Any philosopher who denies that the existence of anything cannot be proven, but must be assumed is lying to themselves. The same goes for any who declare that there exists an across the board standard for everyone everywhere, especially when it comes to things like "good" and "right" and "evil" and "wrong".

Challenge yourself: Prove that you exist without making any assumption whatsoever. I predict that you will fail.

Challenge yourself again: What makes anything inherently "good" or "bad"? I invite you to deny the truth of the old saying,"To each his own," or "Different strokes for different folks"

In case you want to look at what this means or suggest that acceptance of these destroys one's ability to live, here is my opinion:

Through solipsism we come to the realization that it is only our own idea of reality which truly matters as it is the only one which we can perceive. We become the arbiters of "right" and "wrong" within our realities and thus must live to cause our imagined realities, of which we have no conscious control, to most fit into our personal view of "right" or "wrong".

Relativism, especially with solipsism, allows us to acknowledge that if our reality contains any other, even internal, consciousnesses, that so long as they do not interfere with our own goals and imaginings directly, they can be allowed to do and act as they see fit. It is this bit of relativism which allows us to keep from going mad in hopes of controlling all things through one consciousness.

I welcome your thoughts.

I'm not sure what you mean by "solipsism." My definition of solipsism is the idea that objective reality is a fiction created by the self. Anti-solipsism is the other extreme - the idea that the self is a fiction created by objective reality.

If you assert that solipsism is one of the most true philosophies, whom are you talking to? Or is this a solipsistic soliloquy?

The people around you determine your intellectual input as well as make their judgments based on your output. What morals and laws others hold to their existence determines if they feel your values are represented as "good" or "evil". Which brings up the statement "after" the initial thoughts Emil has placed, "to each their own". This is an expression that represents freedom of all thought, which in and of itself is a great expression. It is not to say that evil thoughts themselves are evil in the eyes of another as "doubt" is the initial philosophical thought. To each their own thoughts. as for someone else's actions, we are all accountable for determining what is good or evil. The same is apparently true for thoughts in todays society. There are many evil thoughts, but it is certain the "evil" only holds doubt in the mind of the thinker.

Solipsism, to my knowledge, is the idea that there is no objective reality. If there is no objective reality, then how do you know you exist?

As to what chaos said: If there is no objective reality, then there is no objective "good" or "evil" outside of what I choose for it to be. Accountability doesn't matter so much when you are the one deciding the inherent goodness or badness of any action.

As far as appealing to community, here's what I have to say:

If I do, in fact, exist, while nothing else really does, then what should it matter to me what the other fictional beings say or do or "think"? The only hindrance to this is that they are not consciously controlled by me. This reiterates the question,"How do I know I exist without an objective reality to show me?".

Practically speaking, one must assume that if I exist and nothing else exists and I do not have conscious control of what is going on around me, then this becomes more of a dream, in which I must try to shape the dream to the most pleasurable state possible.

Solipsism, to my knowledge, is the idea that there is no objective reality. If there is no objective reality, then how do you know you exist?

[...]

As far as appealing to community, here's what I have to say:

If I do, in fact, exist, while nothing else really does, then what should it matter to me what the other fictional beings say or do or "think"? The only hindrance to this is that they are not consciously controlled by me. This reiterates the question,"How do I know I exist without an objective reality to show me?".


I would just like you to clarify for me: Are you doubting your own existence, or the existence of everything else, or both? Which is it?

Any philosopher who denies that the existence of anything cannot be proven, but must be assumed is lying to themselves.

If 'prove' means logical proof based upon indubitable premises, then it would seem to be much too strong an expectation. Little or no human knowledge rises to that rather artificial standard. (Descartes was a mathematician who thought this way and tried to spin the world out of his 'cogito', but I'm not particularly impressed by that.)

I think that it's a mistake for philosophy to imagine people as if they are pure and isolated consciousnesses, supplied with sense-data out of which they have to somehow construct an entire universe in which everything is absolutely certain and immune from skeptical doubt. That's probably an impossible task.

I prefer to think of philosophy as trying to make sense of the lives in which we actually find ourselves. No matter what our philosophical persuasions, everyone still grabs something to eat and still periodically takes a crap. From infancy we are interacting with other people and forming our own attitudes and opinions accordingly.

This grittier sort of philosophy is inevitably going to be probabilistic. It's going to begin with real-life givens that are very persuasive, your 'assumptions', but they will rarely if ever be logically necessary. There's always going to be a possibility of error in pretty much anything that we believe and all that we can realistically expect to accomplish is to minimize it.

But having said that, I want to emphasize that what I'm talking about here isn't solipsism. It doesn't start with ourselves as pure isolated consciousnesses, vainly hoping to construct a universe of mathematical certainty out of nothing but our own sense data. It begins instead with the everyday lives that everyone already finds themselves living, already surrounded by other people and by physical objects, all demanding our attention, and about which we can rarely be absolutely and demonstrably certain that we aren't making some kind of error.

So we find ourselves living in a universe much larger than we are, in which individual and human understanding is always a work in progress, where we make decisions and choose actions on the basis of reasonable certainty and the absence of reasonable doubts.