coping with solipsism

how does anyone cope with the idea that your consciousness is the only thing you know is real and anything else could be your imagination or some kind of simulation? am i the only one absolutely terrified by this? i find myself constantly derealizing and getting caught in my own head now because I can't get it out of my mind that it's possible nothing outside of it is actually true. I don't like that the only place that feels real is my mind, which isn't even real in a physical sense. do i just occupy myself until it goes away? sorry for long post

Practically speaking it makes no difference. Even if all the people I interact with are imaginary I'm still going to act the same because I want to live a happy life in my imaginary world. The only difference solipsism makes to me is that it means I'm the sole judge of morality. In public I'll uphold the norms because I don't want to be judged negatively (even if it's all imaginary), but in private I can do whatever I want. For example I can read my roommate's diary while they're on vacation; it makes no difference to anybody except for me. If they found out I would feel remorse, not for the action of reading their dairy which is harmless in my judgement, but for making them upset (even if they're not real). Of course, morality is subjective to begin with, but solipsism is an interesting lens to view it through. It means I'm God, even if I'm trapped in my own delusion. I guess what you're talking about is more of a claustrophobia of being trapped in your mind, or of being completely alone and unable to verify the existence of anyone else. I guess I can't relate to that. Sorry.

>>46440 Just the first part of this for me. My belief is that there is in fact zero differences to be expected between my consciousness being truly all that is real or not. The world out of my control, is just as out of control and mysterious and surprising even if its all in my head. Whatever part of my head its in clearly isnt mine all that much, and so there is no functional difference to me whether I am a individual exploring and existing in this world or a part of my head exploring and existing in my entire head. If I found out one day that in fact truly only my consciousness is "real", then the meaning of real would just change to be "everything contained in my consciousness". That would then change to be "the entire universe" (as its all of reality) and id be in no different of a situation from before I was made aware only my consciousness was real. My morals would not change at all, im no more qualified to be the judge of morality then I was before. Before I was a person in a world out of my control and now im a component in a brain out of my control, whether the observable universe is in my head or not I dont understand its entirety just the same. I know the universe is massive and full of more things I dont know then that I do. Why would it make sense for me to assume or pretend otherwise just because its all a projection of my head or whatever, that just means my head isnt mine, or that I am not all of my head, or that my head is the same size of the universe I once thought was there. It doesnt make sense to me to suddenly assume everything has now "shrunk" to "just be" within your head. Furthermore im assuming a case where you know for sure its true. You dont and never will, the idea that "your consciousness is the only thing you know is real" has no meaning outside of consciousness anyways. It might as well be like saying "its scary that knowing things are real is dependent on me being able to know things". If the fear is related to not knowing if other people are real or share in your consciousness, they do even if your consciousness is all thats real. Everything shares in your consciousness then and itd hardly even be yours.

>>46438 >your consciousness is the only thing you know is real Lain I have some bad news

>>46438 That is not a long post and I feel that way very often. Such a thing is all to do with agnosticism and having faith in nothing at all. How can you be well adjusted that way? I slowly get less and less healthy over time due to such lack of faith. If born into a good environment I'd have good habits but if you're a loser with a bad environment that is how you from my perspective end up so sad. It should logically not matter and your habits should take over, but what if you can't wake up in the morning as a neet that thinks life won't really matter today much less the next day? You turn to pure hedonism then get diabetes and bad kidneys and a bad liver and cardiovascular system and or end up an insane bum due to stress if you don't physically harm yourself. Either way without balance created by the habits that form from a stable environment you would be not.... well off. Also I would say to relate to someone like you by finding someone near exactly like you. That was always my own goal to solve loneliness. It nearly worked before years ago but he left and even during that time our relationship began with my drinking alcohol and proclaiming to him how I often wished I was the last man on earth and that alcohol was better than people. In other words I found him too late as I was already fat and an alcoholic. It should not take years to find a community or culture that one could relate to enough to feel what they call empathy. Faith is a very fake word after all. It's not about what someone thinks they know, it's about what they experience. Experience a creature unlike you and you stomp on the insect or fear a squid, no understanding then less feeling for it, more like you and you won't even care what a soul is. A dog does not know the word soul but it still howls for others and even cries. With a psyche that takes itself as seriously as ours can you need a kindred soul to take the other entity seriously lest you see it as a mindless robot. The meaning of life can't matter if you're a dog in heat as you cause life instead of contemplate why you feel like you are dying.

