Frozenworld wrote:Solipsists understand ACTUAL dread not the materialist nonsense you call dread. Cosmic loneliness of solipsism trumps any sort of nihilism anyone can come up with because you are eternally alone with no other, because they never were. Seems you don't understand what is scary.

FW, one only has to change a few references here to come up with the fundie notion of Hell as "separation from Jesus". Some people are scared by that. Maybe you're just extending it with some fanfiction. You've just swapped fear of death for fear of life. You're not alone in that, ironic as it may seem.

What could be so dreadful about the "cosmic loneliness of solipsism"? Compared, say, with the terror of comparing one's feeble perceptions with the feeble perceptions of others, where nobody knows ultimate Truth?

Frozenworld wrote:Solipsists understand ACTUAL dread not the materialist nonsense you call dread. Cosmic loneliness of solipsism trumps any sort of nihilism anyone can come up with because you are eternally alone with no other, because they never were. Seems you don't understand what is scary.

It's B-Movie level fear.

How can you be lonely when you get to rustle up 7.6 billion people from thought alone?

You've shown your hand now FW. Run along, there's a good non-existent chap.

Solipsists plural understand ACTUAL dread, do they? If that's true, then solipsism isn't true is it?

BlackBart wrote:Solipsists plural understand ACTUAL dread, do they? If that's true, then solipsism isn't true is it?

How many solipsists does it take to change a light bulb?

One. The swapping takes place in post-production.

What if I told you there is no light bulb?

BlackBart wrote:What if I told you there is no light bulb?

Who do I think I am contriving clever little remarks to amuse myself?

How many solipsists does it take to change a light bulb?

All of them.

See? Now I've got myself started and I am doing it too!

I disgust me.

BlackBart wrote:Solipsists plural understand ACTUAL dread, do they? If that's true, then solipsism isn't true is it?

It seems to me that any person can have an understanding of real fear, regardless of his position or philosophy. I think that real understanding and awareness of fear can only be at the moment when a person experiences this fear on his own skin.

Cito di Pense wrote:

Frozenworld wrote:Solipsists understand ACTUAL dread not the materialist nonsense you call dread. Cosmic loneliness of solipsism trumps any sort of nihilism anyone can come up with because you are eternally alone with no other, because they never were. Seems you don't understand what is scary.

FW, one only has to change a few references here to come up with the fundie notion of Hell as "separation from Jesus". Some people are scared by that. Maybe you're just extending it with some fanfiction. You've just swapped fear of death for fear of life. You're not alone in that, ironic as it may seem.

What could be so dreadful about the "cosmic loneliness of solipsism"? Compared, say, with the terror of comparing one's feeble perceptions with the feeble perceptions of others, where nobody knows ultimate Truth?

Not knowing ultimate truth to me is not as bad as cosmic loneliness or this all being in my head. It would render my life meaningless and pointless.

To illustrate there are the cases of hallucinations where someone takes something to be real even when it's not. Yet how are they to know? You can say it doesn't exist to them but why should they believe you? How do they know you aren't a hallucination either?

Spearthrower wrote:

Frozenworld wrote:Solipsists understand ACTUAL dread not the materialist nonsense you call dread. Cosmic loneliness of solipsism trumps any sort of nihilism anyone can come up with because you are eternally alone with no other, because they never were. Seems you don't understand what is scary.

It's B-Movie level fear.

How can you be lonely when you get to rustle up 7.6 billion people from thought alone?

You've shown your hand now FW. Run along, there's a good non-existent chap.

It's not. Because there aren't 7.6 billion people, just you. You clearly don't get solipsism. I haven't shown anything, you just showed you don't read or listen, let alone understand.

To reiterate solipsism in some forms argues that you are all that exists, that nothing else does. The people you see are not people or real, just phantoms, ghosts. It's like a hallucination, it appears real but it doesn't exist.

As I said, you just don't get it.

What happens to someone who hallucinates? he sees and perceives things that aren't acctually there as being real. maybe it's the same with external data

Frozenworld wrote:

It's not. Because there aren't 7.6 billion people, just you. You clearly don't get solipsism. I haven't shown anything, you just showed you don't read or listen, let alone understand.

To reiterate solipsism in some forms argues that you are all that exists, that nothing else does. The people you see are not people or real, just phantoms, ghosts. It's like a hallucination, it appears real but it doesn't exist.

As I said, you just don't get it.

It's because I don't get it?



How many dozens of posts now on this topic and you can't even provide a single sentence showing any functional comprehension about the position you're nominally discussing.

