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June 5[edit]

Form of solipsism?[edit]

What is it called when you equate the real world with a work of fiction (i.e. claim that the real world is no more real than, say, Shakespeare's Hamlet and that there is no fundamental difference between the two)? Is it solipsism, or is there another name for it? 2601:646:8A81:6070:BCAD:7630:2644:9948 (talk) 02:57, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

For a subset of works of fiction, you'd call that religion. Fgf10 (talk) 08:38, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

As with the religion of The Matrix. --←Baseball Bugs ^{What's up, Doc?} carrots→ 18:57, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

There's simulation hypothesis, but it's not a very precise term for what you describe. The page does at least mention that Aztec philosophical texts theorised that the world was a painting or book. Card Zero (talk) 16:33, 5 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You can also read Anti-realism, Philosophical skepticism, Metaepistemology and Deconstruction. What you describe could be Logocentrism. Graeme Bartlett (talk) 01:32, 6 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

This is also related to the "world as myth" version of the idea of the multiverse, as described in The Number of the Beast by Robert Heinlein. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 14:28, 6 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Philosophically, it makes a difference whether the "real" world is a shared illusion, or whether other conscious intelligent actors are merely part of the illusion, like those you encounter in a vivid dream. A common tenet of several gnostic belief systems is that this physical world, created by a malevolent demiurge, is the only one that is accessible to our senses, making the true, non-material world, (almost) inaccessible to our knowledge. A recurring paradigm in Philip K. Dick's stories, as well as his later personal belief, is that the jointly experienced world is "only a veil or delusional world covering another, real one."^[1] Here is another nice quote: "This world is a veil, and the face you wear is not your own."^[2] --Lambiam 17:22, 6 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

You could call it a form of philosophical idealism. --Amble (talk) 19:04, 6 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Right, let me put it in more precise terms: suppose, for example, that the argument is about whether God actually stopped the sun in the sky, and I assert that, regardless of the issue of whether he could exert sufficient force to do so (and without outright denying his ability to do so, as this would in itself be fallacious), if he had actually done so it would have resulted in the destruction of everything on earth, to which the other person replies that God is not governed by the laws of nature and can violate them at will, and that there is no fundamental difference between him doing so and Shakespeare giving a main character some lines in prose instead of the usual iambic pentameter -- what exactly would you call this type of counter-argument? 2601:646:8A81:6070:D51E:9626:2F32:C788 (talk) 02:49, 7 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

I don't know what to call it, but if you are willing to accept the hypothetical premise that there is an omnipotent God, it is only logical to concede that It is capable of bending the laws of nature to Its whims. To deny so requires denying the premise. Additionally, we can only know reality through what we observe. The laws of nature that we believe in are a creation of the human mind, a construct that serves as a model for what we have observed. Surely an omnipotent God can make us observe whatever It wants us to observe. --Lambiam 05:07, 7 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

That’s close to occasionalism. In that view, things like the laws of physics of cause and effect aren’t features of the universe that operate on their own. Instead, the causes and the effects are each divinely set up, specially and independently, with no direct connection from one to the other. Then a regularity like Newton’s laws is just a pattern God chooses to use as he sets up subsequent moments in time, like a poet chooses to use (or not use) a particular meter. —Amble (talk) 06:25, 7 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks! So, the right word is "occasionalism" -- so my other question is, has this ever been disproved, as solipsism has? 2601:646:8A81:6070:CDEB:E2B2:784D:9B1 (talk) 03:25, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Oh, do please explain how solipsism has been disproved. I can't wait to hear how I came up with this one. --Trovatore (talk) 03:37, 9 June 2022 (UTC) [reply]

The consensus seems to be quite the reverse, that there’s no way it possibly could be disproved; see Solipsism#Falsifiability_and_testability. That should apply equally to occasionalism and for the same reasons. —Amble (talk) 03:40, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not entirely congruent, but see last Thursdayism (or the article at RationalWiki: https://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Last_Thursdayism) --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 16:54, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Right, but again, the issue is lack of falsifiability, which is not at all the same thing as having been disproven. --Amble (talk) 17:49, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

In any case, "humans are likely to be wrong about their memories of the past and in fact be Boltzmann brains." --Lambiam 18:40, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

The comment that strikes me as most directly relevant to the original question went unremarked; it was by Khajidha about Heinlein's conceit for The Number of the Beast (novel) (and the later-published version The Pursuit of the Pankera). The idea was roughly that everyone is a fictional character in someone else's universe.

We used to have an article on it under the name pantheistic solipsism, which got deleted more than a decade ago for lack of sourcing. The article lives on in mirrors (for example here). I had remembered Heinlein's full name for it as something like "pantheistic interpersonal solipsism", though the linked article has "pantheistic multiple-ego solipsism". --Trovatore (talk) 19:36, 9 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Modal realism – which I think is related to versions of the strong anthropic principle – tells us that there is a "real" world "out there", just as real as ours, in which a real John Carter, living on a real planet known as Barsoom, is a successful author of pulp fiction, writing novels about a fictional person named "Edgar Rice Burroughs of Earth", who was mysteriously transported to another planet with the unlikely name "Earth" – presumably planet Terra. You actually don't need modal realism for this; if the universe is infinite and homogeneous on large scales, this has probability 1 of being true. --Lambiam 16:28, 10 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hmm, but I took Heinlein's conception to be a bit more causal — I exist because I'm a character in fiction being read by someone in another universe, and that person exists possibly because he's a character in fiction I'm reading. It's not entirely clear whether these relationships loop around or just have infinite regress. --Trovatore (talk) 16:53, 10 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

While I always understood it to mean that works of fiction in one universe were simply echoes of reality in another universe. This idea was also used in DC Comics in the Silver Age, where it was revealed that the writer Gardner Fox had written the adventures of the original Flash as transcripts of visions/dreams that he had had about the "real" Jay Garrick. That this was actually the in-universe Gardner Fox writing the adventures of the original Flash for publication on the alternate Earth of the Silver Age Flash (Barry Allen) has interesting implications about what that meant for the Gardner Fox in the real world, who had written stories about both the original Flash and the Silver Age Flash. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 22:45, 10 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

So, applying this (which, I should note, was not claimed by either party in the dispute in question) to the real world, would that not mean that Superman, Wonder Woman, James Bond 007 (which James Bond 007???), Rambo and Luke Skywalker really do exist, or at least had once really existed, somewhere in the real world??? (And as an aside, wasn't this very concept lampooned in the movie Galaxy Quest?) 2601:646:8A81:6070:6C98:A7D6:3C31:9C2F (talk) 09:54, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Not in our real world. In other universes. Universes that are just as real to their inhabitants as ours are to us. --User:Khajidha (talk) (contributions) 15:51, 11 June 2022 (UTC)[reply]