Stuff You Should KnowAs the philosophical holds, there’s a chance you don’t exist, that not only you, but this episode, the podcast, and the entire universe are only projections of Josh or Chuck’s mind. If so, then recording this episode was a waste of time.
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's not here. We are and we're pretty sure that both of us are here. But it's possible just be this here, and this is stuff you should know.
That's right. Diving into philosophy again, this one sollipsism, perhaps the most naval, gayzy, sort of unintelligible aspect of all of them, which is that sort of old classic stoner college dorm room thing. How do we know if anything is real? What if it's as all in this part of it? What if it's all just a simulation?
Yeah, that's one example of what it could be. But there's a couple of things about this one, as annoying as it is, because if you're if you're arguing for solypsism, and I don't want to say you're syllopsist, because there's basically nobody out there who's an actual syllopsist, Like you can just keep saying like, but yeah, how do you know? But yeah, how do you know? There doesn't seem to be any more reducted argument in all of philosophy, all other philosophy can essentially be argued against by solyopsism. And the reason why is because the basis of solypsism is that there is no reality. It's just you, you hearing this. I don't exist, Chuck doesn't exist, this podcast doesn't exist. Nothing exists except for your mind. And that's the basis of everything that you think is real. And none of us are actually doing anything that you're not projecting out of your mind. That's sollpsism and it sounds mind blowing, but like I said, it's also annoying, and it's also extremely simple, so much so that it can deceive you into thinking that it means more than it does. It doesn't. It's it's as basic as that. But again, as annoying as it is, it is in some ways a useful argument because if you really want to make a philosopher rigorous in their argument, have them take on sollipsism or some form of it.
Yeah.
I think Olivia found something online that said, like, no modern, like legitimate philosopher even takes part in these arguments because it's just such like, hey, get off the couch with your brong and maybe talk about something some real philosophy well.
Also, the other part of it too is if you were a genuine philosopher and you genuinely believe that nothing was real except in your mind, there's zero point for you to do anything like write a philosophy paper for solipsism, because nobody's out there to read it in actuality. So what's the point. You're by yourself in the entire universe so much so that the universe doesn't even exist outside of your mind. You're by yourself in some incomprehensible form of existence. It's just weird and depressing in a lot of ways.
Yeah, for sure we should mention the skeptics a little bit because that's sort of that sort of lays the groundwork for solyopsism a little bit. The skeptics started around the third century BCE. The word itself came from the Greek term meaning inquiry or examination, and they were basically like, hey, it's not possible to have like some knowledge to make definitive judgments, arguing against the stoics, who said, no, you should be able to test claims using, you know, stuff that we can see and hear, using our senses, and the skeptics and this sort of laid the ground of what was to come for solopsism basically said like, hey, we can all be deceived, though, what about the case of idea nical twins? You could you could be deceived there, or you could have a sensory experience if you're talking about trusting your senses that aren't connected to reality, Like that's what a dream is. Yeah, And dreams sort of play into the whole thing, at least at the beginning.
Yeah, the skeptics said, you ever had a dream dingus? Yeah, how are you gonna how are you going to trust your senses with that? And so skepticism, like you said, is kind of an extension of it, a basis of it. It's not quite there, but enough that sollipsism is often thought of as an extreme form of skepticism. Sometimes it's also called global skepticism, like your skeptical everything and then uh, it's also sometimes called mondo scepto.
Uh. Speaking of the dreams, though, there was a Taois philosopher named juang Zi that in this also sort of like the groundwork was, Hey, if I wake up from a dream and I was a you know, an a will debeast in that dream, how to I know that I'm not really a will Tobeaston that this is the dream.
Yeah, and all this again, yes it does seem kind of bongish or bong adjacent for sure, But this is the kind of stuff that philosophers care about. Like it's called epistemology. Epistemiology I like to add a lot of syllables sometimes, so I'm not quite sure which one. But it's the basis of how we know what we know, how we gain knowledge. And the point of this, of all this stuff, as people were kind of building on it, is to say, like we need to kind of figure out how we do know, because if you really stop and think about it, we're not quite sure exactly how we know anything. And that whole thing was picked up in the seventeenth century by Descartes and his very famous quote I think therefore I AM came out of this right.
