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Let's break away from social bindings and self-interested deceit for a moment and treat each other like honest human beings, as creatures that are not merely tools for each other's ends but things that know, independently of ourselves, beauty and pain?
Now, here's my question:
(You ready for this?)
What actual evidence can you give to me your soul/mind/consciousness/self/knowledge/experience exists? That I should treat you as something that knows beauty and pain rather than as a mere tool to my ends?
The best argument I can see is inductive:
1. My soul exists, for I know it.
2. My soul control the actions of that thing that appears in my senses which I call my body.
3. Were I to banish myself from my soul and look at the world of the senses from without, nothing about my body would tell me that I have a soul- that there is knowledge/experience within it. This is of course impossible to even really imagine, but it follows from how we, rightly or wrongly, think of the world of sense, and that which we obtain from that sort of thought is generally called knowledge, so...
4. What I call the bodies & behaviors of others in the world of senses resemble what I imagine my body & behaviors to look like from this nonexistent exterior perspective.
5. THEREFORE, from induction, the bodies of others each have a soul like my own, since my body has my soul.
There are two obvious flaws with this (beyond >induction):
* 2 rests on this idea of seeing my body from outside of it, not as myself but in the world of the sense, of knowing without being that which is in all experience capable of knowing. Obviously this is pretty dodgy.
*It's a generalization from a single instance. But all useful and sane induction requires repetition, generalizing from an observed pattern. If I woke up with no memory one day, and that day I saw Trump inaugurated, you'd think I was retarded to induce that I would see Trump inaugurated on all subsequent days. But apparently if I see, or rather imagine seeing, one body with a soul I'm supposed to believe that all bodies have souls?
So, then, why is solipsism ridiculed?
To me, then, it seems that the only comprehensible reason is that it's detriemental to society; that is to say, I worry that if other believe it (or, fulfil the external behavior which I call for them believing by analogy with a state of my soul (or vice versa)) they'll stop serving my interests and serve their own instead, not believing in my knowledge. But if I thought they did have knowledge, then I'd value this knowledge and drive for truth like my own, treating them as existing, and would admit the legitimacy of their skepticism to my existence.
Given the limits of human knowledge, anti-solipsism seems only possible in the solipsist.
(obvious imperfectly put forth, try to refrain from needless quibbling)
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This is why people hate philosophy.
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>lives within duality
>traversed by psychologism
"Language is an irreducibly public form of life that is encountered in specifically social contexts. Each natural language-system contains an indefinitely large number of "language-games," governed by rules that, though conventional, are not arbitrary personal fiats. The meaning of a word is its (publicly accessible) use in a language. To question, argue, or doubt is to utilize language in a particular way. It is to play a particular kind of public language-game. The proposition "I am the only mind that exists" makes sense only to the extent that it is expressed in a public language, and the existence of such language itself implies the existence of a social context. Such a context exists for the hypothetical last survivor of a nuclear holocaust, but not for the solipsist. A non-linguistic solipsism is unthinkable and a thinkable solipsism is necessarily linguistic. Solipsism therefore presupposes the very thing that it seeks to deny. That solipsistic thoughts are thinkable in the first instance implies the existence of the public, shared, intersubjective world that they purport to call into question."
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>it's a babby discovers solipsism thread
>why is solipsism ridiculed?
Because it literally doesn't matter in any way whether we live in the Matrix or not.
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>>9017734
I'm not denying the "existence" of the world of the senses, so this is seems to be a (very roundabout way of expressing) an argument I've already internalized. By "solipsism" I'm merely meaning "belief that no consciousnesses but my own exist"- the consciousness of others being decidedly -not- something I sense as I do their bodies.
But if this is saying that the "existence" of the world of the senses or of language (as a thing in the entire world [in the broadest possible sense] and not as some cunningly defined concept) somehow implies the existence of some other soul, this I dispute.
Moreover, even if the world of the senses did somehow require another soul's existence, it's a very large leap from "at least one other soul exists" to "every living human body has a souls associated to it in such and such a way".
>>9017740
>>9017755my diary desu
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>>9017178
Is doesn't imply ought you uncultured charlatan. It doesn't matter whether or not we can prove that there's a soul or independent beauty. Acting that way just makes the world a better place. Truth doesn't lead to happiness or fulfillment.
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>>9017178
>Let's break away from social bindings and self-interested deceit for a moment and treat each other like honest human beings, as creatures that are not merely tools for each other's ends but things that know, independently of ourselves, beauty and pain?
no fuk u u fuckking fagit
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http://www.iep.utm.edu/solipsis/
now stop shitting up my /lit/
also sage
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>>9017915
All this does is (re)define "mind" to mean ~"something which causes the sensible qualities associated with anger &c." and so on. It treats words, not things. This is an old sort of philosophistic trick which doesn't deal with the actual question.
My question is not: "can you sodomize my words enough that I agree to define 'box' to be 'something that contains what is defined as sheep'". It is: "IS THERE A SHEEP IN THE BOX".
It doesn't make any argument for there being something else like my mind, it only tries to tell me that I mean something I don't.
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