who exists?

By getting it firmly in your conk that other people do exist and have to be taken account of.If you can't do that I'd see a consultant.A good one.

no fair.
this is supposed to be a sensible philosophical discussion.
ANY SENSIBLE REPLIES????............

I believe that everyone else exists and I am the only one who doesn't exist. Now that is a liberating thought, eh?

Only the spirit of poetry truly exists.

intersting
what makes you believe you dont exist?
and what is your evidence for believing that the spirit of poetry/ only other people exist?

if you are axl roses wife...then axl rose has to exist...right?

"recently come to the conclusion, against my own will that i am the only person who exists"

Please expand as to how you came to this conclusion and what you mean by Against your own will.

yeah...i was truly confused on that as well.

Apparently we all exist. I know 99.99% that I exist, and 99.98% that you exist. The probability of us existing is rather high. :wink:

Damn,it is hard enough to stay alive
now i have to 'exist' too?

a womans work is never done.

I believe I don't exist because I can't experience myself from outside myself. I can only see from my perspective what is outside me. Even a mirror image is something outside me. So how do I know what "I" even am? And if I don't know what "I" am, then how do I know that "I" exist?

Sometimes I exist; sometimes I don't. Right now, despite compelling evidence to the contrary, I am nonexistent.

Re: no fair.

Calm down there, ARW. Nothing to get excited about. You've just discovered that you're a solipsist. This site might answer some of your questions.

If you do not believe that any of us exist, why are you soliciting our opinions on the subject?

Re: no fair.


I think you meant that ARW is THE solipsist. :wink:

Re: intersting

I've been reading a lot of Goethe recently.

Re: who exists?
axl roses wife

In my opinion, there are two kinds of solipsism:
A) the idealist one, that says that only your soul or ideas exist, and all the physical world is an illusion.
B) And there is the empiricist solipsism, that says that only your sensations exist and there is no reason to believe in the existence of anything that is the cause of those sensations.

This second version is based on the fact that all we can experience is in our senses. I say that there is a table in front of me because I have a visual sensation of a table and, if I touch it, a tactile sensation. In fact, my interaction with things is only made with my senses, and all I feel are sensorial impressions, not objects.
However, denying the existence of anything beyond our senses leads to a problem. You see, my hand gives me tactile impressions, but it is also an object of perception: when I look at it, for example. So, when I look at my hand - or touch my eye - I have only a visual - or tactile - impression, and, according to the theory, nothing authorizes me to claim the existence of an external object. Then we must accept that there are no eyes or hands. But if there are no eyes or hands we cannot speak of visual impressions or tactile impressions. And, in my opinion, this makes the theory B) self contradictory.
To escape this contradiction we could go the theory A). Senses don't exist, only my idea of senses. But then, what is an idea? If there isn't anything physical, there is no brain. In this case, I must say that the idea comes from my soul.
And here we have another problem. What is a soul? If you think of it, the definition of "soul", at least within this solipsist theory, must be: something that is not material, or physical. But that is not a definition, because we cannot define something by saying what it isn't. It would be like defining a zebra by saying that it is something that doesn't fly.
In the end, denying all physical existence, what do we have? A concept without real meaning, without attribute.

That is my point of view about solipsism.
I believe it is not an important problem in philosophy. Most of great philosophers - Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Kant, Heidegger - didn't take solipsism too seriously. Most of them didn't even considered it.

But we must make the distinction between solipsism, as a curious philosophical theory, and the situation of someone who, in his daily life, strongly believes that there is nothing else, and the world is a delusion.
Aristotle said that denying the reality of the physical world is not philosophy anymore, but madness.
There is a name for it, and it is not a philosophical one: autism.

thank you people
all of your points are very valid. yes maybe i am a solipsist. i had never heard of the theory before, but now i am going to read into it.

what i sed when i meant 'against my own will' is that i really dont want to follow this belief (it makes me kinda weird and presents a lot of problems in the area of ethics, basically i dont want to turn into a monster), but i am feeling that i cant contemplate any other, i just cant bring myself to believe that other people exist, as much as i want to.
Thank you for making me feel im not too weird!!!

however, if i do discover i am a solipist how shall i base my ethics?

also
eorl, are you a solipsist????