Posted: Apr 08, 2021 2:37 am
Untrue.
You also have other peoples' senses to tell you what's going on. For example. I can tell you it's night time here. It's probably not night time where you are, and you probably didn't think about how dark the sky is for me as I write this, but now I've just told you - you can now picture that I am sitting in a room lit by a light bulb and the outside world is pitch dark. Your senses were completely useless in divining that information.
This is not correct. I only have my own senses. Anything else is speculation. I don't have evidence that you have senses. I can't know you aren't a philosophical zombie.
You've given zero rationale why you lend belief to your senses, but ironically don't lend belief to the objects which stimulate your senses.
This has been shown to be fatally flawed from any reasoned position several times - despite your terminal unwillingness to engage honestly in any level of meaningful exchange.
In reality, you do have feelings and thoughts, and the reason why you can trust them (for the most part) is not simply that you possess them but that they continuously provide you with approximations of reality that allow you and your meaty bits to navigate an independently existing reality. Additional to that, other people also exist, and they also experience that independent external reality and thus also have thoughts and feelings which are wholly independent of yours.
That's the main point of solipsism though. That we can't truly trust our senses and that the only thing we know is that we exist in some form. If we didn't then we wouldn't be thinking now or having any sort of experience. One thing you can be sure if is that you exist in some from. Everything else, not so much. The objects that stimulate can be illusions or not even real, as many experiments can show. Optical illusions trick us into seeing what isn't there. Color is LITERALLY all in your head, it doesn't exist in the world and neither does sound. You don't have a solid argument for "other things".
Recognising that since our brains construct reality based on the input of our senses does not support solipsism. It supports the argument that we have a filtered view of reality. The two are not the same.
Sure, we can not arrive at objective truth one day. Our knowledge will always be filtered through our senses, but we do have a pretty good reason to know that there is a world outside our minds: the predictive power of our filtered observations. Take Pluto, for instance. When the theory of gravity (which itself was arrived at via observations filtered through our senses) was applied to our planetary system certain discrepancies between along what paths certain planets should be travelling according to the theory of gravity and the paths they actually took were observed in planetary orbits that could only be accounted for by the existence of other - as yet undiscovered - body affecting those paths with its own gravitational force. Astronomers used these observed orbital irregularities to calculate the size and location of the hypothesised bodies and finished up discovering Neptune in 1846. It brought theory and observation closer together, but not entirely. So another existence of another body was stipulated. Calculations on the remaining discrepancy resulted in the discovery of Pluto.
The fact that we could predict Neptune's and Pluto's existence, the paths they took and the mass they contained before we had any direct empirical knowledge of them is a pretty good indication that there is stuff outside our own minds. Generally, the recognition of regular patterns, be they scientific or casually experienced ones, are indications that we are not just imagining a world out there.
Actually no, none of that is any indication that stuff is outside our minds. All of it could not have existed until we observed it. How can one know any of this exists outside of their senses? You can't. All we have access to is our own immediate experience. That's what I am getting at and why this is so stubborn to get rid of. Because one cannot deny the fundamental truth that all we have is sensation and everything else is just induction. I can't be sure you exist or that the world won't end when I die. I believe people do exist and have minds, but have no proof of this. I believe that the world will persist beyond my death, but again I can't know that. There is a lot we take for granted and it shapes our navigation of the world, and once you see you have no basis for it, well....
Solipsism came in many flavors, most recently the Boltzmann Brain paradox which the math shows is inevitable given infinite time.
You say I have evidence, but what is that? My senses? In that case then my dreams are real. Is it persistence? Everything ends or breaks down so that's out. Your say so? That's a fallacy in and of itself. There is a reason solipsism is called logically impeccable. It can't be attacked or defended.