Frozenworld wrote:

Spearthrower wrote:

How can you be lonely when you get to rustle up 7.6 billion people from thought alone?

It's not. Because there aren't 7.6 billion people, just you. You clearly don't get solipsism.

I'm afraid it's you who doesn't get 'it' and that 'it' is actually elementary English.

Rustle up = to prepare, to create indicating something done hastily or without planning.

So what I was doing was taking the piss out of your silly little plea in your previous post where you quailed at terrible fear you have of being alone by pointing out that you managed somehow to create 7.6 billion people just using your mind, so how could you be lonely with that many imaginary friends?

Given how you can't even comprehend that simple sentence, it's no wonder you're struggling with any of the more serious criticism of the pap you're uncritically regurgitating, and even less surprising that you're buying into a half-baked load of bullshit that you admit you can't even understand.

What a load of old dross this thread's turned out to be.

Frozenworld wrote: Not knowing ultimate truth to me is not as bad as cosmic loneliness or this all being in my head

What? Solipsists miss their imaginary friends from their imaginary cosmos? Who would have thunk it?

Frozenworld wrote:It would render my life meaningless and pointless.

And would that include your posts?

Newsflash, matey; Nobody knows 'ultimate truth' and never will. And that's true whether all this is really real or I'm just a brain in a jar. And it ain't cosmic loneliness, its plain old vanilla loneliness - which is known cause of solipsism syndrome, which, I suspect, is the problem here as opposed to plain old solipsism. The internet won't fix it, so you'd be better off talking to your doctor or other healthcare professional.
In the meantime, I'm going to enjoy this steak...

So what I was doing was taking the piss out of your silly little plea in your previous post where you quailed at terrible fear you have of being alone by pointing out that you managed somehow to create 7.6 billion people just using your mind, so how could you be lonely with that many imaginary friends?

Given how you can't even comprehend that simple sentence, it's no wonder you're struggling with any of the more serious criticism of the pap you're uncritically regurgitating, and even less surprising that you're buying into a half-baked load of bullshit that you admit you can't even understand.

I understood the sentence, but you failed to grasp what solipsism is. There is no imaginary friends. It's just you. No one exist exists or is real. What are you not understanding about this concept?

https://sagebodisattva.tumblr.com/post/ ... ifiability
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=so ... M%3DHDRSC3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FlyFVK_WE

It seems to me you need to brush up on what it is first before going around questioning other's understanding of it.

Frozenworld wrote:There is no imaginary friends. It's just you. No one exist exists or is real. What are you not understanding about this concept?

What am I not understanding? Why have you not made any attempt to show how you convinced yourself that solipsism is true? That solipsism might be terrifying to contemplate is not an argument that solipsism is true.

The tactic you're trying, which is claiming that rejections of solipsism constitute an avoidance reaction is just psychobabble. Here's some more psychobabble: Compulsions are thought by some to be based on anxiety over a looming loss of control.

If you really want to see whether you are talking to yourself, you should try to make some predictions about what the rest of the conversation will be like.

Frozenworld wrote:

So what I was doing was taking the piss out of your silly little plea in your previous post where you quailed at terrible fear you have of being alone by pointing out that you managed somehow to create 7.6 billion people just using your mind, so how could you be lonely with that many imaginary friends?

Given how you can't even comprehend that simple sentence, it's no wonder you're struggling with any of the more serious criticism of the pap you're uncritically regurgitating, and even less surprising that you're buying into a half-baked load of bullshit that you admit you can't even understand.

I understood the sentence, but you failed to grasp what solipsism is. There is no imaginary friends.

Which is laughably ironic because nothing whatsoever about solipsism suggests there can be no imaginary friends. In fact, you have to explain the apparent existence of other people.

Frozenworld wrote: It's just you. No one exist exists or is real.

That's not solipsism - I'm starting to think this is why you've been so coy when it comes to setting forth any of your own ideas - because you don't really have even an elementary grasp of the topic you want to discuss.

Solipsism only necessarily postulates the existence of one person: oneself. So we've finally got a sentence from you making a claim, and that claim is wrong (and in contradiction to the previous sentence) - it's not 'no one exists or is real' - it necessarily requires at least one person to be real - the solipsist.

And you're still in need of addressing the apparent existence of other people. I mocked that by talk of imaginary friends - want to postulate something 'more serious'? Be my guest!

Regardless, even then that's not actually wholly true because a stricter interpretation of solipsism isn't that other people DON'T exist, it's that you cannot be SURE that they exist.

So you really are hopelessly confused.

Frozenworld wrote: What are you not understanding about this concept?

