Solipsism is the philosophical idea that the contents of your consciousness is all that exists. So, under solipsism, you who are reading this and your experience of reading this represents the totality of what exists in this moment.
The position makes sense, because you have only ever experienced your awareness, so how would you ever be able to know subjectively that there are other agents who are also experiencing life subjectively?
The way I understand this predicament is that God has absolute awareness at all times, and every creature is like a branch of the tree of consciousness. We all experience the world through our senses – we know this because when we close our eyes, for example, there is darkness. If our senses become impaired for some reason, our experience of the world is diminished.
So our senses enable us to have a limited experience of reality, whereas we can suppose God has a total experience of reality at all times.
In my book God’s Grand Game I dedicate some space to exploring the relationship between the God dimension of reality and the human dimension.
Some who practice meditation claim to access a higher state of consciousness where they can see what is happening in different locations. So the higher someone’s state of awareness is, the greater their experience of the totality, perhaps.
I have personally not experienced such higher states, so I can only speculate as to the truthfulness of such a ‘cosmic consciousness’ state of awareness, but I believe it makes sense to reason that such a state might exist.
In any case, I think that if God can create the awareness of one person, and if God is infinitely powerful, it makes sense to posit that every creature has an independent experience, and so solipsism – at least in my estimation – is a fascinating but erroneous philosophical perspective.
What are your thoughts on solipsism? Feel free to leave a comment below.
Perfect Chaos 