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Comment by 3pt14159 | Hacker News Reader

A long time ago I wrote a blog post called "Statistical Immortality" that led others to recommend the concept of lazy immortality and the book "Permutation City" which I highly recommend.

And the very end of the day you have to take something on faith and proceed. Solipsism is internally inconsistent because it presupposes a mind that can evaluate a truth whilst simultaneously taking the argument that existence isn't knowable. Empiricism presupposes that our senses and mind can be relied upon to some degree. Theocratic foundations for selfhood are rooted in faith in a higher power.

So in a limited sense I agree with this article's argument. Once you allow that the simulation argument may be true you invalidate that your mind is capable of determining if this is likely.

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As far as I'm aware solipsism only has a core tenet that nothing but you exists. That is certainly how I was introduced to it when I studied it in class and the only real overarching principle I could find when reading different viewpoints on it.

That said, unless you believe your mind can evaluate what is true it has to be (as far as I can tell) a faith-based stance. That isn't much different from a religious world-view, except there's not a higher power. There's only you.

The whole existence thing is flawed imo. Does an iron ladder exist? It is just a configuration of elements that are perceived as such. The conception lays on “our” plane but not on the lower. We use a latin word for it, but it is still “our” word. We separate things, not things themselves.

What bugs me in philosophy is that you can read theories and ideas (good ones), but no one asks if base terms are too much human to be important. Is there a school that doesn’t ob/subjectivize “items” and thinks as a whole?

Alan Watts.

That's why I think it's erroneous. It presupposes that a mind could know a truth. In this case it is the truth that the mind alone is sure to exist.

I’m under the impression that solipsism is the rejection of the assumption that physical reality is the true reality. Cogito ergo sum. I am not the void. I can say that for sure. Everything else is up for debate.

This is a very different idea than believing that only the self is real. I don’t think it’s possible to strongly argue that. However, solipsism is a real case to make. Prove that your mind and body are connected and you will have debunked solipsism.

There's epistemological solipsism (which is what you describe) and metaphysical solipsism. The latter says that "only I exist." I don't understand the grandparent's objection in either case.

It depends entirely on what "you" means here. In a dream, the whole reality is you, and this is not something you have to take on faith: through lucid dreaming (or rather, its various extensions in dream yoga) it's possible to gain introspective access to all the details of the psyche that manifests as the apparent reality. That psyche doesn't belong to the dream character you thought you were but is still "you" in the most intimate sense.

Mystics claim that it is possible to do something similar for this reality. It's all "I," where "I" ultimately points at something some might call "God." Hence the common instructions to look very carefully within.

I think you’re straw-manning solipsism.

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