Topic Summary:
Applying Yes or No Philosophy.
Goal:
I want to understand Yes or No Philosophy better so that I can apply it to my problems.
Why are you posting this in Unbounded?
I was considering putting it in the Elliot Temple section, but I decided to put it here because I have more than one confusion (more than just what I describe in the post below). I will probably post more stuff here later.
Do you want unbounded criticism? (A criticism is a reason that an idea decisively fails at a goal. Criticism can be about anything relevant to goal success, including methods, meta, context or tangents. If you think a line of discussion isn’t worth focusing attention on, that is a disagreement with the person who posted it, which can be discussed.)
Yes.
Decisively refuting solipsism with Yes/No Philosophy
Here, I will define solipsism to be the theory that is just like the “common sense” theory of reality, except that it tacks on an unexplained claim that everything is really a part of my dream. In particular, solipsism claims that there are things external to my conscious mind that “kick back,” that these things obey the laws of physics, and that some of these things act exactly like human beings.
There are easy criticisms of solipsism that could be made, like “what does it even mean that everything is a part of your dream?” or “why do you say that everything is a part of your dream?”, to which a solipsist has no good answer. In the context of Yes or No Philosophy, it should certainly be the case that criticisms of that sort are considered to be decisive.
However, ET defines decisive criticism in the following manner
A decisive criticism says why an idea doesn’t work (for a purpose, in a context). In other words, it points out that an idea is an error and therefore will result in failure (unless the criticism is mistaken) at a particular goal or purpose. A decisive criticism is incompatible with the idea it criticizes: you can’t (rationally or reasonably) accept the criticism and also accept the idea.
What I’m confused about is this: What is the “goal or purpose” that solipsism decisively fails to achieve? My issue is that for any practical goal I might want to achieve, solipsism doesn’t clash with meeting it, because solipsism makes the exact same predictions about physics as the “common sense” theory. For example, solipsism is just as good as the common sense theory when it comes to meeting goals like driving to the grocery store, or sending a rover to Mars.
It should be clear that in the above, there’s nothing special about solipsism in particular. Indeed, many of the of the “bad explanations” that David Deutsch discusses at length in his books (like the Greek myth of weather, the Copenhagen Interpretation, or the Inquisition’s theory of astronomy) would be similarly difficult for me to decisively refute.
My non-solution to this problem:
The criticisms of solipsism are decisive with respect to the goal of “having a theory of metaphysics with a minimal amount of unexplained baggage,” or something like that.
This isn’t a satisfying answer at all, because it’s not clear why it should be my goal, and it’s extremely vague.