Solipsism Plus
This is a concept that I’ve been toying around with for a while and have finally begun to solidify it into a formal philosophy of mind. First, it requires a bit of understanding about what solipsism is. Essentially, it is the philosophy that all this is just a dream. It sounds like something a bunch of stoners would cook up. Seriously, what if this was all just a dream, and when I wake up, you will all cease to exist? It sounds crazy, but it does have some merit. Just keeping following me with this one, I promise that I’m not completely off my rocker.
Now that the basics of solipsism are out of the way, lets cover the basics of the way the mind works. It must be noted that the things which occur in my mind are not physical things, but mental things. For instance, when I think of a chair, I do not have a literal chair in my head. Essentially, what I have in my head is a symbolic representation of a chair, a mental model. We can take this a step further into the realm of our experiences. Sight does not happen in my eyes, it happens in my mind. My eyes relate data to my brain, which makes sense of it and eventually results in what I see. The same goes for pain. When I get hurt, my nerves send impulses to my brain which relay the type, severity and location of the injury, but the pain exists in my mind. The pain DOES NOT reside in my stubbed toe, it is all in my head.
So how does this relate to solipsism? Well, the title of this post is Solipsism Plus for a reason. The way I see it, we are all dreaming. However, unlike an unconscious dream, which is informed entirely by internal states, our waking experience can be compared to a dream which is being informed by our senses.
Let me elaborate a bit. Our senses are pouring in sense data to our brains. From there, our brains interpret that data to build up a model of the world. This is what I mean by a dream informed by our senses. Since I cannot experience the world in a literal sense, what I experience is a dream that is cooked up by my brain to explain my sense data. The thing is, I can be fooled and I can even hallucinate. In instances where such things occur, my experience remains real even if what I am experiencing does not relate to the external world. That is, if I experience a hallucination, my experience is not informed by my senses and is an illusion. However, my experience of that hallucination is just as real as anything else I experience. An example would be phantom limb pain. People without a foot might experience pain in a foot they do not have. The pain does not come from the external world, it is not informed by their senses. But that doesn’t stop their non-existent foot from hurting. The experience of pain is still just as real.
The implications of this are pretty big. The first big implication is that the structure of experience may be similar to the structure of dreams. That sounds odd at first, but imagine the parallels between a nightmare and anxiety. The patterns of the expectations of violent escalation is about the same in both instances. This implies that methods for coping with nightmares while dreaming may translate over to methods for coping with anxiety. This is one that I have particular interesting in.
Another implication is that it may be possible to apply lucid dreaming principles to waking experiences. Now, I’m not talking about being able to fly or having any other sort of super power. However, it may be possible to realize that our experiences are a dream, and as such, change the way we experience the world. So while I cannot change what sense data I’m receiving, I can change the way that this data is interpreted. Perhaps I could exert control over my own experiences to consciously choose the way I feel about something.
This also has implications for religion. As an example, based on this theory of mind, when I am having a conversation with someone, I am not experiencing that person literally. They are not literally in my mind. What is going on is that I have a mental model of that person in my head, a symbolic representation of them, which is being updated by my senses. Essentially, I am not talking to that person, I am talking to a mental model of that person. It just so happens that this mental model is being updated, in real time, by my sense data. How does this relate to religion? Well, I have mental models of people that I have never met. There are friends of friends, which I’ve heard stories about, perhaps even seen pictures of. I can imagine the situations these people have been in based on those incomplete mental models. Heck, I can even imagine conversations with these people. The only difference between the imagined conversation and an actual conversation is that the former is not updated by sense data. The important thing to note here, however, is that it doesn’t make the experience less real. So, even if gods are just imaginary friends for adults, these gods still map to REAL mental models in our minds and the experience of interaction with those mental models can be just as real as an interaction with someone made of flesh and blood right in front of us. Keep this in mind, whether or not gods exist, whether or not experiences of gods are informed by our senses or are hallucinations, the fact of the matter is that these are real experiences.