Philosopher Argues For Solipsism—Kind Of

[AtmanIsBrahman]

On this forum we’re all familiar with solipsism. But the question is, why does mainstream philosophy completely ignore it? 

As it turns out, there’s one philosopher who argued for a form of solipsism—admittedly not the full thing, but close enough.

Caspar Hare, in his book On Myself, and Other Less Important Subjects, argues for egocentric presentism. This is the idea that my experiences are different from others’ because they are present. Others’ experiences are simply absent. He doesn’t claim that others don’t have an experience, but he does claim their experience is not present. 

This means that my pain is present, whereas someone else’s pain is absent. So, my pain is more important than other people’s. Caspar actually qualifies this claim by saying the quality of being present is just one ethical consideration, and isn’t decisive. I think he’s trying to avoid sounding crazy to academics, which he would if he said “my pain matters and other people’s pain doesn’t matter at all.” Hare’s solipsism is an incomplete version, but it’s close to something profound.

You can read his book if you’re interested. It’s pretty technical, but it has interesting thought experiments. Of course, don’t read it if you’re a soft-brained spiritual person—that’s why I posted this on the intellectual forum.

Here’s a passage that is quite interesting:

 

4.4 The Intelligibility of the Notion of Monadic Presence

What is it for a thing to be present? Not present to me or present

to you, just present? To understand egocentric presentism, you

will need to have a grip on this notion of monadic presence.

In an effort to give you a grip, I asked you to try out some

Cartesian introspection: Wipe your epistemic slate clean. Forget

where you are, forget who you are, forget that you are anybody at

all. Now attend to the world. You will fi nd that there are certain

things. Take their appearing at this stage of introspection to be

a feature of the things, not a feature of how they appear to you.

They are present.

This may seem like a very strenuous mental exercise. You may

be tempted to infer that the notion of presence is like plutonium.

It is the sort of thing that can be brought into existence only by

many hours of painstaking labor inside a philosophical labora-

tory. Outside of philosophical laboratories it is nowhere to be

found.

But again, I think this is not right. I think it is at least pos-

sible to have a pre- theoretical grip on the notion of monadic

presence. Consider my childhood. When I was a child I was pos-

sessed by all kinds of quasi- solipsistic fantasies, convinced that

the people around me were all aliens or actors or robots or secret

agents or whatever. So far so normal. As I grew up so I grew out

of this phase. I stopped jumping around doors to catch the aliens

off guard and generally became more mellow. But one quasi-

solipsistic thought survived into my adolescence. It would arise

most distinctively when I thought about death. What would my

death be like? I would imagine a vicious internal cramp as my

heart gives out, panic and fear as my muscles become limp and,

as the blood stagnates in my head and my brain starves of oxygen,

what? My school vicar said light. Homer, in a much more impres-

sive way, said darkness:50Clarifi cations

Achilles smote him with his sword and killed him. He

struck him in the belly near the navel, so that all his bowels

came gushing out on to the ground, and the darkness of

death came over him as he lay gasping.6

The sword reeked with his blood, while dark death and

the strong hand of fate gripped him and closed his eyes.

Idomeneus speared Erymas in the mouth; the bronze

point of the spear went clean through it beneath the brain,

crashing in among the white bones and smashing them

up. His teeth were all of them knocked out and the blood

came gushing in a stream from both his eyes; it also came

gurgling up from his mouth and nostrils, and the darkness

of death enfolded him round about.7

But even then I understood that neither was right. After my death

there would be a kind of nothingness, a kind of absence that was

difficult to describe or imagine. The closest I could come to pick-

ing it out with words was by appeal to precedent—things would

be the way they were before I was born.

But now I was struck by a thought. Isn’t it amazing and weird

that for millions of years, generation after generation of sentient

creatures came into being and died, came into being and died,

and all the while there was this absence, and then one creature,

CJH, unexceptional in all physical and psychological respects,

came into being, and POW! Suddenly there were present things!

Was I thinking about presence and absence in a relational sense?

Clearly not, for there is nothing at all amazing or weird about the

fact that for millions of years sentient creatures existed without

things being present to CJH, and then CJH was born and sud-

denly things were present to CJH. To the extent that I found it

amazing and weird that CJH’s birth brought an end to millions of

years of absence, I must have been thinking about presence and

absence in the monadic sense.

So the notion of monadic presence is at least sufficiently in-

tuitive for a thirteen- year- old with no exposure to philosophy to

grasp it and find it perplexing (putting aside, for the moment, the

question of whether the thirteen- year- old should have found it

perplexing.)

 

Edited Monday at 02:45 AM by AtmanIsBrahman

[Someone here]

On ٤‏/٥‏/٢٠٢٦ at 5:45 AM, AtmanIsBrahman said:

On this forum we’re all familiar with solipsism. But the question is, why does mainstream philosophy completely ignore it? 

It’s dismissed in academic philosophy and considered horseshit off the cuff because of two reasons:

1- it cannot be proved or disproved. Go spend eternity trying to prove something exists outside your bubble of perception right now .  See how that works out. It is simply not possible by definition. Because you are always using your own consciousness to view the world and to prove the consciousness of others . Which is also just impossible. I don’t care how intimate and close that person is to you .. like maybe your wife ..go kiss her and stare deep inside her eyes and you find yourself inside her eyes ..not her . 
2- it is dismissed also because it’s completely unpractical. Unless this truth of solipsism can be utilized like in lucid dreaming to impact the world to your favor then it’s pointless regardless of whether it’s true or not .

Edited 3 hours ago by Someone here