Can I ask a few questions about solipsism / objective reality?

[dms1972]

Hi just trying find out were I at on this, and looking for a bit of help.

Not sure if I am solipsist, postmodern or what.

I;ve read a bit and thought a bit on this.

What is postmodern thinking?

What is solipsism?


Does postmodernism lead to solipsism?

I think most stop short.



My understanding is that they don't deny there is an objective reality , but think its inaccessible.


I find I have to begin with the thought or telling myself "there is an objective reality" - meaning a reality outside my mind, independent of it.

Or another way: "There is something rather than nothing"


What does a solipsist actually believe?

How does a solipsist get back to objective reality?

 

[Star Adept]

I think you misunderstand solipsism.

It's a school of thought/view but doesn't work very well as something you can challenge to one who holds that view.

It is to say in lesser terms that you only know what you perceive. You cannot prove that anything exists objectively because if you perceive it differently than somebody else, it therefore is subjective.

I'm a schizophrenic. I literally swap realities. To my perception, at times, zero about this world exists. If my fantasy is a forest, I perceive the sights, sounds, smells, breeze, self-consciousness, and memory as it only exists in that fantasy. Which one is real? Do I perceive the forest as a fantasy, or do I perceive the "real world" as a fantasy? Maybe I jump into a fantasy where nobody exists because I want to be alone, maybe I jump into a fantasy where other people with other thoughts and desires exist because I'm the only human in the forest.

As a schizo, the thought process is easy for me to understand, because it's literally the distortion between perceptions that cause my problems.

I know this is the real world because it's the one I come back to every time. (and I'm medicated now lol). But of a purist solipsism mentality, I cannot prove that just because I visit this world more often it is therefore an objective real world.

In less crazy terms; Does a stop light change from red to green, objectively? Not if you consider a color-blind person, it changes from one shade of gray to another shade of gray. By extension this means that we can only know that which we perceive. Perception is inherently subjective as we all perceive things differently, even if there tends to be a statistically "normal" perception of things.

Going further, how do you test the objectivity of your world if your answers are only given to you by perception?

If you write a word on a piece of paper, ask someone else to read it, and they respond with the word you wrote down, a non-solipsist would say that he proved by the subjective response of another that it is therefore objectively true. A solipsist would say that you only know what he said because you perceived the sounds of his words and saw his lips move at what you believe to be what the word looks like if spoken. They would go on further to say, how do you know there was anybody even there to ask?

How do you know you're not in a coma right now?

A solipsist does not get back to an objective reality because there is none he came from nor one he can get back to. There is only the reality he perceives.

 

[Received]

Reminds me a saying attributed to the Buddha.

Does the watch in your hand exist in your mind or outside of it? If outside of it, how are you perceiving it? If within your mind, how do you know it exists?

How do you know objective reality exists? You can't "know" in the sense that we speak about knowing, because knowing anything is mediated by concepts and language. The moment you speak about something, you've already frozen it up in a concept, which means it's now in the sphere of subjectivity. So what's left for objectivity? Even the term "objectivity" is subjectively ascertained. So how do we know what we're talking about by this term?

Because, by definition, we're speaking beyond knowledge as mediated by concepts, and moving into knowledge by experience. What does it mean to say that we can know something by experience and without concepts or language? Because we intuit it. We know it's there without knowing how to explain our knowledge.

Without intuition, we can't know anything, because all knowledge ultimately rests on these very basic, taken-for-granted philosophical assumptions about the world, such as the world existing outside of our heads (objectively). What I call intuition is what Bertrand Russell called "instinctive beliefs". Same thing, different word, same reality that we can't reason our way out of everything, because reason (and conceptualization) itself has roots. Pascal: "the heart has its reasons which its reason doesn't know."

 

[quatona]

I find I have to begin with the thought or telling myself "there is an objective reality" - meaning a reality outside my mind, independent of it.

This is what the solipsists questions, whereas the postmodernist has no problems that there exists something outside his mind. He just denies the relevance/significance of its "objective nature" - if it´s not accessible to us, why even pretend to be concerned with it?
We need to understand reality on our terms. That´s what "understanding" means. "I want to understand reality as it is objectively" is an oxymoron.

 

[Star Adept]

Thanks quotona, I had a hard time understanding postmodernism philosophy other than the ideology of "there's more than what is seen/presented" which, I had always known as free-thinking and/or mystic philosphy

 

[GrowingSmaller]

Solipsism IIRC is "I exist", or thas all that can be known.

PoMo philosophy encompasses a disregard for "metanarritives" (these are attempts to define the big picture once and for all), and deconstruction (reversing binaries like good and evil - like "I'm baaaad" and thats cool - to emancipate the victims of ideological and group serving language. Its also about pick and mix in art and architecture embracing different styles and multi cultures. Also theres discussion of the politics of identity, like "extremism" I suppose...

