Solipsism - A Love Letter

 Hey You (Me)

*

Nah.

I won't try to keep up with a real letter format in this text. However, I really do wish to try to put forth some kind of defense for a philosophical system that everyone interested in philosophy claims to despise, even though it is the only one that doesn't need any clever arguments or wonky workarounds to make sense. Solipsism is simply how the world and the universe presents itself, no less, no more. Maybe that's why the clever ones feel icky around it, it doesn't need our word plays and sophistry to stay a float. Solipsism has the same immediate appeal and elegance regardless how many academic papers or books about it ever gets written, which very much isn't true for any other system. 

I'm not sure if I need to run through what Solipsism entails, but for the sake of definition and clarity: Solipsism is the belief that the only thing worth to consider as real is the subjective mind and since there seems to be only one subjective in the experience of reality there is only one mind in the whole of existence. Yes, there are appearances of tonnes of people, animals and other categories which could be said to have minds as well but only one of them appears to the screen of experience as subjective and that subject of all subjects is Yours. Err... I mean Mine. I mean. Hm. 

This is the main issue with solipsism, I would say. Despite its elegance and immediacy, even if it was to be true it's philosophically worthless since the need of communicating ideas is reduced to zero. Under solipsism, there is no use trying to affect any other apparent mind since they all are empty and hollow anyway, the thoughts of the subject is true regardless how their objective validity or intellectual rigor looks like. Here is an idea which axioms cannot be denied or questioned and which refuses to take a step further than what the axioms immediately implies. The commercial for Solipsism would definitely include the phrase "Philosophers hate them, here is why!"

What makes the system ugly for an arguer and professional hair splitter is however precisely what makes it beautiful and attractive for someone going close to genuine madness. Whatever happens to be true in the end, I'll always be thankful to solipsism as it acted as a formidable raft to me during a time when nothing else would carry me. Our current societal games are for better and worse remarkably huge. Humanity is now truly a global entity, only very small corners of the earth can be said to be unaffected of what happens anywhere else on the globe and our general faiblesse for democracy has the effect that every imaginable issue also becomes heavily important for any grown individual. Even if it isn't actually meant this way, democracy may leave the impression that every problem such as the Ukrainian war, the climate crisis or what have you is up to you to resolve. Get involved, pray to Greta, vote for the correct lizard and make sure that the problem goes away. Just don't forget about all our problems, do you hear me? Don't you dare ignore that we may destroy the earth at any moment and if you don't stay engaged our democracy may be threatened by the bad dudes. You don't want that, do you? So care, little human. Care, care care!  

When your mind is sick, this effect of our current game structure isn't very helpful. It doesn't help either that we have such little consensus about the meta structure of what is going on in society today. We simply don't agree on the answers such elementary questions as where are we, who are we and why are we here? Yes, there is a current paradigm which most big players are buying into but it so happens that this paradigm is heavily contradicting the major ones, the religions of yore, that went before it and in any case those paradigms weren't much better since they argued to hell and back about which one of them who were supposed to dictate the rules of the societal games of their days. We simply don't know the basis of the Game of Reality, yet we still expect every single little player to care for every issue that is going on in the global village called humanity. 

It's deeply tiring and when sick it's frankly impossible to stay a float in this particular game style. I saw myself give up, and it is there where solipsism isn't just a confused dead- end of argumentative philosophy - it acted truly as a haven of the mind. Solipsism allows you to deattach from all the "democratic screeching" of the world. Suddenly it becomes only noise and all the problems surrounding other humans around the earth gets reduced to issues dancing around shadows and other illusive structures. Of course, your emphatic side get a serious blow from all this but since your mind is so sick it's worth it if only to survive mentally yet another day. Solipsism allows you to not care, when caring only is a burden. That I got to stay in that particular room of existence for quite a while is an experience I'm rather thankful for. It was scary and it was intellectually frustrating, but it simply was necessary. In my experience I am the one and only subject and every step outside of that simple truth needs serious grounding in whatever reality entails. And I can say this much, every current system suck at grounding their speculative beliefs in anything resembling reality. They don't care about that anymore, they care only about our humongous game structure. To make sense within whatever that is, is much more relevant than to make sense regarding whatever the truth outside our gargantuan game might be..

