Are you just a figment of my imagination?
Resolving niggling doubts about the nature of reality
“The mind is its own place, and in itself can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven..”
John Milton, Paradise Lost
Most people accept that our minds have an influence on our perception of the world. In a good mood, a delayed train can feel like a welcome break to sit and relax; on a bad day, a horrible inconvenience. So, it is not just the things around me themselves which affect me; it’s also my perception of those things which matters.
This idea is associated with stoicism. Stoics place a lot of weight on the importance of mastering of our own mind in order to live well. They take as a given that nothing happens to us directly; all events must pass through the mind first, before impacting us. And while we can’t control the things which happen around us - and inevitably hurtful things will happen - with enough mastery of the mind even tragic outcomes can pass over us without causing pain.
If we accept that the mind is at the centre of all experiences, how different could my experience of the world be to the actual, real world?
Well, at the extreme, the external world could have no bearing on my experience whatsoever. Given the real, external world has to pass through my mind in order for me to experience it, it’s possible that my mind could be changing that world in any number of ways, so I experience something quite different to what’s really happening.
For example, imagine something which exists in the physical world, and is very hot. I come into contact with this object. But, because all my sensory experience is indirect via my mind, it’s at least possible that instead of feeling the hot object, my mind changes the experience so that I feel something cold instead. And, when it sears my skin and leaves a scar, my mind could dull the pain and edit out the injury, so my hand looks normal. I’d have no way of knowing this has happened - after all, I have no other mind to compare my experience against!
This is of course an extreme example. But it gets the point across that given the only link I have to the real, external, world is my own mind, I’m really at its mercy in terms of how I experience the world, and have no way to ‘directly’ access the real world to check if its being a faithful messenger or not.
The lonely conclusion from pushing this to the extreme
At this point - if my mind can tweak and transform the real world in any way it likes, and my experience could be totally different from what’s really around me - what’s the need for a real world at all? After all, it need not have any bearing on my experience. So, it’s entirely plausible that there’s really no physical world; all there is my mind, which, rather than transforming a ‘real’ world in some way, simply conjures its own experiences from thin air.
This is an extreme position and suggests the only thing which really exists is my mind, and all the things I think exist around me are just its conjurings. The desk I’m sat at, the laptop I’m typing on; the people around me; all of nature, history; all art, scientific theory; the entire universe; everything has been created within my own mind. I am, it seems, totally alone in my own reality; locked into it with no possibility of escape. After all, how could it even be possible to escape my own mind. My mind is me!
If there are other consciousnesses also doing the same, I will never meet them; all I have in my world my own conjurings, and all they have in theirs are their own conjurings. We have created two, totally separate universes and can never inhabit one-another’s.
Resolving the odd consequences of this extreme scepticism
Should we take this dramatic conclusion seriously? There are two quite unintuitive consequences which suggest not; not at face value, anyway.
Firstly, it seems odd that I’m able to learn about things in the world, if my mind created everything. Why am I surprised when I turn a corner and see, say, a car accident? Surely, if I put it there, I should have already known it exists, or perhaps have my memory jogged when I see it, like ‘oh yeah, I remember doing that!’.
Similarly, other people often have opinions which I hadn’t considered before and offer me new perspectives on the world. How could I learn from others if my mind had created them?
It strange to think that my mind would create a universe, then deprive its conscious-self (me) of all knowledge of this universe (after all, I started life not knowing anything about the world), then steadily drip feeding itself knowledge over time.
As well as the odd case of learning about a world my own mind created, it’s also surprising that I’m bound by physical laws. If my own mind created this universe, why can’t I fly? Why can’t I make rocks float or square pegs fit in round holes? It’s not clear to me why a mind would create a universe only to subject itself to binding and arbitrary constraints.
The presence of these two mysteries – of learning and of being constrained by physical laws – suggest that there’s more going on than my mind simply hallucinating its own reality.
There are two possible pathways to resolve these issues;
In the first case, physical reality does exist externally to me. I can learn from others, and I’m bound by physical laws, because other people and physical laws really do exist, externally to me. Great! This is exactly what life feels like, and I’m glad not to be alone in the universe.
