Solipsism
Posted: Fri Nov 15, 2024 9:46 pm
Douglas Mercer
November 15 2024
Her face that
She keeps in the jar
By the door
Who is it for?
Gradually he is drawn to psychological games with a game master who presents his paradoxical views on life, his mysterious persona and his eccentric masques. At first, he takes these machinations which are termed the godgame to be a joke, but they grow more elaborate and intense and soon he loses his ability to determine what is real and what is artifice. Becoming a performer in the godgame he realizes that the re-enactments of the German occupation, the absurd playlets after Sade, and the psychodramas of Greek myths, are not that of the game master, but his own, and he finds himself participating in a game which integrates in strange ways into his everyday life; as the lines between his real life and the game blur and become more uncertain hints of a larger conspiracy begin to unfold.
In 1968 James Cornman and Keith Lehrer suggested something they called the brain machine which controls the brain of the subject who wears a device which by inputting data into the brain can produce any hallucination that the operator wishes, and the hallucination producing machine can produce as complete, systematic and coherent a hallucination as the operator wishes to make.
Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have accepted either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time, I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. If there is an evil demon who deceives me at least I know I am still here, however deceived.
The evil demon, also known as deus deceptor of malicious demon or evil genius is an epistemological concept that features prominently in the philosophy of Descartes where he imagines that a malevolent force of utmost cunning and power has employed all his energies in order to convince the subject that what he calls the external world is an illusion created by his own mind.
Descartes devoted much more space to the discussion of dreaming and cast it as a unique epistemological threat distinct from both waking illusions and evil genius or brain-in-a-vat-style arguments. His claim that he has often been deceived by his dreams implies he also saw dreaming as a real-world (rather than merely hypothetical) threat.
The Brain in a Vat thought-experiment is most commonly used to illustrate global or Cartesian skepticism. One is told to imagine that at this very moment one is actually a brain hooked up to a sophisticated computer program that can perfectly simulate experiences of the outside world. In Philosophy the brain in a vat (BIV) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of human conceptions of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness and meaning. Following many science fiction stories, the scenario involves a mad scientist who might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer that would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those a brain normally receives. According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the disembodied brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences, like those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the real world.
Schizophrenia is defined simply as a break with reality; thus to make the diagnoses one needs to know what reality is and the one sure thing you can tell about the person who tells you they know what reality is is that they don’t know what reality is. Derealization Disorder (often called Depersonalization) occurs when one believes that the world itself is real but that one’s self is not, a feeling which can be very disturbing and causes one to feel as if one is in a dream. Young girls suffering from this delusion are said to cut themselves in order to feel that they exist, and a suggested cure for this behavior is to give the subject strong sensations to snap them out of what is considered to be an illusion. Likewise when something extraordinarily good or extraordinarily strange or uncanny occurs, it is as if the world seems to go off kilter in fugue states, the old wives tale is that one should pinch oneself in order to remind oneself that one is real.
Solipsism (Latin solus alone and ipse self) is the opposite of derealization for in solipsism one thinks not that the world is real and oneself is not but that oneself is real oneself and the world is an illusion; that others are actors out on loan who have their costumes, carry their props, play their parts, but are either automatons or deceivers. Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind exists; as an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one own mind is unreal.
They say a condition of total knowledge is akin to a condition of total madness; but what really happens is that the condition of total knowledge mimics a psychotic break. When one can connect everything with everything a reaction formation crops up to defend oneself against reality in the form of the assumed outlandish or preposterous nature of the experience (as if one were seeing things); and all or some of the symptoms of psychotic breaks occur: that one is a very important person, delusions of grandeur, primary narcissism, auditory hallucinations, and so as a means of self-analysis all the apparatus of psychology is wielded in order to shield us from reality.
As Kevin Strom has said in a very profound sense our souls both contain the whole of the universe and are that whole; as in a hologram where each part contains the whole but also perceives the whole from its unique perspective or site.
When in the process of activating (closing in) one decompensates or rids oneself of the normal inhibitors or psychological formations that bar one from seeing reality as it is, infinite; one then sees the correspondences and synchronicities, of the inside spontaneously measuring up to the outside: and these coincidences, these impossibilities, spook one or unnerve one and panic and fear ensue lest one is deemed to be mad; but only apparently eerie, this valley of the uncanny, needs to be traversed; for the condition of total knowledge mimics a psychotic break but is not one; it is a breaking down which leads to a breaking through.
