Who is the person looking through your eyes? When you look in the mirror, who do
you really see? Have you really thought about this question? Isn't your
consciousness the only thing that matters in the universe? From your point
of view, the only sentience you have is your own. You can't know or perceive
whether anyone else is really conscious. What if they aren't? What if you're the
only one? Could the world essentially be revolving around you? Could it literally
be your oyster? This is the essence of solipsism. Some say this is the scariest
philosophy of consciousness known to man. Could it be true? What does science have
to say about this? The scary, crazy and absurd science of solipsism is coming up right now!
What do you really see when you look in the mirror? A scientist might
say that when you look through your eyes, packets of electromagnetic radiation,
called photons, enter the pupil of your eye, gets focused by a lens, hits your
retina and triggers electrical signals in your optic nerve, that travels back to
the LGN, then to the visual cortex, in the back of your brain, where it gets
interpreted and is made available to your consciousness, which may be located,
according to recent studies, in a tiny area of the brainstem called the pontine
tegmentum, and two small areas of the cerebral cortex connected to it. A
philosopher might say that you are the consciousness behind your eyes. The "you"
is the awareness of yourself, and your surroundings, and your place in the
universe. You are a sentient being with thoughts, feelings, perceptions, needs and
desires, along with other sentient beings, on a planet floating in a vast universe,
in a time you call the now. A solipsist has a slightly different viewpoint.
He or she believes that she is the consciousness behind her eyes, alright,
but the difference is that she believes she's the only consciousness.
She believes not only that consciousness is fundamental to the universe, but that
only her consciousness is fundamental in the universe, in which she resides. You
can only be certain that you are here. Everyone else may be a mirage at worse,
or irrelevant at best. There was a great movie called The
Truman Show, Starring Jim Carrey, where an entire reality TV series was created
around Truman, played by Carrey. Truman was born in this world and it is all he
had ever known. But the world was really an elaborate movie set, and everyone
around him was an actor. Truman was the only person who didn't
know that he was on the television show. Could the universe be kind of your very
own show, where everything is really just revolving around you. You know you exist
because your consciousness says so. You can't be sure anyone else really exists.
Is there any irrefutable proof of anything other than the existence of
yourself? If that's the case, then is it rational to assume that anything else
actually exists? What does science have to say about this? There is something
called the information theory, that says that in a closed system, and presumably
your universe that revolves around you is a closed system, can not generate
something more complex than itself. The question is, is your universe more
complex than yourself? The answer would probably be yes. The
universe behaves in mostly predictable ways, following a set of laws that you
probably did not come up with. You're not Einstein, Max Planck, or Nikola Tesla,
right? Since you are not the scientist that came up with the laws of this
illusion of the universe, how would you explain the fact that other people, who
you don't think exist, came up with the laws that explain your world? What about
some of the greatest creations like from Mozart, Shakespeare or Michelangelo?
Explaining this may be more difficult than concluding the perhaps you're not
the only conscious being. But maybe everything is perceived by you as being
more complicated and more creative than you are, but maybe it isn't.
Maybe complicatedness and creativity could be part of the illusion too!
Science doesn't claim to know the ultimate reality, at least not yet,
without a theory of everything. But even if we had such a theory, if everything is
an illusion, then science can only tell us what is true within that illusion.
Science treats reality as a foundation. The universe exists apart from our own
mind and senses. It says that we are going to see
the same things, whether we're in a subjective or objective reality. So now
the question is: is reality objective or subjective? Most scientists will say that
it is objective, that objectivity is a given. It's the canvas on which the laws
of physics make predictions. Science only assumes that objective reality exists,
though. In a paper published in 2019 by Massimiliano Proietti at Heriot-Watt
University, in Edinburgh experimentally replicated a famous thought experiment
proposed by Eugene Wigner. This research seems to indicate that at the
quantum leve,l two different realities could both be correct, suggesting that an
objective reality may not actually exist, at least not at the quantum level. If
reality is subjective, then could it all be a simulation like in the movie The
Matrix? But if we were living in a simulation, then everything is an
illusion, including what you know as you! The simulation is apparently so complex
that it can simulate consciousness in at least one of its characters - you. But why
would the simulation only simulate one conscious character, out of billions?
Maybe tto save memory space? But this would not make sense because then you
would have to create a separate world for every conscious creature that you
are simulating. If simulating humans it would mean 7.5 billion different worlds,
one for every human being. This would increase the memory requirement . Wouldn't
it make more sense to simulate all humans in one matrix, instead of billions
of separate matrices? Maybe advanced beings want to test the theory of
solipsism in a simulation? Maybe you are something special and they want to build
a world around you? But then why would advanced beings be so interested in one
particular avatar? What would be the purpose of that? But one of the questions
that even Solipsists have to ask themselves is, "Are you even conscious?" Scientists cannot solve
the problem because there's no such thing as a consciousness detector.
there's no objective measurement of consciousness. If there was, we could
settle this question in five minutes, once and for all. Now, this could be
easily solvable in the future, possibly, if we can figure out a way to connect
with other brains. Some futurists, like Ray Kurzweil, estimate that will achieve
this within thirty years. Once you can go inside my
brain, you'll know for sure whether I'm conscious or not. But what is
consciousness anyway? Does it require a nervous system, the ability to learn and
adapt to new circumstances? Does it require freewill? Are all animals
conscious? What about jellyfish or trees that don't have a central nervous system?
Can AIs be conscious? They're just a mass of metal, silicon and other
non-biological materials. They learn. They can change their behavior independently
of any humans. They will develop a kind of free will in the future. Their
behavior cannot necessarily be predicted. But their brains are dealing in binary
language, consisting of ones and zeros. Does this mean they're not really
conscious? If they're not conscious, then what makes you think you're conscious? In
many cases, they're smarter than us. They can beat us at chess. They can design
better cars. They can even program. And if we ask an AI of the future, he might say
that he is indeed conscious. How will we know for sure? If we declare that they
are not really conscious, then how can we be sure that any human is conscious?
They're made of material just like us, different material, but material
nevertheless. And their behaviors are also determined by firings of
electromagnetic signals inside a central processor. So are humans. Our processor
just happens to be called the brain. We all live in our own subjective realities.
Is the human mind really capable of being truly objective? Our realities all
interact, and we're able to independently observe the same things. Shouldn't that
mean that we are all part of the same reality? A solipsist will say, "not
necessarily," because you could be a figment of my imagination. Or we could
both be figments of somebody else's imagination. Or maybe nobody exists. and
everybody is imaginary. You think, therefore you are. You don't know if
anyone else really thinks, and therefore you cannot know whether they are. The
problem is solipsism is not disprovable. But lots of things are not disprovable.
This does not make it true. You could argue that solipsism is completely
useless, because it cannot be disproven, and it doesn't give you much in the way
of making your life better. But its uselessness does not make it false. Note
that solipsism is not synonymous with narcissism. There are
many people who treat life as if they're the center of the universe. And many tend
to be narcissists. You probably know one of them. I have an idea for you.
If they start to know you with their conceit, just slap them on the face.
Tell them nothing happened, because you're not here anyway.
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you have a question, post it below, because I try to answer every one of them. I'll
see you in the next video my friends!