Thread: Exploring Solipsism

Solipsism provides an interesting outlook on reality. It claims that we cannot know whether or not anything exists outside our personal mind. This is different from Eastern philosophy which includes the concept of a Brahmic Mind. However, considering we have individual receptors on reality which send information to individual processors, we cannot really obtain proof that anything is more than the creation of our minds. Because we cannot prove objective or even collective reality, we cannot disprove the solipsistic model. Not everything you can't disprove is true, of course, it's just a funny reminder on the nature of the subjective mind. But it's worth exploring what it would turn reality into, contrasting what we commonly hold it to be with our objective or collective worldview.

Something about the objective and collective worldview, of example, entails an accumulative reality where the past is cemented into existence and unchangeable. The objective model states that if a tree falls in the forest and no one is around to hear it, it still makes a sound. The collective model states that if somebody was around to hear it, it makes a sound for everybody (not meaning they all hear it, simply meaning the sound waves occurred in everybody's universe). The solipsistic model would claim that the tree didn't fall until you, personally, witness that a tree fell, and because of this there was no actual fall before that you didn't witness. The fallen tree created itself the instant you laid eyes upon it, and not a moment prior.

This is, of course, how dreams work. The dreamworld doesn't create itself in one place while we explore another, it creates itself instantly before our perception, and that's why it's so volatile. In fact contrasting dreams with reality is a good way to fallaciously disprove solipsism because the stability of reality lends itself to the cumulative assumption.

But let's play with the thought that even waking life is not cumulative, but that it creates itself in all the details as we witness it. This would mean that not only is the future manipulable, but so is the past. All the proper justification would seemingly need to exist. At least, based on my experience of waking life, nothing happens without an apparent cause. But this cause can create itself, working within the realm of the unknown. Essentially, everything can happen unless you know better. If you've already sifted through the details to such a great extend that you know exactly what the tax laws are and exactly how much you have to pay, then its room for change is lessened. However, if you remained ignorant of such details and paid something you believe you needed to pay but didn't have a great enough knowledge of tax law to be sure, you might be looking at a call from your accountant and an unexpected refund.

And you're left with an unanswerable question. If you knew everything there was to know would you have still gotten the refund? Or was it your own mental manipulation which caused reality to give you the money? Can the past be affected by our mental conditions in the present? Can we manipulate the details we don't know about the past to ensure they come out in our favor? Even Magicians like Peter J Carrol will tell you that you should obtain every possible detail because the magic doesn't work on every detail we're ignorant of, only in details that everyone is ignorant of, which is to say within the chaos. But in my study of manifestation, many positive outcomes come about that seemingly would have come about anyways. And yet for some reason these things that would have happened anyways become more abundant when we manifest them.