Folie a deux (French for madness for two) is also called a shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD) and is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from on individual to another. This disorder was first conceptualized in the 19th Century by Charles Laseque and Jules Falret. Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as Shared Psychotic Disorder. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie a trois (three) or quatre (four); and further, folie en famille (family madness) or even folie a plusieurs (madness of several), or folie en masse (up to and including the entire world).
Folie a deux is when two people collude in a common delusion and the mutual reinforcement and validation that they get from each other dives the delusion deeper and deeper. There is no end to the number of people who can be involved in a societal delusion and mass psychosis, or consensual hallucination, are just psychiatric terms for the fabled fable agreed upon. To wake up of break free from this hypnotism is unnerving as one begins to view the world as a sort of PsyOp of unknown intent, or as if tricky deceiver is deceiving one; that is solipsism is the truth’s last safeguard, the joker in the pack, by means of which the truth protects itself. This introversion or frighteningly internal response to life is seeing reality as it is but every message coming from the external world tells one it is nothing less than insanity itself. These are the swirling winds of force and relation that one needs to disentangle before one can see things as they really are: infinite. When it happens and the activation is complete the bandwidth goes infinite and the meters begin to peak; or in another way of putting it, it’s the best part of waking up.
***
Notes:
It’s a real place—Thomas Pynchon Bleeding Edge (2014).
Kurt Vonnegut’s mother was a suicide (drank drano), he was a major depressive and his son suffered from schizophrenia and wrote a book about it called The Eden Express. In the book he said he told his father that when he was on the subway he felt that others were looking at him and talking about him. Vonnegut told him that he was not there, so he can’t be sure, but that more likely than not people were not paying that much attention which, from personal experience, I can say is almost certainly true.
November 15 2024
Her face that
She keeps in the jar
By the door
Who is it for?
Gradually he is drawn to psychological games with a game master who presents his paradoxical views on life, his mysterious persona and his eccentric masques. At first, he takes these machinations which are termed the godgame to be a joke, but they grow more elaborate and intense and soon he loses his ability to determine what is real and what is artifice. Becoming a performer in the godgame he realizes that the re-enactments of the German occupation, the absurd playlets after Sade, and the psychodramas of Greek myths, are not that of the game master, but his own, and he finds himself participating in a game which integrates in strange ways into his everyday life; as the lines between his real life and the game blur and become more uncertain hints of a larger conspiracy begin to unfold.
In 1968 James Cornman and Keith Lehrer suggested something they called the brain machine which controls the brain of the subject who wears a device which by inputting data into the brain can produce any hallucination that the operator wishes, and the hallucination producing machine can produce as complete, systematic and coherent a hallucination as the operator wishes to make.
Whatever I have up till now accepted as most true I have accepted either from the senses or through the senses. But from time to time, I have found that the senses deceive, and it is prudent never to trust completely those who have deceived us even once. If there is an evil demon who deceives me at least I know I am still here, however deceived.
The evil demon, also known as deus deceptor of malicious demon or evil genius is an epistemological concept that features prominently in the philosophy of Descartes where he imagines that a malevolent force of utmost cunning and power has employed all his energies in order to convince the subject that what he calls the external world is an illusion created by his own mind.
Descartes devoted much more space to the discussion of dreaming and cast it as a unique epistemological threat distinct from both waking illusions and evil genius or brain-in-a-vat-style arguments. His claim that he has often been deceived by his dreams implies he also saw dreaming as a real-world (rather than merely hypothetical) threat.
The Brain in a Vat thought-experiment is most commonly used to illustrate global or Cartesian skepticism. One is told to imagine that at this very moment one is actually a brain hooked up to a sophisticated computer program that can perfectly simulate experiences of the outside world. In Philosophy the brain in a vat (BIV) is a scenario used in a variety of thought experiments intended to draw out certain features of human conceptions of knowledge, reality, truth, mind, consciousness and meaning. Following many science fiction stories, the scenario involves a mad scientist who might remove a person's brain from the body, suspend it in a vat of life-sustaining liquid, and connect its neurons by wires to a supercomputer that would provide it with electrical impulses identical to those a brain normally receives. According to such stories, the computer would then be simulating reality (including appropriate responses to the brain's own output) and the disembodied brain would continue to have perfectly normal conscious experiences, like those of a person with an embodied brain, without these being related to objects or events in the real world.
