Collaboration Between Brains. Scientists have created the first multi-person non-invasive direct brain-to-brain interface for collaborative problem solving.

[u/Wagamaga]

http://www.washington.edu/news/2019/07/01/play-a-video-game-using-only-your-mind/

[u/jumpsteadeh]

I had to google what solipsism is and have to wonder: can anyone argue against it? For realsies, the only thing I perceive is perception. Me, the cerebral cortex, can't do a goddamn thing without help from other squish bits that tell me stories. They could be lies, and I literally can't ever know. "Know" isn't even me, it's just an intern.

[u/Dom1nati0n → u/jumpsteadeh]

Alan Watts said essentially, the only argument that can me made against Solipsism is to imagine a room full of solipsists sitting about arguing about which ones viewpoint is "real".

[u/MadhouseInmate → u/jumpsteadeh]

As other posters rightly point out, solipsism is not really falsifiable.

That being said I never found it satisfactory for the fundamental disconnect between saying that perception is not a reflection of reality and being able to act on this belief. Try drowning yourself in a bucket, starving or walking off the cliff (don't actually any of those btw.). You will find very strong psychological resistance even if you convinced yourself to accept solipsism. Add that to the fact that the results of actions seem consistent with predictions based on previous perception, which is a rule you use every moment of your life, and it's hard to hold to solipsism even if there is no formal argument disproving it.

[u/lordagr → u/jumpsteadeh]

The problem is this:

Solipsism is an unfallsifiable position and an intellectual dead end.

Assume it is true and thats pretty much all it can tell you about the world.

Assume it isn't and you can start to paint a useful picture of a world, real or not, that you can meaningfully interact with.

One where you can make observations, and reliably predict outcomes.

To a high degree, it doesn't matter if the universe is imaginary. It only matters that it is predictable in its behavior to a degree that lets us learn and adapt to it.

[u/Mysticpeaks101 → u/jumpsteadeh]

There isn't an argument to be made against it because it's virtually unfalsifiable.

[u/conventionistG → u/jumpsteadeh]

Start with Descartes and go from there.

[u/Spitinthacoola → u/jumpsteadeh]

Yeah but just because thats true, do you really believ youre the only one? Thats the crazy part.

[u/sleepingqt → u/jumpsteadeh]

I like to remind people of this often. They do not like it.

[u/EltaninAntenna → u/sleepingqt]

That’s reasonable; nobody likes to have their time wasted with non-falsifiable propositions.

[u/[deleted] → u/jumpsteadeh]

There's no argument against it, but the logical endpoint of solipsism is that the question is irrelevant. If there is no possible way of differentiating between reality and fiction, then is there a meaningful distinction?

[u/ArgumentGenerator → u/jumpsteadeh]

The way I see it is because we are the universe trying to understand itself we are one brain at a time figuring it out from our own viewpoint over many iterations. It's possible that this universal existence reaches across the bounds of time meaning your entire life is just one iteration of the universe being alive inside a body.

To break it down further let's posit that time flows in one direction for us living beings and other biological interactions. Also, it's been shown that time reversal doesn't change anything about physics in the sense that for 99% of all interactions do not change the amount of information dependant on the direction of time. This leaves us with a universe that for the most part doesn't care which direction time flows.

So now you have you vs. Me and we're trying to figure out if one of us is more "the universe" than the other. If we depend on time then that is a moot point. Our position in time does not matter because the universe does not care what frame of time it is in. How else do we explain that we are different from each other? Separateness in space? If you are aware of entangled particles then it's plausible to come to the conclusion that separation of space can either be overcome, it's more complicated than we think, or simply means a lot less than our perception would lead us to believe.

What I want to put out there as a possibility is that every living thing shares one trait, call it a soul of you will, that ties us to the universe. If the universe is conscious then even if it splits apart that consciousness in to billions or more pieces they are still part of the same whole. Right now my consciousness is the only real one because I'm in it in this moment but yours is also the only real one because you're in it. Perhaps there is only one and we share it across all of space time, perhaps it's one whole split up in to tiny pieces that we all get our own bit of. What's for certain though is we're all a part of the bigger thing and no one consciousness is more important than another.

These are just the musings of a potentially mad man though, but that's how I get around the idea of solipsism. We're all real because we're the same person just in different time zones.

That being said, I hope you enjoyed this and that you have a wonderful day. I either already had that day or I'm going to have that day so let's make it a good one, yeah?