PHILOSOPHICAL MUSINGS-

Solipsism has been variously described as incoherent, meaningless, absurd, ethically repugnant, sociopathic and bullshit that no sane person would ever subscribe to. In addition there have been no “Great Philosophers” who have espoused solipsism, so it might be expected that there would be little point in discussing it. Further to that, it is described as a “logically irrefutable” notion, a wrong idea framed in such a way that you cannot prove it wrong.

Rather bizarrely, presumably to provide more avenues of denigration, the professional philosophy industry have variously subdivided this topic they seemingly love to hate into sub-categories:-

Metaphysical Solipsism, Epistemological Solipsism, Ontological Solipsism, Methodological Solipsism, Bullshitological Solipsism...

OK, that last one isn't an acknowledged “ism” and Ontological Solipsism doesn't have its own wikipedia page at the time of writing but someone is likely preparing one.

Solipsism has also been linked with schizophrenia and mental health issues so taking up the challenge of admitting to having solipsist tendencies may not be the wisest of moves, but here goes.

Those are the openimg words to a major article in which the true nature of solipsism is discussed. (link to follow)

The Misunderstood Solipsist.

The single most important point to remember, and keep constantly in mind, is that you exist as and with a localised sense of personal existence.

A LOCALISED SENSE OF PERSONAL EXISTENCE.

This is the self we think we are. A localised sense of personal existence generates a feeling of being, memory enhances the feeling to a belief of continuity and thus to the idea of time. So is created a human being.

The localised sense of personal existence powerfully associates with a perceived physical body, (hence the term localised). There are many reasons to question the nature of this association, but suffice to say at the moment that the perception of a physical body appears to be generated in the same way that all the “external phenomena” we experience are. Despite what many would casually claim, we do not experience the external world from the point of view of a body. The body is as much an external object as a chair, a tree, or the walls of a room.

It is traditionally (and axiomatically), assumed that the body and the external environment it moves around in has a physical, material, objective independence.

This is not the case.

Your body and the world it moves around in are creations of your SCREEN OF PERCEPTION. You were probably told this at school, but not in these words. Exactly how you manage to perceive the world at all is a mystery to conventional science, so an explanation is glossed over with statements about how wonderous the brain is when scientific descriptions of the process of perception reach the point where something actually happens.

When inputs from your ears, eyes and nose get processed by your brain, the point at which you actually perceive something is indescribable.
Maybe that will change some day, but as for now, your schoolteachers and learned Professors have no explanation for how synaptic events generate your Screen of Perception.

This objective reality has been questioned for thousands of years on religious, spiritual and philosophical grounds, and in the past hundred years on sound scientific grounds. The world of immediate experience and the extended world out to a universal scale appears to behave in a predictable objective manner, but observing it from an embodied location behind the eyes is no guarantee that what you see is as physical as it behaves. Moving to view the world from a different location is accompanied by the body moving in relation to other objects to maintain a viewpoint centred behind the eyes. The apparent objective world displays its own behavioural freedom.

That behaviour is not evidence that the object doing the behaving has a physical objective existence.

THE SCREEN OF PERCEPTION IS:-

The First person experience of consciousness. All of it. Every sense, every situation, every thought and dream, pain, taste, smell, imagining, fantasy... all of it. Sleeping or waking, meditating, singing, dancing or hallucinating. High on drugs or clinically depressed.

These things do not appear on your screen of perception, they are the screen of perception.

It sounds like substituting screen of perception for consciousness, but as already stated, the screen of perception is the first person experience of consciousness.

I do not experience your consciousness (second-person), I do not experience their consciousness (third-person).

The screen of perception is a solipsist occurrence.

So what is consciousness?

Bearing in mind that we only define one word in terms of other words:-

Consciousness is the perception of existence.

Philosophers excel at criticising the way others define the term consciousness, and science has a truly bizarre notion they have convinced many lay people to adopt without a jot of supporting evidence for, namely that consciousness is an emergent property of the complexity of the brain. These notions I will discuss here. Meanwhile defining consciousness as the perception of existence provides a fundamental, foundational and axiomatic statement as to what I am referring to when I use the term.

Existence is.

There is something, not nothing, existence is.

Perceiving something is the conscious awareness of existence.

Now this is where it gets a little tricky. Conscious awareness of existence is the Screen of Perception.

The screen of perception is not a creation, it is a source. It is existence, it is what you perceive as the external world.

You are a creation of your screen of perception, you are a creation of that which you perceive as an external reality. Your screen of perception, your perception of an “external reality” is the source of all and everything that you are.

You have been told from childhood to build a barrier around the limitations of your body, to confine yourself, to confine your “self” within the skin, within your head.
So successful at this you may have been, that you have come to believe that you can accept the proposition of science that you mysteriously emerge from your brain, that you exist within your head and that whatever lies outside your head is “other”, is not you.

Recognising that you are a product of what you perceive as an external world comes with some serious ramifications which you may regard as justification to dismiss everything you are reading here. The World is a Very Bad Place.