Yeah, And that's you know, basically saying like, hey, I know that I am. I'm doing the thinking. I have a brain, and but that's about all I know. They you know, Descartes was the first one that came in and said, hey, maybe we should get a system called methodic doubt. Great band name to determine if like, hey, you're saying something is truth, like one of the truths. We should be able to test this, but things are fallible, like math, you can make mistakes in you can't look at tradition of a culture because you know, people might disagree with that kind of thing. And then the idea of an evil demon coming in and basically kind of taking hold of your consciousness and saying that you're you're having all these illusions and that's inhabited inside of you.
Yeah, so that evil demon thing too. It's like, as we'll see, it's been updated in much more modern form. But Descartes was the first one to really kind of say it's possible. Especially we should say cart believed in God, that the extension of that I think therefore I am, is also that anything I can just intuitively know is real, like God is real. So he believed that there definitely was God. So he was arguing like, okay, if we believe in God, then there we have to entertain the possibility that it's not just you know, our minds that are projecting this, but that we're we're being diluted, that we're like an entire universe is being created for us by this evil demon. This is his seventeenth century application of it, but it's it's like we, like I said, it kind of formed these or it's been updated in modern forms, and that really kind of that's where it gets super tough, because it's like, Okay, yeah, it's ridiculous that you're you're the only person who exists and all the rest of us don't exist, or even more creepy, this is where it gets it to me. Okay, like when you start to try to argue against sollipsism, one of the ways that you're going to go is that other people have experiences and thoughts and emotions too, so that totally discounts the idea that you're the only entity, you're the only self in the entire universe, and that all of this is just in your mind. But then you have to ask, like, well, wait a minute, how do you know other people have experiences in thoughts and feelings like you do. There's no way for you to know that, and there's actually no way for them to get that across to you in any provable way. And then you just kind of go like, oh, it's a little scary. At least I do it's the kind of thing that keeps me up at night.
Well, the word itself, if you want to break it down, it first appeared in eighteen sixty nine from Kant and I think it's Latin for solace from a loone in ipsy, meaning self. And this isn't the kind of thing where like at the beginning, people are like, wow, this is really holds a lot of water. From the beginning, it was pretty ridiculous, and philosophers thought it was pretty ridiculous. Oh, here's a quote no great philosopher has espoused solypsism. It is the quote that Lvia found. Because you know, if you believe that there's nothing, then there you can't have an argument about anything, because, like you said at the beginning, a solypsis would just come in and go like, well.
How do you know prove it?
You can't prove that because you even your proof isn't proof because it's not real.
Yeah. One of the other things too, just to kind of get this into perspective, is like you can't even say that you have a brain because everything you know about a brain, you've you've basically you're not born with the concept of a brain. You learn that from the external world, and if the external world doesn't exist, then maybe brains don't exist, Like maybe you just don't can't even conceive of who you are, and that's the ultimate problem. You just you can just keep reducing it, like you can't prove how you know what you know. And I feel like that's really kind of set us up for a break. Who do you think?
Yeah, we'll be right back.
So one of the things I kind of talked about earlier before the break, Chuck, was that the as far as philosophy goes, like if you're trying to actually apply this to philosophical arguments or maybe like real world kind of stuff, is that it has to do with other minds and the fact that we can't ever fully understand what other people are thinking. And then as relates to sollipsism, we can't really prove that other people are thinking. And there's actually some not just philosophers, but neuroscientists who've kind of investigated this because it is an interesting question, Like it's that same kind of question like how do I know that we both experience the same color green in the exact same way, and that what you call green I actually think is blue? Like, I experience it as what you would experience blue, but I call it green because I think that's what you're talking about too.
Yeah, And in terms of neuroscience, you know, you're talking about maybe a technology where you could brain splice and you could literally maybe get someone inside someone else's head. But even then, it's not like some sort of full proof solipsistic argument, because even if you were sending signals from one brain to another, it's still going to be a subjective experience and you wouldn't have any idea even though you're getting the signals from their brain, like the subjective nature of it, like you can't you can't gauge subjectivity scientifically.
