[TheScorpion]

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[Chip1021]

An obsession with solipsism seems to be rather common in derealization sufferers, so you are definitely not alone in these thoughts. It’s very understandable too. We interpret the world through our experiences. “Normal” people don’t tend to obsess over these things, even when they read or talk about the possibility of solipsism, because they have a more “real” experience of the external world; whereas derealization sufferers can get stuck in that cycle of thinking because our experience almost reifies those ideas; we experience external reality in a highly solipsistic way.

If you were to look through some of these forums, you will probably see many threads on the subject, with many sufferers believing that if they could just disprove solipsism, they could return to normal. But that is a fools errand for a couple of reasons. First, if you could disprove hard solipsism, then you should deserve a Nobel Prize, though i doubt that such a thing is even possible, certainly not scientifically, and probably not philosophically either (though many have certainly tried).

But more importantly, obsessing over the issue will almost certainly only exacerbate it, fueling the anxiety that I can already read in your post. I think you are doing the right thing by trying to focus on your role as a mother to your kid(s) as much as possible. The best advice I can give is to simply try to redirect your thinking/behavior toward more worldly things as much as possible. And also, try not to obsess over your fears about potentially harming others because “they don’t have minds.” Do you have a mind? If you accept that, then it is fair to assume that others do as well. And if you created your universe with your own mind, then perhaps other people created their universes with their own minds too. If you use that understanding as a basis for your morality, then you need not fear being a serial killer. Because if you did become one, it wouldn’t be because you “lost your mind,” but rather because you lacked the moral sense to refrain from harming others.

I don’t personally have this obsession, so there isn’t much advice I can give from my own experience, but others here have definitely dealt with this problem, and they might be able to provide you with more specifics on what helped them (just type in “solipsism” in the search field to read similar stories and responses from people who have successfully dealt with it).

 

[Trith]

Hey! I’m new here! So on April 1st of 2022. I smoked some weed and got derealization. The derealization lasted only a month. I also have pure OCD. As I started to get better and everything looked more clear I was still on this forum and came across the word “Solipsism” (if you don’t know what it is please don’t google it) I wish I would of listened. Anyways. After reading that theory I have constant been obsessing over it to the point where I genuinely believe I created the world in my mind. At first I was wondering if other people had minds but that’s not bothering me too much, now I’m just constantly feeling like I literally created everything in my head and no matter how much I argue with the thoughts my brains will be like “You’ve been programmed to think people have minds and you didn’t created the world. I’ve ever had thoughts that “I was God”. This shit is really sick and annoying to feel like this everyday. I’m afraid my brain won’t ever unbelieve this. Sometimes I even have thoughts like “What if I hurt someone because I don’t think they have minds or what if I turn it a serial killer” That’s another fear that gets to me because I don’t have the desire to hurt another person. It’s really overwhelming to constantly think about this all day. I’ve been doing better. Still trying to enjoy my life and be the best mother but the thoughts will sneak in and go “You created this, its pointless, these people don’t have minds”. Has anyone experienced this!

Solipsism in a “non falsifiable claim”. Which means it is a claim that cannot be disproven, but in no way it means it is plausible. One example of that is “Russel’s teapot hypothesis”, which is a hypothesis saying that there is a teapot flying in orbit between Mars and Jupiter and that it is impossible to detect it using our current technology. If it’s impossible to detect it it means we cannot prove this hypothesis is right. But at the same time, if we don’t detect it it doesn’t mean the teapot isn’t there, because our instruments don’t work anyway.

Solipsism is very similar to this, you cannot prove it is right but you also cannot prove it is wrong. But does it mean this has any chance to be true? If you think it does, for consistency now you should perhaps also believe that Russel’s teapot exists. You can make infinite unfalsifiable claims, the only limit is your imagination.

Creationism can be formulated to be unfalsifiable. Young Earth creationists say that the world is 6000 years old, and you think you could prove this wrong by showing dinosaurs fossils that have been proven to be much older than that using radioactive decay. But some creationists will reply that dinosaurs never existed and the fossils were planted by god 6000 years ago with some radioactive elements mimicking what millions years old life should have, just as a trick from god who wants to test our faith. If you point out that stars can be observed more than 6000 light years away (meaning that light was emitted more than 6000 years ago), some creationists will reply that the stars were created during genesis, and some light was also created already on the path between the stars and our eyes so that upon creation we should be able to see them already. So even though their claim is very unlikely, there is no way to prove them wrong.

