X-Message-Number: 8039
From:  (Mike C.)
Subject: Solipsism
Date: Thu, 10 Apr 1997 21:20:28 -0400

I believe it was Steve H. who wrote:

>
>   Are the one or more "agents" which make up the unconscious
>mind, themselves "conscious"? 

I say yes.

>  The philosopher Bertrand Russell was once
>entertained by a letter from a solipsist, who wrote that, since
>solipsism was impossible to disprove, why then didn't more people
>believe in solipsism as a philosophy?  Russell wrote back in his
>incomparably ironic style, asking the correspondent why he
>couldn't make himself *believe* that more people didn't believe
>in solipsism...

I keep reminding my self that, 
but I do not seem to listen very well.

>
>   As Russell's comments suggest, one difficulty with solipsism
>is the emotion of surprise.  Surprise results (as it did for
>Russell's correspondent) when one's observations or sensations
>don't correspond with what one expected, on the basis of one's
>model of "reality."  Surprise is thus a fundamental emotion, and
>perhaps a more important one than it is usually given credit for
>being.  For the objective realist, surprise (which always results
>from inductive mal-prediction) is the fundamental weeder-out of
>bad inductive theories about the objective universe (c.f.
>Popper's theories of science).  For the idealist, surprise is the
>ultimate challenge to explain.  How does one account for stimuli
>one is not expecting?

I do not want to expect surprises.
That would spoil the whole purpose don't you think?
I'll just play a little trick on me
and forget that I'm going to surprise my self.

>
>   The solipsist, when confronted with surprise, is forced into
>simple denial: the solipsist must either deny the existence of
>surprise (clever tack), or else must simply hold somewhat
>contrarily that it implies no contradiction in terms for one to
>surprise one's self. 

Of course I'm forced to deny it is not possible;
to convince you it can happen I must deny that it can not.
Am I trying to make myself appear a fool?
Do I think it is immpossible 
for me to make my self forget I am doing a thing.
It is not impossible; I have seen it done to my self.

>
> For the non-solipsist, however, the essence
>of consciousness is knowledge,

Can I be conscious if I do not know a thing?

>
> and the element of surprise in
>unexpected stimuli to a conscious being is prima fasciae evidence
>of the existence of *something* about which there has been a
>demonstrated lack of predictive knowledge-- and thus, something
>"outside" (by definition) that consciousness.  

Bah, if I know of this thing outside of me I am conscious of it.

>
>If solipsists
>write letters to philosophers asking for explanations, 

I communicate with my self often.

>
>shouldn't
>they already know what to expect by way of answers?

...if I know the future, yes, it is quite instantaneous 
unless I feel like not making up my mind or being confused.

>
>   To Rene Descartes' famous maxim (the so-called Cogito): "I
>think, therefore I am," 

Then if I think the floor exists I must think it thinks, 
for that is the proof of existence.

>
>the non-solipsist will add a corollary:
>"Furthermore, I'm often surprised, therefore there is more to
>existence than just me." 

I guess I like making them suprised now don't I?
If I am unaware of being surprised am I surprised?

>
>   If the reader is still with me at this point, and hasn't gone
>to sleep, it is possible to analyze some of the previous 
>philosophical debate on Cryonet in terms of what the emotion of
>surprise means to the average person.  At the beginning of this
>letter, I made the explicit argument that the existence of
>surprise in a dream argued for the existence of more than one
>"model-producing" conscious entity in the brain of a dreaming
>person.  At the same time, I can also as long time experimental
>dreamer report that dreams are not as surprising as real-life
>events.  In dreams, "objects" sometimes do surprising things, but
>"people" only rarely do, and "people" never seen to act in
>_totally_ inexplicable ways (as they do occasionally in real
>life-- especially women <g>).  In dreams, I have noted that
>characters act in ways that are understandable and somewhat
>stereotyped, almost as people in a bad novel (perhaps this says
>something about this author's creativity...).  Moreover, I have
>noted that more than once, characters in my dreams seen to share
>a shocking amount of my own knowledge about the world, so much so
>that I've frequently awakened wishing that I might somewhere find
>a real person who was as much an alter-ego as someone I had met
>in a dream (no doubt if I actually did, I would be spectacularly
>bored in a short time, of course).
>
>   It's no coincidence that the characters in my dreams share my
>knowledge, for we are dipping at the same well, so to speak. 
>My dream characters thus share some of my identity, but not quite
>all of it.  Empirically, one of the primary things that convinces
>me of the separate reality/identity of other people, and of the
>non-dream nature of the "waking world," is that in my waking
>hours other people ("real people") do things which are utterly
>unexpected. 

