Solipsism 101

Now, I know that you don’t exist when I don’t think of you. I understand that. It took me a while to really appreciate this. I remember this kid named Russell I met one day in August 1986 – well, I imagined him on that day – and especially what he told me. He said, “Everyone’s a marionette laying on the floor with their strings scattered all about. When I walk into a room, the strings are pulled up and everyone comes to life to interact with me.”

Nice try, fella. I’m the one who’s pulling the strings.

Well, technically, someone else, I guess it’s God, is pulling the strings for me. That would be more accurate, I suppose. But it took me a while to get there.

This dude’s assertion resonated with me. It’s the first time such a thought was brought to my consciousness, and it took a marionette to do it.

Off and on throughout the years I devoted some brain power to figuring it all out, but the problem was, my head would ache after a short while. But one winter day I was skimming through some random yellowed paperbacks at some forsaken, dusty out-of-the-way used book store, when I came upon Discourse on the Method by Rene Descartes. I heard about this guy from my readings, so I bought the slim book and read it. About a dozen times.

You know him. He’s the I-think-therefore-I-am man. I agree with that. I think. But what I hooked me, what intrigued me, was his evil genie concept. Heard of that? It appears he’s being deceived by this evil genie, but because he can think, he knows he exists, despite all the malicious illusions that surrounded him.

I bought into that for a long time.

Pretty quickly, though, I wondered, who created the evil genie? God? Now there’s three of us. So I shaved off the genie with Occam’s Razor, and brought the magic number down to a maximum of two.

Then a nagging thought began tugging at me, night and day: What proof did I even have that God existed? Or to echo back to something I alluded to earlier, a Puppet Master? None. What follows from this conclusion? Easy. I am God. I am the Puppet Master.

Honestly, that lasted like two weeks. I went out with some friends I conjured up to a club I must have conjured up, though admittedly I would have made it a little brighter and made the music selection a little better and the drinks a little cheaper and the chicks a little friendlier. Celebrating my new revelation (which I kept to myself for some reason) I wound up having a little too much to drink. Too much imbibage. Well, the point to this seemingly point-free story is that the next morning I was ruefully wondering why God gets hungover.

A few months later I put pen to paper and came up with a list of what was bothering me. Things such as: Why do some people speak languages I don’t understand? That didn’t make sense to me. I created them; why would I create them to yak gibberish at me? And why did some people have skills I wished I had? For example, I absolutely love the piano. Anything with a piano – anything from Billy Joel to Art Tatum to Frederic Chopin. Yet for the life of me I can’t play anything more than a simple major scale or a three-note chord. And further, why am I just scraping by? It’s a little embarrassing, but once I actually told a person I know, someone who had considerable wealth, to write me a check for $50,000. I actually said that: “You will give me a check for $50,000.” In a commanding tone of voice that Mesmer might’ve used. This person laughed at first, then, when he saw I was serious, gave me a funny look and disappeared. Now at family functions he just ignores me or moves to the other side of the room.

I brought up the subject of solipsism – the term philosophers that I dreamed up in a past I dreamed up give to, well, my Me-ness – to a college acquaintance to see what I would be saying to myself. He said the proof that other minds exist is morality. I said that I understood perfectly, and that often when I felt like punching someone who made me angry or randomly sexually assaulting some girl I fancied, something deep inside me prevented me, something I guess I called a conscience. He, too, laughed at first; then, when he saw I was serious, I got the funny look and the disappearing act.

So I’m not the Puppet Master. There is Another. And the only answer is that I am being tested by Him.

But I cannot prove this, unlike the proof that I exist, proven solely from my ability to think. Now, this lead me to a dangerous thought …

If I can’t prove that the Puppeteer exists, yet I am certain of the knowledge that I am not the Puppeteer, what proof do I have that other people do not exist? Maybe they are their own minds, and are not the simple marionettes that Russell first suggested to me.

Well, that certainly levels the playing field.

My head hurts …