Some skeptics made fun of this claim by making their own, saying that the world was created last thursday (independent of the current date), everything was created at the same time, dinosaur fossils, buildings around us, everybody, and all our memories are fake and have been planted in our minds last thursday during creation. And you can still claim this is true next week, and that today’s memory was planted in your head next thursday, and it is impossible to prove this wrong. But this doesn’t mean it is any likely.

A colleague of mine told me that he thought the moon physically existed only when we looked at it. I think he was just messing with me and was proud to present a hypothesis that could not be disproven just to see me try and struggle with it. He wasn’t talking about “the image of the moon in our minds”, he was talking about the physical moon itself, that it disappeared everytime we didn’t look at it. But he is right, it cannot be disproven. But if this is true, it means that there is a kind of sensor that knows where everybody on the planet is looking, even through a mirror. And it knows when a camera is looking at the moon, or if someone in the future is going to look at the moon on the film. And when the moon disappears, something has to keep in memory the position of all atoms of the moon, to make them re-appear later on the trajectory of the moon and at the correct position and with the correct speed. And also when the moon disappears something needs to fake the moon’s gravity so that it doesn’t mess with the tides and with the trajectory of other space objects that we might be looking at. So it gets extremely complicated, and for no purpose at all other than making an unfalsifiable claim true, just for fun. So it is unfalsifiable, but at the same time extremely unlikely. You can also try to do the same with solipsism and think why there would be any chance solipsism could be true.

So if you think that the fact a hypothesis is unfalsifiable means it has any chance to be correct, if you believe in solipsism you should also believe in Russel’s teapot, in lastthursdayism, in the disappearing moon and in anything you can make up, like the theory there is an invisible imaginary animal in my garage that nobody can see including me. But I guess you don’t believe in these things, you only tend to believe in solipsism. And I guess you do so because something in solipsism is attracting you. And it’s a little paradoxical. Because I think you tend to believe in solipsism because you experienced DR, and you wonder if things could be flipped around, that you could have experienced reality (that solipsism is true), while the non-DR experience could be an illusion. So it’s your experience of DR (past or present) that makes you think that solipsism could be true. And it’s paradoxical because solipsism is all about doubting everything you experience, and yet you are attracted to solipsism because of an experience of DR. I don’t know if this helps though. Not that it is a good thing to doubt everything you experience, but just that solipsism is self-contradicting.

Perhaps you could imagine an unfalsifiable claim that goes the opposite way. Perhaps you are indeed imagining people’s minds and everything, but perhaps something is causing you to only imagine things that actually do exist around you and are real, and to imagine them exactly as they are? It is as unfalsifiable as solipsism.

And about the fear of hurting others, this is called impulse “phobia” (and contrary to what the term says, it isn’t really a phobia). You can google it. It is a very frequent anxiety / ocd thought, and they say it is absolutely not correlated with actual actions. People who have impulse phobia are not any more likely to act on these thoughts than anybody else. That maybe doesn’t make the thoughts easier to deal with, but at least that doesn’t mean you are dangerous. You are like millions of people suffering with impulse phobia, that’s all. I do have such thoughts occasionally, especially with people I love. Last time it happened to me I saw the kid of a friend, she is four years old, and I imagined I could take a knife and kill her just like that, and I imagined all the graphic picture. But I know there is no way I would do something like that. To the contrary, I know I thought about it because I think she is a very precious and delicate being, and I am rather afraid of not being good enough for her or able to protect her. And this is because I like her. And my brain just has some bugs and likes to frighten itself. I know I am nowhere near acting on these thoughts and they tell absolutely nothing about me other than I am a little anxious, I have some ocd thoughts and I value this person’s life. This is all it means to me and when it happens I only regard it as an “interesting” phenomenon. Still, it used to happen a bit often before and now it happens much less. Of course I won’t tell most people I have these thoughts, because there is a chance they would judge me if they never had them. But still I know better. And maybe there are more people who have them than I think.

 

[TheScorpion]

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