close to radical skepticism. He famously questioned the logical basis of Induction, which is the type of reasoning that we use both in science and in every day life. He showed pretty convincingly that there is no way to defend Induction on logical grounds independent of using induction itself". We know induction works because it has always worked before! If you defend Induction by using Induction, then you are using circular reasoning. Well that is just the nature of Induction - it can't be proved. But then again, the same could be said of Deduction - you can't prove that it is valid without resorting to deductive reasoning.

Hume followed up with - well, we have to live our lives, and the best way to have success in life is to use induction as a way of reasoning. After describing the puzzle, he moved on, as we should do with radical skepticism and solipsism.

He goes on to say, "We can use these doctrines, though, to improve our thinking. They should remind us of just how precarious and uncertain the foundations of our knowledge really are. They foster epistemic humility: we are really not as smart as we often think we are, and in fact we don’t even have unequivocal answers to very basic questions about knowledge. If over 2500 years of philosophy and science have not been able to come up with a decisive answer to radical skepticism and solipsism, then that should tell us something. It tells us that people thought about these things for almost three millennia, and we still don't have an answer, and we have very good reasons to think that there will never be an answer." It shows us one of the limits of knowledge, an epistemic limit - that we cannot be absolutely certain.

What should we do with this? From a pragmatic perspective, we just need to ignore it and continue living our lives. We acknowledge what it tells us - "yes, I don't know that I'm not the only one here. But I need to proceed under the assumption that I'm not alone here." We need to use it as a reminder that we probably are certain about much less than we think we are.