Solipsism

Solipsism is a very peculiar philosophy, for although it is logically irrefutable, the circumstantial evidence for the external world is so overwhelming that I find it hard to believe that intelligent people can seriously question its existence. For even a philosopher who professes solipsism in his professional capacity, still returns home every night with full confidence that his house will still be there where he left it that morning. In fact, the evidence for the existence of the objective external world is also available phenomenologically. In the first place my phenomenal experience includes an experience of my own self, and my observations of that self reveal a rather finite and limited memory. I can hardly remember exactly what my own house really looks like in detail, and yet every time I come back to it, it appears to have "remembered itself" in far greater fidelity and minute detail than anything my own mind appears to be capable of. The stability and permanence and sheer complexity of the external world "shines through" the unstable, impermanent, and relatively simple phenomenal mind through which I view it. This does not of course preclude the possibility that my solipsistic mind is actively "fooling itself", pretending to have an inferior memory for its model of its "self", while secretly using a vastly superior memory to remember the details of a fabricated world. It is hard to imagine that the mind, which is supposedly the only thing in existence, would go to such great lengths to fabricate a replica of an external world if that world did not exist for it to copy in the first place. And that replica is fabricated in such stupendous magnificance and detail, with such complex and elaborate laws that are so far beyond my feeble powers of imagination, that I feel the looming presence of something external, which is not a part of my self, even though I see it only indirectly, through the veil of phenomenal experience which is part of my self. And that world is populated by so many millions of apparently independent minds, each one talking and acting as if it had a complete mind of its own, each with its own unfathomable depths of independent complexity. To pull off this stunt, the solipsistic mind would have to have a profound capacity for both intelligence, and for self- deceipt, as if that mind had come into existence for the sole purpose of deceiving itself. The fact that solipsism is not logically refutable and therefore appears logically to be on an equal footing with the far more likely possibility of the existence of the external world, merely highlights a blindness in our system of logic for its failure to register the extraordinary improbability of this hypothesis. In the words of Fichte, "The person who doubts there is an external world does not need proof: he needs a cure."