Unfortunately, as it stands, we are all dying a little bit each day. That sense of dread when we think about all the time we’ve squandered, that’s because we know we’ve wasted some time we’ll never get back. We are going to die. That existential crisis is tough each and every time we contemplate it, but let’s seriously talk about death, and what that means for our goals here in life.
Death is the great equalizer. No one escapes it, and no one knows what lies beyond it. Putting aside religion for the moment, there is nothing after death. With the destruction of the brain comes the end of consciousness. You will, literally, cease to exist. Nothing you do in life will have mattered, because you won’t be able to appreciate your worldly accomplishments after your biological clock hits midnight. Do you really think that even Einstein, the man who has arguably done the most to advance humanity, can appreciate his success now? Like a person in a dreamless sleep, there is no consciousness after death. Consciousness, the state of being alive (and more specifically, self-aware), is embedded in having a working brain with the little electrical impulses running back and forth between neurons. A dead guy doesn’t have those tiny impulses, we do. The chemical reactions and tiny electrical impulses that dart through your brain are you, in the sense that you are a thinking being with feelings and senses. It’s sort of an intimidating thought, that we are just some chemical reactions taking place in that gray mush in our skulls.
While that may be a little scary to think about, we don’t have to worry, because we have many long years ahead of us, secure in the knowledge that we are alive. Or are we? The great Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi once recounted a dream he had, wherein he dreamt he was a butterfly. When he woke up, he asked himself if he were in fact Zhuangzi dreaming of being a butterfly, or if he were a butterfly dreaming of being Zhuangzi. So how do we know that we exist? We don’t. We can’t know, because our perspectives are embedded in our consciousnesses. I mean, let’s take an example most of you should be familiar with: The Matrix. It’s a little overdone, but how does Neo know what is reality? For the people still plugged into the Matrix, their reality is 100% real. It’s only after being separated from that perspective that Neo sees it for the grand illusion it really is.
Here’s another example to try to explain the philosophy of solipsism, because it’s kind of a difficult philosophy for us to understand from our perspective. There is a short story by Stanislaw Lem (which you can buy in this collection) that I’m going to shamelessly paraphrase here to try to explain why our lives have absolutely no objective meaning or truth.
So the story goes, a scientist invites the protagonist to his laboratory to show him an interesting experiment the scientist is running. When the protagonist gets there, he sees a bunch of metal boxes all attached to a big metal drum, humming mysteriously. The scientist explains that within each box is a mechanical “brain” that receives sensory input from the magnetic tape in the big metal drum, just like we receive sensory input from the world around us. He explains that logically, there is no difference between the “people” contained within those boxes and us.
To really put the screws in this little mind-game, he explains that this box thinks it is a beautiful seventeen year old girl, that one thinks it’s a priest having a crisis of faith, another thinks it’s a scientist studying physics, and by their choices, they can control which way their lives travel along the magnetic tape that makes up their world. He has one box that he keeps separate from the others, though. It contains the mind of a man going insane. He is on track to be put into a sanitarium because he has concluded that he is nothing more than a box on a shelf in a laboratory, and his whole world is nothing more than a series of sensory experiences taken from miles and miles of magnetic tape contained within a giant drum. He knows the truth, but no one can accept it, because that would invalidate everyone’s existence.
The point is, their world is as real to them as our world is to us, and their world is obviously “artificial”, so how do we know that our own world truly exists? The final observation of the story is that perhaps we are all boxes contained in a higher being’s “laboratory”, who is himself a box contained in a higher being’s “laboratory”, ad infinitum. The scientist in the story simply wants to continue the chain of existence up to divinity, and play God by watching his little world unfold before his eyes.
That’s solipsism, in a nutshell. We can’t know for sure that any of the world around us exists, since there is nothing to prove that the entire world isn’t just a private reality. Everyone you meet, your family, friends, the people you care about, you don’t know if they are thinking beings or essentially unthinking bodies following the elaborately choreographed programming that makes up your universe.
But let’s stop doubting the existence of our reality for the moment. Society really can’t get anywhere if we’re always assuming that everyone around us is just a figment of our imaginations. So, like Descartes did with his famous proposition of “I think, therefore, I am”, let’s take it as a given that we exist, and try to move forward from there. What purpose will this serve? It just might provide a consistent, logical framework that otherwise unmotivated, disillusioned young adults like you or me can use to figure out why we’re here, assuming for the moment that we actually are here.
So, where does this leave us? We know that death is the great endpoint. We have consciousness, perspective, experiences, senses, a reality to enjoy, and then—BAM! We’re dead, and we have nothing. No consciousness, an eternal dreamless sleep. What’s a guy (or gal) to do, when confronted with this philosophy that practically borders on nihilistic? Don’t worry, there are answers, and they may just restore your optimism for life. Rene Descartes’ famous declaration may help us build up from here to a more sustainable philosophy.
Hi there. I discovered your website by way of Google whilst looking for a related topic, your website got here up. It seems good. Ive bookmarked it in my google bookmarks to visit then.
Having experienced the grandest possible form of this solipsism, I think philosophy itself is misleading in a way.
I do agree, when we get down to the neuroscience, everything is just electrical inputs. Or is it? After all, reality still exists simply because there is an experience to be had in the first place. Wanna know somethings real? Try with the might of your entire mind to claim that it isn’t. Try it. It’s difficult.