Thanks for the reply; I agree with you 100%. I guess my last post was more about the subjectivity of morality than solipsism and I conflated them without justification. Viewing morality through the lens of solipsism then being corrected by your post was a catalyst for me to realize that morality is completely subjective. I don't need the egotistical justification of "I'm the God of my made up world" to judge morality for myself. Everyone has to decide what's right on their own. Sorry for the high school level philosophy.

>>46444 Forgot to tag >>46441

>>46443 new to lainchan, dont know what constitutes a long post. also, thanks for the "find a likeminded person" advice. I took a break from my browser and actually talked to a friend on the phone who had a similar issue when it comes to it as I did. It helped a bit! >>46441 because you never know if it's real or fake, I agree that solipsism shouldn't change your morals. >that just means my head isnt mine, or that I am not all of my head I sometimes do experience that kind of feeling. Dissassociation doesn't really interfere with my day to day, so I don't think a diagnosis is necessary, I['ve been struggling with derealization and depersonalization for a long time now and sometimes it genuinely can feel like my mind isn't entirely mine. >>46444 >Sorry for the high school level philosophy. not sure if directed at me but it's all good, I have a peanut sized brain when it comes to philosophy

>>46446 >new If it's too short it can actually be deleted and or a warning from Apple-mod will say to expand on what you are saying or similar message. Longer is better. Also, about finding a kindred spirit, make sure they match myser's briggs is my advice and also in other tests. Most would say this is bad advice but if you're something like INFP and agnostic you may as well not even try to integrate into other parts of society because you won't likely be happy with the job nor peers you end up getting with such a personality.

What if your consciousness isn't really all yours and is being manipulated to make you think everything else isn't real in order for the operator to remain hidden from your perception?

I used to be pretty messed up by this, until i got into german idealism and epstemology, as of today, i know that i am a construct, not necessarily like a simulation, but a result of my country, my ancestors, my culture, my ethics, my morals and my time, past and present, i never was a pure entity inserted in a society, i am the society, i am the culture, and this is fine, and even the philosophy of the "is this really real?" was created by someone at some point, someone who had masters, backstories and interpretations, and i don't belive that makes me ou you artificial, or that this is a logical and irrefutable conclusion, beacuse reality itself gives no "true" info about the universe, in fact, it gives no info at all, cuz all the info we have comes from our reading and interpretation of reality, and we just study and adapt the reality to "our" reality. So, even the premise itself of being fuarrrked up by that knowledge is just anothet result of a major social context that includes you and the idea lol

>>46450 good guess, Spooky. Picrel >>46451 i never thought of that but hm >>46497 i like that take, thank you :)

>am i the only one absolutely terrified by this? Whats so scary about it? Heck you don't even really know anything about your own mind. "You" are in fact poorly defined. Today I nearly stepped on a rattlesnake. That kind of thing will remind you how fuarrrking real and worth protecting your life is, doesn't matter whether you know it's real.

>>46438 Stop being a narcissist, you're not so important that you're the only thing that exists, not even God is that arrogant.

>>46504 it's just that i can't prove anything exists other than my mind. it's not narcissism

>>46505 you also can't prove 2+2=4.

>>46506 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peano_axioms

>>46505 Do you have godlike powers that let you do whatever you want? no you don't, which means your existence has limits. Can you remove those limits? no, so those limits exists independent of you. Those limits are called reality, which you have just proven to exist due to you not being anyhting special. I repeat, stop being a narcissist.