The concept of solipsism I understand just fine - your 'comprehension' of it is another thing altogether; that, I may or may not understand, but given what you've written so far, I think it's quite possible that your comprehension of it is intrinsically incomprehensible.

Frozenworld wrote:https://sagebodisattva.tumblr.com/post/171234531194/so-lets-talk-a-little-about-the-falsifiability
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=so ... M%3DHDRSC3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FlyFVK_WE

What a lovely thing to see. For me, this is wholly indicative of why you're stuck in this morass - you have no ability to parse the value of information, to understand what's credible and what's lacking, to identify appropriate sources. You take your 'information' via cherry-picking; you're not interested in actual truth, just comforting fictions you find by typing a word into a search engine. Despite all your supposed tortured angst about loneliness, you're basically snuggling up to a comfort blanket.

Frozenworld wrote:It seems to me you need to brush up on what it is first before going around questioning other's understanding of it.

It seems to you that I need to do X?

But if I don't exist, then it must be YOU who needs to brush up on it - no?

As for your understanding of it - your choice of citations exemplifies who's in need of remedial injections of comprehension. That's also the case for your entire argument - such as it is. How can I be doing anything? If solipsism is true, then as far as you're concerned, then I don't exist - you're having this discussion with yourself. Why do you keep making yourself look a fool to yourself?

Cito di Pense wrote:
If you really want to see whether you are talking to yourself, you should try to make some predictions about what the rest of the conversation will be like.

Let's try it, shall we FW? Experimentation, eh? The bane of shit ideas.

What 3 words am I going to type next in this thread?

Frozenworld wrote:….
I understood the sentence, but you failed to grasp what solipsism is. There is no imaginary friends. It's just you. No one exist exists or is real. What are you not understanding about this concept?

https://sagebodisattva.tumblr.com/post/ ... ifiability
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=so ... M%3DHDRSC3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FlyFVK_WE

OK, I’ll agree with you (and with the speaker in your second link) that in the end we don’t have any means of being sure of anything, even ourselves, even as a matter of probability. I would call this radical scepticism rather than solipsism, but that’s a matter of language. My line is that if we don’t know anything we may as well do what we want, what we think we will enjoy, which is probably what we were doing before. Quoting my own post #153 in this thread:

zoon wrote:

Frozenworld wrote:

You say that accepting this would radically alter your behaviour, there would be no point in doing anything. My view is that if we don’t know anything, including that, then the answer to “Why do anything?” is probably “Why not?” Do you find that sitting around doing nothing makes you happier than carrying on much as before?

Generally my stance is the "why do anything" since the "why not" aspect of it has already been answered.

If your stance is “why do anything”, does that include “why eat”? Would you plan to continue with mealtimes if you reach the conclusion that food, along with the rest of the external world, is a product of your imagination and doesn’t really exist?

It’s not just about food, we do everything because it makes us feel more comfortable or happier, including, for example, looking after children, taking a moral stance on racism (for or against), or mulling over the ontological status of minds.

I’m repeating the question which I asked you in post #153, and which you have not answered: you say that you take the stance of “why do anything?” rather than “why not?”; would you then refuse to eat when you were hungry, on the score that you have no way of knowing whether food is real or whether eating would let you feel better?

zoon wrote:

Frozenworld wrote:….
I understood the sentence, but you failed to grasp what solipsism is. There is no imaginary friends. It's just you. No one exist exists or is real. What are you not understanding about this concept?

https://sagebodisattva.tumblr.com/post/ ... ifiability
https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=so ... M%3DHDRSC3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3FlyFVK_WE

OK, I’ll agree with you (and with the speaker in your second link) that in the end we don’t have any means of being sure of anything, even ourselves, even as a matter of probability. I would call this radical scepticism rather than solipsism, but that’s a matter of language. My line is that if we don’t know anything we may as well do what we want, what we think we will enjoy, which is probably what we were doing before. Quoting my own post #153 in this thread:

zoon wrote:

Frozenworld wrote:

You say that accepting this would radically alter your behaviour, there would be no point in doing anything. My view is that if we don’t know anything, including that, then the answer to “Why do anything?” is probably “Why not?” Do you find that sitting around doing nothing makes you happier than carrying on much as before?

Generally my stance is the "why do anything" since the "why not" aspect of it has already been answered.

If your stance is “why do anything”, does that include “why eat”? Would you plan to continue with mealtimes if you reach the conclusion that food, along with the rest of the external world, is a product of your imagination and doesn’t really exist?