 

[dms1972]

Solipsism IIRC is "I exist", or thas all that can be known.

OK thanks for the replies


To Star Adept - I have or have had some difficulties with fantasy and reality. Its as if episodes have taken place (but I can't convince people)

I spoke to a counsellor a couple of years ago and he said to me in my case its not schizophrenia and its not bi-polar.

But I can understand with others its different.

My previous doctor said to me she thought it wasn't something that could be treated with pills and it in my case it was insecurity.

I find i am better not to put a label on it sometimes.

There is something underlying this - a particular way of thinking , or that I live in my thinking. And this is to me what causes the problem.


Goin back to the philosophical side

In postmodern thought as I have read about it the centre is deemed to be inaccessible through language. (I am not sure why this is or why the postmoderns arrive at the view that its problematic - I know for derrida its something to do with the word 'differ').

So whatever has been taken for the centre: In the West: God, the idea, the world spirit, the self, substance, matter... Postmoderns deem them to be metaphysically absent.

So do they have a committment to some view of reality before they begin.?





Through

 

[agua]

I think you misunderstand solipsism.

It's a school of thought/view but doesn't work very well as something you can challenge to one who holds that view.

It is to say in lesser terms that you only know what you perceive. You cannot prove that anything exists objectively because if you perceive it differently than somebody else, it therefore is subjective.

I'm a schizophrenic. I literally swap realities. To my perception, at times, zero about this world exists. If my fantasy is a forest, I perceive the sights, sounds, smells, breeze, self-consciousness, and memory as it only exists in that fantasy. Which one is real? Do I perceive the forest as a fantasy, or do I perceive the "real world" as a fantasy? Maybe I jump into a fantasy where nobody exists because I want to be alone, maybe I jump into a fantasy where other people with other thoughts and desires exist because I'm the only human in the forest.

As a schizo, the thought process is easy for me to understand, because it's literally the distortion between perceptions that cause my problems.

I know this is the real world because it's the one I come back to every time. (and I'm medicated now lol). But of a purist solipsism mentality, I cannot prove that just because I visit this world more often it is therefore an objective real world.

In less crazy terms; Does a stop light change from red to green, objectively? Not if you consider a color-blind person, it changes from one shade of gray to another shade of gray. By extension this means that we can only know that which we perceive. Perception is inherently subjective as we all perceive things differently, even if there tends to be a statistically "normal" perception of things.

Going further, how do you test the objectivity of your world if your answers are only given to you by perception?

If you write a word on a piece of paper, ask someone else to read it, and they respond with the word you wrote down, a non-solipsist would say that he proved by the subjective response of another that it is therefore objectively true. A solipsist would say that you only know what he said because you perceived the sounds of his words and saw his lips move at what you believe to be what the word looks like if spoken. They would go on further to say, how do you know there was anybody even there to ask?

How do you know you're not in a coma right now?

A solipsist does not get back to an objective reality because there is none he came from nor one he can get back to. There is only the reality he perceives.

This is interesting and implies that there's no real way for correct communication to occur according to a solipsist. I like your description of deciding objectively which reality is true ( according to the schizophenic model ) and unless we're inside the Matrix it makes sense to me.

 

[GrowingSmaller]

I think that the idea of the "logos" has been attacked, in that people are logocentric (using logic etc, relyiing on the "word" as raison detre). Not sure whow this conclusion was reached though, but it has to do with reversing binary oppositions at the heart of culture again.

For PoMO language is fundamentally ambiguous IIRC, such that real communication is rendered impossible. How can you know what I mean? My intentions are always hidden, and you only have your end of the bargain (text you interpret) not mine.

 

[dms1972]

I can't say for sure if my thinking is 'postmodern'. It seems a slippery term. Douglas Groothius says its often debated whether ultra-modern, or super-modern are better terms to use.

This term would not have been part of most peoples vocabulary at one time. So someone it seems to me has come up with it

But christianity isn't really pre-modern, modern, or postmodern.

Did pre-moderns think of the themselves as pre-modern for a start? Do we not only refer to them as that now?


Some classify the middle ages as the high-middle ages, the late middle age, and I suppose the early middle ages. The whole of the middle ages beginning with the fall of the Roman Empire and up to the around the 16th century, when the modern era begins.


Basically there are writters notably Jean-François Lyotard who wrote of the 'post-modern condition'. Which he said in retrospect was the "worst of all his books"

The Postmodern Condition - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

It seems to me a lot of what is called "postmodernism" is all following on from Wittgenstein, and Neitzsche and maybe others.

The term wasn't used much before Lyotard's book except by art critics, or in architecture.