Yeah, And there's this example of like, Okay, one person that you're connected to the brain of is saying like, I'm thinking of a red apple, and the other person with the other connected brain is like, yep, I can see the red apple that you're thinking of. But again that to that person, red is what the other person would think of as blue, and you can't possibly know that that person is thinking of what would be actually a blue apple and calling it red. But the thing is you can you can just be like, okay, person number two. Now you think of a red apple, and we'll see what person number one thinks of it if it matches their conception. It'd be really easy to find that out if you ask me.
Yeah, and if that was a test subject, they'd say, why is Chuck walking into traffic?
What's going on?
Yeah? I mean we should say here, like all of this does require brain implants, and I just don't feel like there's anybody trustworthy to put an implant in your brain right now.
Yeah, that's true.
There's also this concept of a philosophical zombie, right, They're called p zombies, and it kind of ties in with what I was saying, Like, we can't ever say that somebody else is thinking or emoting, because we can conceive of something that looks like a human, acts like a human, has all the same thought processes of a human, maybe even has emotions and all that stuff, but they're missing what it means to be a human, which is the experience of experiencing something. Right, So, like that person can eat an apple and taste what an apple tastes like, but they will never feel what it feels like to taste an apple that's like really delicious, You know what I'm saying, and some people come up with it, came up with the idea of a p zombie, a philosophical zombie to try to investigate like what it is that makes humans humans? And that's kind of what they came up with.
Yeah, and if you you know, as AI comes on more and more, and I know you tackled some of this in the End of the World your special podcast series for that. But the idea of like AI becoming sentient or conscious or whatever, Like, how were we going to know if that's even happening, because it's not just if it knows so much stuff it can you know, AI can learn facts and things, but like it's that that subjectivity of a human or a I guess just an experience because it wouldn't be human. And like, how do we know if that's happening to an AI?
Yeah, or a person too, you know, like it's just and again, like I think you kind of nail it on the head, like all this seems like navel gazing, but there is like some utility to it.
Well, let's talk about some of the I guess varieties of solypsism that they've come up with over the years. There's one called metaphysical solepism. That's basically that an individual is like yourself is all that there is nothing else has any independent reality at all.
Then there is.
Epistemological solypsism, and that is it is not even possible to know where anything outside our individual consciousness exists or is real.
And that one is actually like kind of a step down from metaphysical. They're like, we're not saying that nothing else in the universe exists but your mind, but we're saying, like, like you and I were just talking about with p zombies and AI, like we can't prove that anybody else has those thoughts some feelings besides the thinker.
Right, not the famous statue, but you know, a real thinker. There's methodological methodological soism. I got that extra ow in there, and that means it's not possible to even start to analyze the world except through your own individual consciousness and lens.
Which that makes sense.
Yeah, it does. But I saw that it really gets tricky with research because at base, methodological sollaptism says you don't need to mess with data or other people's research, just what do you think about the subject, And that doesn't really hold water for like a research paper, because yeah, I mean that's a good place to start. You can't just dive in, or I guess you can, but it's also like, what are your conceptions about this, and let's start from there and then go figure out if that's correct. Like this is just sticking with the what do you think about this? And write the research paper. So it's not a really good idea, frankly, and then also, Chuck, there's just a straight up bad idea. Ethical solypsism also called pos sollopsism. Yeah.
I think there's a professor from m team name a Plosis or rather or maybe teaches philosophy named Casper Hair and he had a book in two thousand and nine called On Myself and Other Less Important Subjects where he was he was arguing a lesser version of ethical sollipsism, which is the idea that other things and people might exist, but we have no obligation to any of those people or ideas except for our own.
No, And I think ultimately at the end he's like, but for us, for the person, the individual, to lead a fuller life, you kind of do need people here or there, So you don't want to just completely screw over everybody for yourself. But that's the basis of what's called ethical solaptism, that you have no moral obligation to anyone except yourself. And then the other thing that really stuck out to me, Chuck, was that you have no moral obligation to anybody but yourself right now, So you don't even have to look out for your future self. All you need to care about is your present self. And that's why I call it pos solypsism.
Yeah, piece of what piece of s.
