• Question: How could you prove to a solipsist that everything is real? (impress me; I'm one).

    Asked by obiwankenobi to Aled, Ellie, Kev, Willem on 7 Mar 2014.
    • Photo: Willem Heijltjes

      Willem Heijltjes answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      Well, the point is that you can’t prove that solipsism is wrong! But you can show that it is a bit silly. I would say something like:
      1. No, no, I’m not in your head, YOU are in MY head 😉
      2. If everything is in your head, why do things happen that you don’t like?
      3. If everything is in your head, how can you learn something new?

    • Photo: Kevin Arbuckle

      Kevin Arbuckle answered on 7 Mar 2014:

      To my mind (which of course is all I know to exist 😉 ), solipsism is a philosophical standpoint and not a scientific one. This means to that you cannot really provide ‘evidence’ for it in any real sense, but also that you cannot provide ‘evidence’ against it.

      Perhaps one thing to think about though is that even if reality exists, we may never actually be aware of it. After all, we can only experience the world through our senses, and we know that those (and the way our brain processes them) is very biased. As a simple example, we can only see a relatively small range of colours – other animals can see much more (e.g. birds can see UV light but we can’t). Therefore how we view reality is different between people and between species. ‘Reality’, then, is only what we perceive, and if we define reality this way then because we perceive things reality must exist.

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