>>46505 >>46510 Also GK Chesterton described your condition perfectly over 100 years ago, it's a surprisingly common intellectual trap that people fall into. "The madman’s explanation of a thing is always complete, and often in a purely rational sense satisfactory. Or, to speak more strictly, the insane explanation, if not conclusive, is at least unanswerable; this may be observed specially in the two or three commonest kinds of madness. If a man says (for instance) that men have a conspiracy against him, you cannot dispute it except by saying that all the men deny that they are conspirators; which is exactly what conspirators would do. His explanation covers the facts as much as yours. Or if a man says that he is the rightful King of England, it is no complete answer to say that the existing authorities call him mad; for if he were King of England that might be the wisest thing for the existing authorities to do. Or if a man says that he is Jesus Christ, it is no answer to tell him that the world denies his divinity; for the world denied Christ’s. Nevertheless he is wrong. But if we attempt to trace his error in exact terms, we shall not find it quite so easy as we had supposed. Perhaps the nearest we can get to expressing it is to say this: that his mind moves in a perfect but narrow circle. A small circle is quite as infinite as a large circle; but, though it is quite as infinite, it is not so large. In the same way the insane explanation is quite as complete as the sane one, but it is not so large. A bullet is quite as round as the world, but it is not the world. There is such a thing as a narrow universality; there is such a thing as a small and cramped eternity; you may see it in many modern religions. Now, speaking quite externally and empirically, we may say that the strongest and most unmistakable MARK of madness is this combination between a logical completeness and a spiritual contraction. The lunatic’s theory explains a large number of things, but it does not explain them in a large way. I mean that if you or I were dealing with a mind that was growing morbid, we should be chiefly concerned not so much to give it arguments as to give it air, to convince it that there was something cleaner and cooler outside the suffocation of a single argument. Suppose, for instance, it were the first case that I took as typical; suppose it were the case of a man who accused everybody of conspiring against him. If we could express our deepest feelings of protest and appeal against this obsession, I suppose we should say something like this: “Oh, I admit that you have your case and have it by heart, and that many things do fit into other things as you say. I admit that your explanation explains a great deal; but what a great deal it leaves out! Are there no other stories in the world except yours; and are all men busy with your business? Suppose we grant the details; perhaps when the man in the street did not seem to see you it was only his cunning; perhaps when the policeman asked you your name it was only because he knew it already. But how much happier you would be if you only knew that these people cared nothing about you! How much larger your life would be if your self could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference! You would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played, and you would find yourself under a freer sky, in a street full of splendid strangers.” Or suppose it were the second case of madness, that of a man who claims the crown, your impulse would be to answer, “All right! Perhaps you know that you are the King of England; but why do you care? Make one magnificent effort and you will be a human being and look down on all the kings of the earth.” Or it might be the third case, of the madman who called himself Christ. If we said what we felt, we should say, “So you are the Creator and Redeemer of the world: but what a small world it must be! What a little heaven you must inhabit, with angels no bigger than butterflies! How sad it must be to be God; and an inadequate God! Is there really no life fuller and no love more marvellous than yours; and is it really in your small and painful pity that all flesh must put its faith? How much happier you would be, how much more of you there would be, if the hammer of a higher God could smash your small cosmos, scattering the stars like spangles, and leave you in the open, free like other men to look up as well as down!” https://www.ccel.org/ccel/chesterton/orthodoxy.v.html

>>46509 you can prove it from a set of axioms, but you cannot prove those axioms are correct.

>>46511 I will read the text you linked to but I have to say that the non-arguments in your quote are bad and do nothing to alleviate the problem. >>46438 I'm in a similar situation: is God a product of my own consciousness or not? Do I have to live by His external rules and suffer hellfire if I don't, or are the rules my own? Is the evidence for God, my experiences, real evidence or is it not? It matters a great deal since the choice between Heaven and Hell might be real.

>>46516 That is accurate.

>>46521 >I will read the text you linked to but I have to say that the non-arguments in your quote are bad and do nothing to alleviate the problem. You can call it whatever you like but it's still correct, Solipsists vainly think that the whole universe revolves around themselves and that nothing could possibly be more important than their own existence, how could something possibly exist without them? It's narcissism and it's pathetic, and the most pathetic part is the "woe is me" attitude they take when they pretend to be bothered by it. >I'm terrified and can't cope with being the center of all reality oh dear oh no No you're just a garden variety narcissist.

>>46516 you know... an axiom is an axiom. it's true because we say so. mathematics is nothing but an entirely formal framework for deriving truths from basic rules. our rules say that 2+2=4. there's no notion of "truth" without axioms, so this is kind of a silly thing for you to say.

>>46521 feeling like the god has been created inside of your mind and whole "reality" is merely a reflection? I don't find anything anything wrong with it. As if the "reality" is created by your thoughts everything is just your reflection and if you try to exploit this reflections, like act unethical towards the reflections won't you get hurt? as they're your own reflection. I don't think this is called narcissism as seeing everyone as your reflection can make you more soft and friendly towards your surroundings.

>>46533 Being unable to imagine that other people's lives don't revolve around you is textbook narcissism.