It’s Not All About You
Why solipsism is false
At some point every student of philosophy runs into a version of the following argument: everything I know, I know through my own senses and my own mind’s interpretation of them. There’s no way to “get outside my head.” So it’s possible that everything I think I experience is all just a product of my brain, some kind of elaborate hallucination.
Furthermore, everything I (think I) know about other minds I know only by analogy to my own thoughts and feelings. It’s possible that the beings I think have minds don’t actually have them. They may be mindless automatons. They might not even exist. Again, they might just be figments of my imagination. My consciousness might be the only reality. How could I possibly prove it’s not?
Most people are content to just dismiss this possibility as absurd. But as long as it appears to remain a possibility, there are plenty of people who will be troubled by it. So in this article, I’ll present two arguments that I believe wholly refute the idea of solipsism. One argument will show that, contrary to the assertion above, self-consciousness is actually parasitical on our consciousness of other minds, and this can be backed up with hard scientific data. The second argument will show why solipsism is logically inconsistent, since, as I’ll demonstrate, making the solipsistic argument requires using something — language — that could not exist if there were only one mind.
The Priority of Other Minds
Solipsism is sometimes called the problem of other minds, and it depends on the claim that we can only infer the existence of other minds, and their possible contents, by analogy from our own experience. Self-awareness comes first, then awareness of others. But is this true?
The philosopher P.F. Strawson argued that the opposite was in fact the case. In his book Individuals, he writes that “one can ascribe states of consciousness to oneself only if one can ascribe them to others.” In other words, assume that you had no concept of other minds. Would you need to represent to yourself that you felt pain or fear, or would you just feel pain and fear? Given that these and other feelings have evolved to regulate behavior, it is clear that their primary importance to us is that they are acted upon, whether or not we ever ruminate on our possession of them. The experience of thinking and feeling is logically, and biologically, prior to the emergence of a self-consciousness that is aware of its thoughts and feelings.
On the other hand, recognizing that others feel or intend, or know certain things can also help us regulate our behavior. Whether it’s finding a mate, avoiding a predator, catching prey, or any number of other things, the mental states of other organisms are part of our adaptively relevant environment. But as Strawson points out, “one can ascribe [mental states] to others only if one can identify other subjects of experience. And one cannot identify others if one can identify them only as subjects of experience….”
What Strawson is saying here is that we don’t identify a being as having thoughts and feelings unless we’ve already identified it as something that acts upon the environment (and potentially upon ourselves) in certain ways. This is what he means when he says that the concept of a person is logically (and biologically) prior to the concept of a self.
So, to put it all together, Strawson is saying that one cannot have a concept of one’s own self without first having a concept of a subject of experience, and one cannot have a concept of a subject of experience without first having concepts of beings that interact actively with their environment, including with us. First, we evolve the ability to interact adaptively in our environment, including recognizing patterns of external behavior that suggest others’ possible intentions, and only once that cognitive foundation has been laid is it possible to turn those insights inward and reflect on our own mental states.
Strawson’s argument doesn’t just comport with the logic of natural selection. Recent empirical data appear to back it up. Yale researcher Laurie Santos has found that rhesus macaques prefer to steal fruit from her assistants when they can see the assistants aren’t looking. In other words, the macaques appear to understand that others might not know things (I’m stealing your fruit) that they themselves do.
Yet we have no evidence that macaques possess a sense of self. Granted, testing for selfhood in other animals is a tricky business, but even using a fairly liberal standard for self-awareness, the number of species clearing that bar would still be much lower than the number of species capable of assessing and reacting to others’ probable mental states. Strawson’s argument, and Santos’ evidence, confirm the common-sense judgment that, so far as survival and reproduction go, appropriately reacting to social and ecological cues is a more pressing problem than reflecting on one’s own inner narrative.
The Impossibility of Private Language
In order for solipsism to be true, for there to be no other minds but mine, it must be the case then that a purely private language is possible. But another important philosopher — Ludwig Wittgenstein — demonstrated why such a language is logically impossible. Let’s take a look at his argument.
To speak a language is, at least in part, to obey certain rules. Rules of grammar, to be sure, but also rules about the appropriate application of words to their referents. Now the meanings of words can change over time, but they tend to do so slowly and by consensus among the speakers of the language. That language and meaning evolve do not negate the fact that there is such a thing as using a word correctly or incorrectly. If I pointed to a stool and asked you to bring me that chair, you’d probably not think anything of it. If I asked you to bring me the table, you’d think my usage strange but still, figure out what I meant. But if I asked you to bring me the parrot, you’d just be confused, and rightly so.
Wittgenstein’s argument begins with the observation that every time we think we are obeying a rule, we are actually interpreting that rule in order to apply it in a new case. We are, as it were, reformulating our rule so as to render all our past usages consistent with the present one. Assuming a community of speakers who can check each other’s interpretations, differences of interpretation from one individual to the next are likely to be ironed out by practice or, in cases of more controversial topics, by the debate of a scientific, moral, or political nature.
But solipsism supposes there is only one mind. And Wittgenstein is skeptical that there could ever exist a language spoken only by one being to itself. “‘Obeying a rule’ is a practice. And to think that one is obeying a rule is not to obey a rule. Hence it is not possible to obey a rule ‘privately’; otherwise thinking one was obeying a rule would be the same thing as obeying it.”
The very act of thinking that one is following a rule presupposes an external reality — including other minds — that can push back against some of the ways we might be inclined to interpret that rule. A solipsist can “have no criterion of correctness. One would like to say: whatever is going to seem right to me is right. And that only means that here we can’t talk about ‘right’.”
In other words, the solipsist would not even conceive of the idea of a rule. Similar to the argument above, just as a creature with no notion of other minds would never be led to the idea of its own, so without the “pull” of other minds it would never occur to us that we were engaged in following or interpreting a rule. Every act of perception would be a new act of definition. Appealing to our own past practice to justify our definitions would be “as if someone were to buy several copies of the morning paper to assure himself that what it said was true.”
Conclusion
So there you have it. I can’t promise you you’re not living in a simulation, but I can promise you that you’re not alone in the world. If it were not for the existence of other minds, you’d have no notion of your own. You can try to argue for solipsism, but you’d be doing so with words whose meanings could only have been crowdsourced.