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Idealism - the claim that the universe is fundamentally a mental structure, as well as both my previous and current belief system (prior and post the Solipsism Desert Walk, if you will) - often gets conflated with solipsism. This is both understandable and a bit unfair. Unfair because I would say that every thought system runs the risk of being conflated with solipsism when you really start to think about them since solipsism is our necessary starting point and everything can be boiled down to their initial parts if you work hard enough. Understandable, because well, Idealism claims that there is only one subject, one cohesive consciousness within a world of illusory separate minds. Mind at Large (Bernardo Kastrups term for the "God mind") is the basis for all lesser disassociated minds and when those dissociations eventually dissipates, the basis will reveal itself again as everlastingly being one. This distinctively isn't solipsism because idealism still withholds that the dissociations which forms various human minds, if not absolutely real, still are relatively so and as long reality takes place on a relative scale every disassociated mind is equally real to one another. Solipsism in this way of speaking would claim that only one disassociated mind (which is yours! No, mine! Err...) is to be considered real and only all the others are to be considered illusions. Idealism doesn't claim this at all, the one mind is only ever relevant to talk about on an absolute scale - on every lesser scale that concept quickly becomes irrelevant. The absolute is pretty much only relevant to our spirituality and our religious life and there it is generally advised to pray to "MAL" (stupid allergy to the word "God" which makes the system of Analytical idealism sound so phony, but it is what it is) instead of activating a sense of "I am the actual mind" or so. The ego is a tricky bastard and to give it so much reign that to allow it to associate with the "real mind" is not generally a good idea.  

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I'm not sure what led me out of my intellectual basement. It wasn't Idealism, I was aware of it before my descent and if anything it was a certain understanding of the idea system that allowed the detonation I blow up into to be so surprisingly big as it was in the end. This is not the place to play blame games in that direction, however. My mind did blow up, but instead of searching for explanations I wish for the moment to just accept the event and let it be whatever it was, untouched by ideas of the mind. 

In the end, I don't think it was any particular ideas or systems at all that guided my way up. My priest did a good job with her tools of lutheran pastoral care and freudian psychology and I would say that the general concept of acceptance led the major part of my salvation in this regard. In the end it is not up to me to decide which way reality works. "I am" is the only subject there is to experience but there are still tonnes and tonnes of apparent subjects feeling the same thing as I do regarding the I am. 

Whatever I am in the end, I'm clearly created in contrast to being the Creator and as such a creature I can only ever accept that I'm limited in scope, that I'm generally weak and vulnerable and forced to being utterly confused about pretty much everything. Regardless if I accept this or not, part of the deal of being created is to play the Game of God and I can either choose to play along the given rules or to choose God themselves as my opponent, trying to make them stop the game. It's impossible to quit the game, since death and suicide on this scale simply doesn't work. Somewhere along these talking points, I, or rather something in me - decided that I actually want to play, but I wish to play good games. When life is seen as a play, a dance, a multidimensional symphony of sort it is actually worth living and if I happen to heavily dislike our current game of Society, Democracy and Modernity which is hopeless to try to stop or change I can at least try to create my own games within the general "Game of God". If I succeed in creating those games they would be helped by having other players than only myself within them and there I find an opening to lovingly say goodbye to Solipsism. I don't want to stay with the initial axioms of Solipsism because I want you lot to be part of something beautiful that I hope is yet to come and that hope is, actually, worth living for. 

The blog is part of that bigger project. I don't know yet what my games will look like, but I have some ideas and those ideas I will try to describe within the context of this text thingy and after that is majorly done we'll see.

Stay tuned if you will. I think it will be fun.