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Comment by krageon | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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’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.

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.

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