SCIENTIFICAMERICAN.COM | 35what it is like to be a Black woman trying to save her
children from slavery or a Jewish ad salesman wan-
dering through Dublin, wondering whether his wife is
cheating on him. But to imagine is not to know.
Some of my favorite works of art dwell on the solip-
sism problem. In I’m Thinking of Ending Things and
earlier films, as well as his novel Antkind, Charlie
Kaufman depicts other people as projections of a dis-
turbed protagonist. Kaufman no doubt hopes to help
us, and himself, overcome the solipsism problem by
venting his anxiety about it, but I find his dramatiza-
tions almost too evocative.
Love, ideally, gives us the illusion of
transcending the solipsism problem. You
feel you really know someone, from the
inside out, and they know you. In moments
of ecstatic sexual communion or mundane
togetherness—while you’re eating pizza
and watching The Alienist, say—you fuse
with your beloved. The barrier between
you seems to vanish.
Inevitably, however, your lover disap-
points, deceives, betrays you. Or, less dra-
matically, some subtle biocognitive shift
occurs. You look at her as she nibbles her pizza and
think, Who, what, is this odd creature? The solipsism
problem has reemerged, more painful and suffocating
than ever.
It gets worse. In addition to the problem of other
minds, there is the problem of our own. As evolution-
ary psychologist Robert Trivers points out, we deceive
ourselves at least as effectively as we deceive others. A
corollary of this dark truth is that we know ourselves
even less than we know others.
If a lion could talk, philosopher Ludwig Wittgen-
stein said, we couldn’t understand it. The same is true,
I suspect, of our own deepest selves. If you could eaves-
drop on your subconscious, you would hear nothing
but grunts, growls and moans—or perhaps the high-
pitched squeaks of raw machine-code data coursing
through a channel.
For the mentally ill, solipsism can become terrify-
ingly vivid. Victims of Capgras syndrome think that
identical imposters have replaced their loved ones. If
you have Cotard’s delusion, also known as walking
corpse syndrome, you become convinced that you are
dead. A much more common disorder is derealization,
which makes everything—you, others, reality as a
whole—feel strange, phony, simulated.
Derealization plagued me throughout my youth.
One episode was self-induced. Hanging out with
friends in high school, I thought it would be fun to
hyperventilate, hold my breath and let someone
squeeze my chest until I passed out. When I woke up, I
didn’t recognize my buddies. They were demons jeer-
ing at me. For weeks after that horrifying sensation
faded, everything still felt unreal, as if I were in a
dreadful movie.
What if those afflicted with these alleged delu-
sions actually see reality clearly? According to the
Buddhist doctrine of anatta, the self does not really
exist. When you try to pin down your own essence, to
grasp it, it slips through your fingers.
We have devised methods for cultivating self-
knowledge and quelling our anxieties, such as medi-
tation and psychotherapy. But these practices strike
me as forms of self-brainwashing. When we meditate
or see a therapist, we are not solving the solipsism
problem. We are merely training ourselves to ignore
it, to suppress the horror and despair that it triggers.We have also invented mythical places in which
the solipsism problem vanishes. We transcend our
solitude and merge with others into a unified whole.
We call these places heaven, nirvana, the Singularity.
But solipsism is a cave from which we cannot
escape—except, perhaps, by pretending it does not
exist. Or, paradoxically, by confronting it, the way
Kaufman does. Knowing we are in the cave may be as
close as we can get to escaping it.
Conceivably, technology could deliver us from the
solipsism problem. Koch proposes that we all get brain
implants with Wi-Fi so we can meld minds through a
kind of high-tech telepathy. Philosopher Colin McGinn
suggests a technique that involves “brain splicing,”
transferring bits of your brain into mine, and vice versa.
But do we really want to escape the prison of our
subjective selves? The archnemesis of Star Trek: The
Next Generation is the Borg, a legion of tech-enhanced
humanoids who have fused into one big meta-entity.
Borg members have lost their separation from one
another and hence their individuality. When they
meet ordinary humans, they mutter in a scary mono-
tone, “You will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
As hard as solitude can be for me to bear, I do not
want to be assimilated. If solipsism haunts me, so does
oneness, a unification so complete that it extinguishes
my puny mortal self. Perhaps the best way to cope
with the solipsism problem in this weird, lonely time
is to imagine a world in which it has vanished.John Horgan directs the Center for Science Writings at the Stevens
Institute of Technology. His books include The End of Science,
The End of War and Mind-Body Problems, available for free at
mindbodyproblems.com. For many years he wrote the popular blog
Cross Check for Scientific American.NATURAL SELECTION INSTILLED IN US THE
CAPACITY FOR A SO-CALLED THEORY OF
MIND—A TALENT FOR INTUITING OTHERS’
EMOTIONS AND INTENTIONS. BUT WE HAVE
A COUNTERTENDENCY TO DECEIVE ONE
ANOTHER AND TO FEAR WE ARE BEING DECEIVED.