Try expecting them.

>
> I believe that (except for die-hard solipsists) we
>accord identity to other people partly on this basis.  If other
>people acted precisely as we expected them to, we would soon no
>doubt come to see them as nothing more than complicated devices,
>not deserving of the same status and regard with which we hold
>ourselves.

Am I not a device?
I am as real as any thing I know of.
I think I am rather simple too.

>
>   A machine which began to slavishly act in predictable ways in
>a conversation would not pass the Turing test-- indeed, this is
>the most damning of machine-like behaviors in such a test. 
>Moreover, I propose that one reason Searle's "Chinese Room" seems
>to be intrinsically incapable of consciousness to some imaginers,
>is that the Chinese Room is intrinsically and by definition
>incapable of surprising us.  You can, after all, look up and
>predict anything it does, in a big book of rules.  

Like psychology?
Are you perhaps suggesting people do not obey 
physical, natural, Godly laws?

>
>For that
>reason, it doesn't pass the Descartes Corollary test (the
>"Surprise Test"), and neither do any computers which run with
>discrete and predictable binary programs.  
>
>   Here, I don't mean "predictable" in terms of the Turing
>halting problem, I mean predicable from the view of repeatability
>of behavior.  Humans would have exactly the same consciousness
>problem, if they were found to be this kind of machine.  What
>would happen if we were to make a matter duplicator which turned
>out copies of people who always did exactly the same thing,
>perhaps for hours or days on end,

...carpel tunnel syndrome?

>
> after they stepped off the
>replicator pad, and into the test-room?  We might well begin to
>regard humans in a different light, in that case.  Suppose I feel
>"conscious," and yet am doing only exactly what I am expected and
>predicted to do, just like an unconscious robot-- is that not a
>paradox?  (Perhaps only a paradox of the sorites type?)

...not paradoxical to me.

>
>    Is such a duplicator and test-room even possible, then?  Some
>people, after due consideration, would say no-- that different
>conditions of the room at different times would preclude 
>duplicate responses of the replicated human.  But what if you
>replicate the room also?  Now many people will take refuge in
>quantum mechanics, and argue that any such test-room will be
>embedded in the universe, and will begin to diverge from any
>duplicate (even a perfect one) which appears at another time and
>place.  We've seen this argument on Cryonet.  Another way to
>frame such an argument is to say that many people refuse to
>accept the consciousness of any being found to be operating
>according to fixed and completely deterministic rules, and thus
>incapable of doing something we don't expect from looking at a
>prior simulation.  If a being can't, in principle, provide a
>surprise for one who knows enough about it, some people begin to
>get solipsistic about its "consciousness."  Not to do so would be
>to admit to the possibility of a certain determinism of action
>for "conscious beings," which bothers many people.  As to whether
>it should or not, I cannot say.*

It does not bother me.
I am what I am, concious selfdetermined law abiding robot or not.

>
>                                  Steve Harris
>   
>
>* "Arguments" about determinism have some of the same odd 
>character as arguments about solipsism.  If someone argues for
>determinism, the rejoinder is: "What makes you say that..?"

"What makes you..."

>
>If the argument is for some element of randomness, the rejoinder
>is: "Oh, you're just saying that..."  

If I do not know the reason for an action I am ignorant.

>
> People who want to argue a
>third alternative need to be reminded, as Minski does, that there
>isn't one.

a third alternative to what?

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