Schizophrenia is defined simply as a break with reality; thus to make the diagnoses one needs to know what reality is and the one sure thing you can tell about the person who tells you they know what reality is is that they don’t know what reality is. Derealization Disorder (often called Depersonalization) occurs when one believes that the world itself is real but that one’s self is not, a feeling which can be very disturbing and causes one to feel as if one is in a dream. Young girls suffering from this delusion are said to cut themselves in order to feel that they exist, and a suggested cure for this behavior is to give the subject strong sensations to snap them out of what is considered to be an illusion. Likewise when something extraordinarily good or extraordinarily strange or uncanny occurs, it is as if the world seems to go off kilter in fugue states, the old wives tale is that one should pinch oneself in order to remind oneself that one is real.
Solipsism (Latin solus alone and ipse self) is the opposite of derealization for in solipsism one thinks not that the world is real and oneself is not but that oneself is real oneself and the world is an illusion; that others are actors out on loan who have their costumes, carry their props, play their parts, but are either automatons or deceivers. Solipsism is the philosophical idea that only one’s mind exists; as an epistemological position, solipsism holds that knowledge of anything outside one own mind is unreal.
They say a condition of total knowledge is akin to a condition of total madness; but what really happens is that the condition of total knowledge mimics a psychotic break. When one can connect everything with everything a reaction formation crops up to defend oneself against reality in the form of the assumed outlandish or preposterous nature of the experience (as if one were seeing things); and all or some of the symptoms of psychotic breaks occur: that one is a very important person, delusions of grandeur, primary narcissism, auditory hallucinations, and so as a means of self-analysis all the apparatus of psychology is wielded in order to shield us from reality.
As Kevin Strom has said in a very profound sense our souls both contain the whole of the universe and are that whole; as in a hologram where each part contains the whole but also perceives the whole from its unique perspective or site.
When in the process of activating (closing in) one decompensates or rids oneself of the normal inhibitors or psychological formations that bar one from seeing reality as it is, infinite; one then sees the correspondences and synchronicities, of the inside spontaneously measuring up to the outside: and these coincidences, these impossibilities, spook one or unnerve one and panic and fear ensue lest one is deemed to be mad; but only apparently eerie, this valley of the uncanny, needs to be traversed; for the condition of total knowledge mimics a psychotic break but is not one; it is a breaking down which leads to a breaking through.
Folie a deux (French for madness for two) is also called a shared psychosis or shared delusional disorder (SDD) and is a psychiatric syndrome in which symptoms of a delusional belief are transmitted from on individual to another. This disorder was first conceptualized in the 19th Century by Charles Laseque and Jules Falret. Recent psychiatric classifications refer to the syndrome as Shared Psychotic Disorder. The same syndrome shared by more than two people may be called folie a trois (three) or quatre (four); and further, folie en famille (family madness) or even folie a plusieurs (madness of several), or folie en masse (up to and including the entire world).
Folie a deux is when two people collude in a common delusion and the mutual reinforcement and validation that they get from each other dives the delusion deeper and deeper. There is no end to the number of people who can be involved in a societal delusion and mass psychosis, or consensual hallucination, are just psychiatric terms for the fabled fable agreed upon. To wake up of break free from this hypnotism is unnerving as one begins to view the world as a sort of PsyOp of unknown intent, or as if tricky deceiver is deceiving one; that is solipsism is the truth’s last safeguard, the joker in the pack, by means of which the truth protects itself. This introversion or frighteningly internal response to life is seeing reality as it is but every message coming from the external world tells one it is nothing less than insanity itself. These are the swirling winds of force and relation that one needs to disentangle before one can see things as they really are: infinite. When it happens and the activation is complete the bandwidth goes infinite and the meters begin to peak; or in another way of putting it, it’s the best part of waking up.
***
Notes:
It’s a real place—Thomas Pynchon Bleeding Edge (2014).
Kurt Vonnegut’s mother was a suicide (drank drano), he was a major depressive and his son suffered from schizophrenia and wrote a book about it called The Eden Express. In the book he said he told his father that when he was on the subway he felt that others were looking at him and talking about him. Vonnegut told him that he was not there, so he can’t be sure, but that more likely than not people were not paying that much attention which, from personal experience, I can say is almost certainly true.
