Filed under: Mild Nihilism
Solipsism, Explained to You (If You're Out There)
Solipsism says the only thing you can be sure of is your own mind. It's surprisingly hard to argue against and impossible to live by. Here's the tour, addressed to you.
4 min readCase No. 000-044
Solipsism is the philosophical view that only your own mind is sure to exist. Your thoughts, feelings and perceptions are undeniable, since you're having them. Everything else, including the outside world and other people's minds, might be appearances in your experience rather than independent realities. In its strongest form, solipsism says you're the only mind there is.
This post is addressed to you, then, the only reader, assuming you're out there. If you're not, we apologize to whoever is.
What solipsism means
There are two flavors, and it helps to keep them apart.
Epistemological solipsism is about knowledge: you can't be certain anything exists beyond your own mind. This is a fairly modest claim, and it's hard to argue with.
Metaphysical solipsism is about reality: nothing does exist beyond your own mind. This is the dramatic version, the one that makes for good late-night conversations and bad dinner guests.
Most philosophers who take solipsism seriously are interested in the first kind as a puzzle, not in actually believing the second.
Where it comes from: Descartes
The modern starting point is René Descartes. In Discourse on the Method (1637), looking for something he couldn't possibly doubt, he set aside everything that might be a dream or a deception, and found one thing left standing: the doubting itself. "I think, therefore I am."
That gave him one certainty: his own thinking mind. The trouble is getting from there back out to everything else. Descartes used arguments about God's goodness to rebuild the outside world, and not everyone found the bridge convincing. Solipsism is what you're left with if the bridge doesn't hold.
Why it's hard to refute
Try proving that another person has a mind. You can see their behavior, hear their words, watch their face. But you can't experience their experience. Everything you know about them comes to you as your own perception. Philosophers call this the problem of other minds.
Any evidence you could offer ("but they talk to me!") is also something that shows up in your experience, which is exactly what the solipsist says is all there is. That's why solipsism is notoriously difficult to knock down head-on.
Why nobody lives by it
Here's the catch: nobody actually behaves like a solipsist. Solipsists still look both ways before crossing the street. They still get annoyed when other people are late, which is strange behavior toward figments.
Most philosophers reject metaphysical solipsism on practical and explanatory grounds. The ordinary view, that there are other minds out there with experiences like yours, explains a staggering amount: language, surprise, disagreement, the fact that other people know jokes you don't. Solipsism has to treat all of that as an unusually detailed private hallucination. It's possible, but it's doing a lot more work for a lot less payoff.
Bertrand Russell captured the problem in Human Knowledge: Its Scope and Limits (1948): "I once received a letter from an eminent logician, Mrs. Christine Ladd-Franklin, saying that she was a solipsist, and was surprised that there were no others." Solipsism does not survive being shared.
The Department of Non-Existence has received a complaint from a solipsist that no one else exists. The complaint has been forwarded to everyone.
Why solipsism is lonely (and why that's telling)
There's also an emotional argument against solipsism, or at least an observation. Taken seriously, it's the loneliest possible view: no one has ever really understood you, because there's no one else to do the understanding. Every conversation is a mirror. Every friendship is a very convincing puppet show.
Almost nobody can hold that view for long, and that's interesting in itself. It suggests that our sense of other minds isn't a conclusion we reasoned our way to. It's built in at a level deeper than argument, and it shows up the moment someone laughs at a joke we didn't see coming.
Solipsism's modern cousins
You've probably met solipsism's descendants even if you've never used the word. Descartes himself, in his Meditations (1641), imagined an evil demon deceiving him about everything outside his mind. The modern version is the "brain in a vat": how would you know you weren't a brain in a lab, fed convincing signals? Hilary Putnam made the scenario famous in Reason, Truth and History (1981), though he raised it to argue that the hypothesis can't coherently be true. The Matrix (1999) turned the same worry into a blockbuster, and today's simulation-theory debates are its latest form.
None of these scenarios says you are definitely alone. They say you can't prove you aren't, from the inside. That's epistemological solipsism, and it's the part philosophers take seriously. The jump to "therefore only I exist" is the part almost nobody makes.
Solipsism vs non-duality
People sometimes confuse solipsism with non-duality, since both question the line between "me" and "the world." They actually point in opposite directions.
Solipsism inflates the self until it's everything. Only my mind is real; the rest is my show.
Non-duality says there was never a separate self to inflate. There's experience, one seamless happening, with no private owner standing at the center. (The plain version is in what non-duality is.)
So the solipsist says "it's all me," and the non-dualist says "there's no me, there's just all." One is the ego's final boss. The other is the ego's retirement party.
For the extreme solipsists among you
Our home page says we make shirts for "mild nihilists, non-dualists, and extreme solipsists," and we stand by all three. The solipsists' design, logically, is the talking-to-yourself design, since if you're the only mind there is, you really have been talking to yourself about yourself all day. We admire the consistency.
If you're out there, thanks for reading. If you're not, this was a lovely monologue.
Sources
Questions
What is solipsism in simple terms?
The idea that only your own mind is certain to exist. Other people, and the outside world, might be appearances in your experience rather than independent realities.
Is solipsism the same as non-duality?
No, and they point in opposite directions. Solipsism makes your individual mind the only sure thing. Non-dual traditions say there's no separate individual self to begin with.
Can solipsism be disproven?
Not easily, which is why philosophers still discuss it. Most reject it on practical grounds: it can't be lived consistently, and it explains less than the ordinary view that other minds exist.