There are also lots of little sort of side ideas that come along if you're gonna gaze at your navel about solypsism. And one is the famous brain in a vat or the futurama or the matrix idea, which is all you are maybe is a brain floating in a jar with some life sustaining liquid and it's hooked up to a computer and everything you see is a simulation.
Yeah, and this is where we kind of get into the modern updated versions of Descartes evil demon right, Like, what's keeping you in the brain in vat? What's running that simulation for you? Yeah? There's also the simulation hypothesis, which came from Nick Bostrom, which I did do a whole episode on End of the World on because it just fascinates me. But it's a lot of people confuse it with the brain and a vat. But it's different because in the simulation hypothesis, which is that if if civilization becomes advanced, like say, are we're there ancestors, there are descendants, they just keep getting more and more technologically advanced, that they can invent simulations that are indistinguishable from reality, and they run a bunch of simulations over and over again, like say, they sell copies of the simulation game, so one hundred million simulations are ever created over the course of history. Then, mathematically speaking, since we can't distinguish between reality and a simulation, it makes it's much likelier that you and I exist in a simulation rather than the actual one version of reality that the simulations are based on. Right, And the thing that people get mixed up with the brain in a vat is that the brain in the vat in reality, your brain in a vat in the simular in reality, your reality simulated. But to you it's reality. There's nothing different. There's no other like reality that you could wake up to that's just reality. It's essentially like a techno version of creationism. Essentially, like if you replace whoever came up with the code for the simulation with God, it's essentially saying the same thing.
Yeah.
There's also and this is sort of along those lines, the experience machine idea. There's a philosopher named Robert Nozick in a nineteen seventy four book that said, how about this for a thought experiment. I don't think that people are just basically hedonistic in life, And what if what would people choose if they could be attached to a machine they can simulate any experience, like as if it were identical and real and you thought it was real, Like, would it be hedonistic?
Would you choose falling in love with you?
Would you choose to write, you know, create a great piece of art or something like that? And then that you know, there are different versions of that, like what if it's for two years at a time, what if it's your whole lives? And the counter to that usually is somebody saying, yeah, but people, it's not reality, and people aren't engaged in reality. In humans inherently want to engage with reality.
Yeah, and like to sweeten the pot. Noasick was like, like, you will have nothing but pleasure for the rest of your life, all all the pleasure you want. You will never be able to distinguish it from what life was like before. You won't remember that there was a life before. Like, it will be amazing. And something like seventy four to eighty percent of people who are posed this thought experiment say like, nah, I don't want to do that. Even though life is suffering in a lot of ways and sucks and can be boring and is definitely not one hundred percent pleasure all the time, most people still want to be engaged in reality. And that's again, like, it's not just a cool thought experiment. I use that to argue against the idea that humans are at bottom, just nothing but hedonistic creatures who seek out nothing but to increase their pleasure. Knowsick really kind of demolished that with that thought experiment.
Yeah, I think, what in the matrix? What in Joey pants? Fully on board with the simulation.
I don't remember. I don't remember that.
I think he was because I think he was like eating the steak and they were like, yeah, but the stake's not real and he's like, yeah, but you know, it tastes, tastes real, tastes good to me, something along those lines. But yeah, that's pretty interesting.
Do you want to take our second break and come back and talk about our favorite part of this criticisms.
Yeah, let's journey into K three.
All right.
So when it comes to criticisms of sollipsism not from us. There are some famous stories, one of which very famous story in philosophy circles as at least you're not a philosopher, you probably would be like once I got kicking the rock for But it was an eighteenth century story about writer Samuel Johnson who was in a I guess debate with the philosopher named George Berkeley, and Berkeley said, hey, Descartes's mind body dualism is faulty, and everything that appears to have existence is just made up in your mind. Well, first Berkeley said it's impossible to refute this, and that's when cheeky old Samuel Johnson came in and kicked a very large rock and said, I refute this. In other words, hey, this rock is here, and this is just an absurd idea because I can kick that rock and it hurt my toe.