As McKenna said, “…if it’s real, it can take the pressure…you don’t have to pussy-foot around the real thing…the real thing is REAL. It doesn’t demand you adjust your opinion to suit it.”
You can drive yourself mad over this stuff. They are cool thought experiments, but taking them as reality is possible and will fuck someone up for a long time. I know because I have been there. Literally through being in doubt of all of reality.
Solipsism is interesting, but I feel that when one escapes these thought experiments and re-enters the beautiful reality of nature, love is boundless and infinite there, just as when we were children.
These philosophies are nice, but I believe they are all flawed in the respect that when people get a tad stressed or manic, they can claim truth, but that truth is usually out of fear. It’s the story of all humanity. Religion is a mass fear-based hallucination, as are all stories as to what life really is because somewhere along the lines, we stopped loving life and fearing it. Talking, and speculating out of imaginatory fun is where the fun is (duh lol), but taking it too far and claiming truth is absurd because one person’s truth is never another person’s truth, but that’s kinda what you were saying…woah…lol
Also like you said, let’s stop doubting reality and live life. It’s a pretty cool one to live
Hey Justin, thanks so much for taking the initiative to start a conversation about this stuff (especially here in a public venue–that takes some courage).
I completely understand your reaction to this piece, and I’m actually brainstorming a follow-up that I hope to post this weekend. Basically, I’m going to argue that it is truly important to accept the world and other people’s existence as “real”, for a simple reason. You place an upper bound on your own happiness when you cut yourself off from the feeling of empathy. I contend that empathy (and love, the highest form thereof), is the single best way for a person to experience long-lasting, natural satisfaction and happiness with life. We are, after all, wired to be social creatures. Solitary confinement fucks our brains up badly. Even though our existence is unprovable, both from a utilitarian perspective and from a conscious-hedonistic one, it behooves us to accept this world as real. (As a side note, it takes a special kind of crazy to really, truly convince oneself that the world and the people in it are all one giant Matrix-like dream. These types of people are almost universally unhappy.) The wonderful side-effect, then, of taking other humans’ existence as real is that it opens up whole new lines of philosophical and ethical inquiry that can help us form a real, actionable set of principles to guide our behavior.
I look forward to our conversation about that.
Ben
Fantastic website you have here but I was wondering if you knew of any discussion boards that cover the same topics discussed here? Id really love to be a part of group where I can get feed-back from other experienced people that share the same interest. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.
Hey, thanks for the kind words. Do you know about Reddit.com? There are tons of philosophical message boards (the term they use is “subreddits”, and there are subreddits for every topic you can think of) where people discuss this stuff all the time. I’d start with http://www.reddit.com/r/philosophy or http://www.reddit.com/r/askphilosophy. If you make a post on there, comment here and link to it. I’d be happy to take a look at what you have to say!
Ben, I can tell you from experience that it is very possible haha. When Buddhists talk of the great Void, there is a reason. It is very possible to fall into a state of grand nothingness.
St. John of the Cross wrote a powerful poem describing a “spiritual journey” we can undergo before returning to love. He called it the Dark Night of the Soul. It is a time of returning to love and, from my experience, letting go of so much control, because no matter what life really is, our ideas about it will never fit the bill. They just can’t. Whatever quantum theory ends up stating, whatever religious texts claim, they all will ultimately affect what is REALly in front of you if you internalize them as truth.
The truth is life in it’s physical realities, joys, sorrows, loves, sadnesses, curiosities, disappointments, etc.
As for believing in a matrix, it is really fascinating what the brain will believe in a state of perpetual fear (almost anything). 7-9 months ago, if you had told me we were all actually tiny bugs inside a great ocean of air being held captive through mind control by a spaghetti god, I may have believed it, no kidding lol. Mental illnesses are serious things, not to be taken lightly. They suck and can lead to a lot of suffering for people.
I look forward to more posts. Part of me wishes I hadn’t deleted my blog, and then another part of me is like it was a good idea. I’m agreeing with the latter. I simply took philosophy/lifestyle to an unhealthy level.
PS- regarding our health talk, read Eat for Heat lol, it’ll make you really think and question everything health….mwuahahaha 😉
You’re right Justin, I unfortunately do frequently discount mental illness and write it off in a patronizing way that it doesn’t merit. I am trying to consciously fix this lapse on my part. In the vast majority of humans without chemical imbalances in their brains, however, I think it is safe to say that it is impossible to fully internalize and believe that one is the only consciousness in the Universe. Again, our brains aren’t naturally wired to work that way, we have too many neurons that rely on/deal with interpersonal communication to ever be able to just dismiss this life and the people in it as one big dream.
Now I agree that mental illness can override a lot of the natural thoughts of a “normal” person, and often even in a normal individual, there will be some moments of their philosophical inquiry where they entertain this notion of solipsism, but to fully integrate it into your everyday thought patterns and actions, that is something that I believe requires mental illness to internalize.
Yes. To all of that lol.
Minus the chemical imbalance thing. Serotonin doesn’t make you happy. No single chemical in your brain brings a state of wellness. It comes from a myriad of factors, mostly being out of our conscious control. The best we can force ourselves to be is manic, but well-being comes from letting go of control. Mental illness is a tough thing to crack and I’ve spent months looking into it. I really just think it’s stress vs non-stress. Fear vs acceptance.
But I still don’t know