It’s not just about food, we do everything because it makes us feel more comfortable or happier, including, for example, looking after children, taking a moral stance on racism (for or against), or mulling over the ontological status of minds.

I’m repeating the question which I asked you in post #153, and which you have not answered: you say that you take the stance of “why do anything?” rather than “why not?”; would you then refuse to eat when you were hungry, on the score that you have no way of knowing whether food is real or whether eating would let you feel better?

About the only response so far the understands it.

But to explain the why not, if solipsism were true there would be no point. There would be no friends or lovers because there is only you. Morality doesn't exist because there are no other minds. Life quickly becomes a lonely hell as the phantoms dance across your vision but you can't know if they truly are real or not.

In a sense behaving as though they are is lying to yourself because you don't know for sure. Don't know if all your effort is being wasted in making friends and the like, and having to second guess your interactions with people all the time.

There is no "apparent" existence of other people, that's what Spear fails to grasp. It's just you.

No matter what we do all we have is provisional knowledge:

as I indicated, there is nothing wrong with relying on your senses to build a "provisional" worldview. I do it all the time. but if you are questioning the efficacy of sensory input to arrive at absolutes, at some point you have to rely on something other than the senses to avoid cirular reasoning do you not? so you asked - what then do we rely on? some traditional thinkers would say that we should rely on philosophical examination. but they also admit (whether they realize it or not) that philosophical concepts are ultimately contingent on sensory input. as you said - senses are the starting point.

so where do we go from here?
why go anywhere? some people desperately seek absolutes - a safety blanket against the cold reality that is essentially and ultimately unknowable and in flux. some people want to build a house of cards and "make it all fit". but I ask; what's wrong with a provisional worldview? I'm perfectly content in relying on my senses to build an incomplete and flexible reality, like the proverbial reed that bends in the wind and stays whole, while the oak tree snaps like a twig and lies shattered in the aftermath of the storm.

when I pointed out that human perception and human reasoning cannot arrive at absolutes, maybe you assumed that there was something else I relied on to get there, like divine revelation. no. my point was that there is no there there.

I am agreeing with you that the senses are the foundation of our reality, and as such, a provisional reality is all we have.

What a lovely thing to see. For me, this is wholly indicative of why you're stuck in this morass - you have no ability to parse the value of information, to understand what's credible and what's lacking, to identify appropriate sources. You take your 'information' via cherry-picking; you're not interested in actual truth, just comforting fictions you find by typing a word into a search engine. Despite all your supposed tortured angst about loneliness, you're basically snuggling up to a comfort blanket.

In the case of solipsism credible and lacking are pretty much the same.

As I have said, you don't grasp it or the immense dread those who do grasp it feel.

Frozenworld wrote:
As I have said, you don't grasp it or the immense dread those who do grasp it feel.

Ah, but you grasp it. At least, you're grasping something. Use your dominant hand. Keep a tissue handy.

Frozenworld wrote:
There is no "apparent" existence of other people, that's what Spear fails to grasp. It's just you.

Ugh, I really thought you couldn't be this dumb.

Ok, let's walk you through it.

So there's just you. Yes, this is called 'solipsism' - we all know what the word means...

But you obviously acknowledge that there appears to be other people around you - people who are not you - people who appear to be independent of you both in terms of their actions appearing to precede and supersede the moment while you observe them, and their intent appearing to be different than your own.

So given that appearance, and given that you want to discuss the idea that they don't actually exist, that there is actually only you, then I made a sarcastic joke about how it's nice to have so many imaginary friends.

Are you genuinely not capable of understanding that concept?

Not find it funny? Ok, sure; different tastes in humor are a characteristic of the diversity of (actually existing independently) humans, but you can't keep pretending that I am not following the solipsist's logic there while also pretending that you are somehow in deeper understanding of the discussion.

I am pretty sure that my 7 year old son could understand that concept, and he'd be understanding it in his second language.

So let's move away from the joke and have you actually address the fucking point for a change.

If only YOU exist, then why do I think you're full of shit? If I don't exist, then how do I think that? Is it really YOU thinking that YOU are full of shit and just manufacturing an illusory me to tell yourself that?

Worse, whatever 'logic' (cough) you use to declare yourself the only person who exists, I can surely use too, meaning the concept is intrinsically flawed and incoherent. That's the real problem here - the concept is foundationally self-refuting, but that isn't helped by your terrible confusion and ineptitude at expressing any cogent ideas.

In truth, the probability is that these two factors are co-morbid. Your woolly thinking is what makes you find the idea compelling, but your woolly thinking won't let you explain what exactly it is that you find compelling about it nor understand why others think it bum-custard.