Right exactly. Yeah, And so if you're a philosopher, you're like Samuel Johnson doesn't get it, And if you're not a philosopher, you're like Samuel Johnson gets it. Like philosophers are very famously, maybe overly engaged in perfectly crafted, totally air tight arguments and the idea of just kicking a rock and being like, see it's real. It doesn't really hold water with them, but for everybody else it's like, yeah, it kind of gets to what Wickenstein is that how you would say it in German? Yeah, Ludwig Wckenstein. I'm gonna say his name again at least one more time, because it's fun. He was a philosopher of the twentieth century. He basically was like, man, philosophy, this is not a quote I'm paraphrasing, has some like real hang ups with having to just like the fact that sollipsism is actually it exists, and people feel the need to argue against it. Sometimes says all you need to know about how uptight philosophers are aboutilosophy, and essentially we just need to take some things as fact as granted or else all we're doing is spinning our wheels. But if you say, like, okay, I believe that the world is material, that it exists apart from human consciousness, that if there were no humans around and nothing, no life to experience it, everything would still be the same. Like, let's just take that as fact, if that's what you believe, and just move on from there. You need to have some sort of foundation that you can say this is real, this exists, and then you build off of that, and if you don't, then you're just shooting yourself in the foot. Essentially, it was what Vickens was what Ludwig Vickenstein was saying.
Yeah, yeah, I think's unfortunately at Vickenstein, Well, I was I didn't see it, but the I think the second letter in the EI in German is the one that's favored.
Oh so how would you pronounce it? Then?
I think it would be Vitckenstein.
Well, I still like Vickenstein, so I'm going to.
Stay with it like Frankenstein.
Oh, I had it backwards, So I thought that Stein was like the Anglicized version of it in Stein was the German version.
I'm pretty sure the second letter in German is the one that's pronounced.
I know I do I believe you.
I'm not positive, but I do know that that Frankenstein was the doctor.
You mean Frankenstein had not the monster.
Yeah, that's true.
So let's talk about Steven P. Thornton.
He's a philosopher at the University of Limerick, the most singsongy university in all of Ireland. He has an argument that hey, guys, it's a big mistake to view these mental states as just something we experienced subjectively and then you know, relate to others like, hey, I know how it feels to get my toast stubbed because I've done it, so I see that's happened to you, so I know how that feels. He says, we learn what these mental states are and what he called an intersubjective world, like we learn like a kid when it's born understands what being sad is by looking around at someone crying or something like that. And that's how they know what sad is because of a behavior they witness in a context they witness it in. So if you you know, Livia used a great example, if you're grinding your teeth and if you're you know, snapping at people in your life and you can't sleep, then you probably know you're experiencing stress.
Right. This guy's argument to me is the one that's that makes the most sense, just refuting sollipsism, which is like, yes, you have internal feelings and thoughts, like the experience of feeling sad is not the whole of sadness. That there's other stuff and all the rest of it essentially comes from interacting and learning from the external world. And so the whole idea of solis is based on a faulty premise that the entire world could possibly just be in your head, because how are you going to learn from something that's not actually there in the first place. I like Stephen P. Thornton. He's my new favorite philosopher. Uh. There was one other guy too we have to bring into the conversation, Bertrand Russell. He's a very famous philosopher, a mathematician. I believe his whole thing was like if if, if we might be like, like, what was it? Juang z him saying like, how can I tell if I'm a man dreaming of a will to beast or a wild to be dreaming of being a man, And Bertrand Russell was like, if that were true dreams are just weird and freaky and anything goes really like waking life is not like that. So if waking life for a dream, there would be measurable ways that it veers off of, like physics or whatever, and we would notice that. And these days it's called a glitch in the matrix. You would notice glitches in the Matrix. And there's actually a really coolddit subreddit called Glitch of the Matrix and it's people's like stories about just how just weird, inexplicable, strange small things that they've noticed here there in life. They'll they'll post them and every once in a while they'll be like a picture too. This is kind of fun to go through.
What would it be of like, give me an example.
Any one that I saw a couple of times is something like seeing somebody like go out a door and then like thirty seconds later they come in and totally opposite door that they physically couldn't have possibly gotten through. So how do you explain that? Just stuff like that, Like how in the actual movie the Matrix things would literally glitch like you can kind of tell all of a sudden they were like ones and zeros. This is kind of like that, but it's like the program itself is lazy or something like that.