In the second case, the external world doesn’t really exist. But in this case, I must have quite a perfect split in my mind: mind 1, which created and continually sustains the universe (people, things, physical laws and all), and mind 2, which has no awareness of doing these things, nor any recollection of ever having done them.
However, it’s doesn’t make sense to think of this as a split within one mind. For all practical purposes a mind split so completely as to hide any knowledge or recollection of its thoughts from the other half isn’t one mind; its two.
The reason me and my brother, for example, are two different minds is because I don’t have access to his memories or thoughts. If we had the same thoughts and memories we’d be one mind; but we don’t, so we’re two. So, to say that I have one, split mind with separate, inaccessible thoughts and memories– one which created my universe, and another which lives in it with no recollection - makes no sense; these are separate minds.
Therefore, even in the extreme case in which there is no physical world, there must be at least one other mind in existence; one which created and sustains the world which I’m experiencing. This is relieving to me - at least I’m not totally alone.
Comparison with others who also went down this rabbit hole
The resolution of this second case sounds like an argument for some form of God (something which I certainly didn’t set out to do when I started thinking about this). Omnipotence, omniscience, benevolent, certainly not - just something outside of myself which pieced my world together and set its laws, if we’re in that second case where the external world doesn’t really exist.
But doing some quick research, its interesting that other people have come to a similar conclusion when faced with the issue of a fundamentally unknowable external world. Rennee Descartes (1596 – 1650), for example, dug his way out of similar doubts about the external world because he had an idea of a perfect, infinite being (God), and such an idea, he thought, couldn’t have come from a finite being like himself. Therefore, God must exist and have placed this idea in his mind; and if God exists, we can also trust that the real world exists, too.
George Berkley (1685 – 1753), also doubted the existence of a world independent of our minds. If the external world doesn’t exist in itself, things can only exist insofar as a mind is actively conjuring them. But then, if I light a candle, go away for an hour not thinking about it, and then come back, how can I explain the fact that the candle has burnt itself down? Shouldn’t it have been put on ‘pause’ – literally, ceasing to exist - in the period that no mind was conjuring it? There must be something – God – broad minded enough to always be conjuring everything, keeping things in continual existence.
I didn’t write this post to discuss Descartes and Berkley, but, considering Descartes’, I don’t think my mind has this concrete idea of a perfect, infinite being. I can extrapolate ‘goodness’ and ‘largeness’ pretty far – I can imagine someone very, very kind, or a forest very, very large, but I can’t imagine something perfect, nor something infinite.
Berkley I have more sympathy with, and chimes with my idea of being surprised by the external world’s separateness from my mind.
Does it matter, anyway?
Very quickly, its worth thinking about the practical consequences of these types of problems. Whether the world a) really exists externally, b) is completely within my own mind, or c) some mix of both is interesting to think about – and for me, a rabbit hole I found myself pulled down quite reluctantly – but what point does it serve?
After all, will it change anything about how I think about, or live my life? If I convince myself that the world is totally in my own mind – then what? Will I stop sleeping, eating, and going to work because it’s all just made up anyway? No, and if I did, I’d be mistaken. This is my reality, and the only one I have, irrespective of its true nature. What constitutes a good happy life is unchanged, and the feeling of wellbeing and happiness I get from living it well remain very real to me, regardless of its source.
The sense of futility in this debate reminds me of the free-will/ determinism debate. There, its quite easy to convince yourself that meaningful free-will is impossible. But then what? What would a life not believing in human free will look like? Do we suddenly empty all prisons, because they couldn’t have done otherwise? No, of course not. Similar to the topic of this post, its an interesting topic to think about and once that can of worms is open, impossible not to delve into for some - but ultimately, its probably not worth thinking about too much.
Overall, then, in this post I’ve discussed how the principles behind the quite innocuous idea that our minds are central to experience can take us all the way to extreme scepticism about the existence of a world outside of our minds. Given the way we learn about the world and how we’re bound by physical laws, I argue that either the physical world must exist, or there is at least one other mind, external from my own, which has created and sustains the world I inhabit. Which one of these is the case shouldn’t really matter to how I live my life, and probably best to never think about this again.