I gotcha.
So, you know, the navel gazing and talking about solipsism and debating it or whatever is one thing, but if you do you have a mental illness, especially if you have something like schizophrenia, this idea is terrifying. It's called derealization, and it's you know, something that can happen if you suffer from paranoid schizophrenia. There are people that suffer from that that talk about sort of exactly this, like the people around them are extras or empty shells, and that you and you alone are real and responsible for like the world moving on as it is and being alienated from your own body and not having a sense of self. Like that's all real stuff and terrifying stuff.
Yeah, for sure. There's a a psychologist named Clara S. Humpston who kind of explains how somebody with schizophrenia might actually retreat to a solipsistic state as a way to kind of exercise control over a world that they feel like they have zero control over. That Like, if you're like, nope, all this is just in my mind and it's not real, then in a weird sense, even though as lonely and horrifying as that thought actually is, Like you can feel like you can control those things then too, And that actually kind of ties into yet another argument or criticism of sollopsism. If all of this is just in your mind, all of reality, how do you explain the fact that you have no idea what's coming in the future, or that you can be surprised or startled? Like none of that makes sense either. So I don't remember through thirty seconds on how those two things tied together, but just if I rewind, I'm sure I would find out that they did.
Well. There are other disorders too that touch on other parts of solypsism. Certainly you're talking about the pos kind the ethical solypsism that very closely could tie into something like narcissistic personality disorder or anti social personality disorder. That sort of lack of empathy and only making choices based on their own needs. That definitely is like rings of ethical solypsism.
Yes, so, yeah, I mean that's pretty much solyopsism. I don't think we're going to do a part two eventually. I think we've kind of put it to bed, which feels good Chuck, And since Chuck doesn't.
Have anything else, right, I got nothing else.
I got nothing else either, So then that means, of course that it brings up Listen or mail.
This is from Yun spelled ja n but yun is German. Hey, guys, listen to the episode on Ludvig the second, which I enjoyed like all your episodes. I work in research and development for wastewater technology, so I know how much work it is to research a new topic and become familiar enough to talk about it like you guys do, and I mostly research stuff in my own field.
So well done.
I want to say thank you for being a steady presence throughout my PhD on waterless toilet, It's fatherhood, the pandemic, and my new job which often takes me on long road trips. Love learning, and your podcast allows me to broaden my horizon way beyond my normal work. Today, however, guys, I have to write to assure you that filling a hall of five hundred people in Germany would be in and kendush be a child's play.
Oh wow.
Okay, most people below the age of forty here speak English to a decent degree and I know plenty of people that listen to your show, so please please come to Germany. If you do, I'll make it my mission to get the event sold out. Oh wow, and let me know if you want any recommendations for decent beers while you're here.
And that is from jun Man.
That's awesome. That was a great email, Yun. Yeah, I think we should take you on up on that. Finally, Chuck, I want to go to Germany.
We've had enough people seeing come to Germany. I think we have to go to like Berlin and Munich just to see how heck is.
Going on too.
Huh.
Yeah.
We could do the big city style and then Bavarian city style.
Okay, let's do it. Then it's it is settled. And that was from young j A N. Yeah, I'm glad you said that, because for my whole life I've been saying, well, first I said Jan, then I grew up and I thought Jan. I did not know it was Jun.
Well, this is what I mean.
J A N. In this letter said it's pronounced why you n n?
Yeah that's young for sure, that's young. But anybody's name pronounced Jan reminds me of a quote. Have you ever seen Johnny Swayede the Brad Pitt movie. I never saw that, yeah, but there was a classic line in it where he's at dinner at like his date's house. In the dates, Dad says, you know, John, if we were in Sweden, your name would be Yon Spade and he says, no, sir, it'd be John Johnny Swayed, always has been, always will be.
That's a pretty good, uh, Brad Pitt.
Yeah, yeah, imagine Brad Pitt blankly saying this, but with a huge pompadour.
It's pretty great, not bad.
Well, I think that's it again. Thanks you, and we'll see everybody, including you in Germany. Eventually we'll figure it out. And in the meantime, if anybody out there from Germany or otherwise wants to get in touch with us, you can send us an email to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
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