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Episode 2: Solipsism for Two
Is anyone really out there, or am I just chatting to a very articulate hallucination?
In this episode, we juggle Descartes’ lonely thinker, Kant’s phenomena vs noumena, and Wittgenstein’s ban on private language. If all we ever have are mental snapshots of the world, what right do we have to talk about some “real” thing behind them?
On the way we hit:
Private language & inner voices – are we talking to others, or just different bits of ourselves?
Postmodernism & perspective – if everyone reads the world differently, do we still share a world at all?
Ethics after God – without a cosmic referee, how do we avoid moral chaos?
Featuring Red Dwarf’s “Better Than Life,” a brain that sabotages its own happiness, Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein as unlikely comrades, and the comforting thought that if this is your solipsistic universe, you’ve got some serious explaining to do about Hitler, Trump, and broken-down cars full of kids.
Plug in and decide whether “we” are really in this together – or whether “we” is already one person too many.
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By Danny O'Donnell & Dr. Michael Alsford
4
77 ratings
Is anyone really out there, or am I just chatting to a very articulate hallucination?
In this episode, we juggle Descartes’ lonely thinker, Kant’s phenomena vs noumena, and Wittgenstein’s ban on private language. If all we ever have are mental snapshots of the world, what right do we have to talk about some “real” thing behind them?
On the way we hit:
Private language & inner voices – are we talking to others, or just different bits of ourselves?
Postmodernism & perspective – if everyone reads the world differently, do we still share a world at all?
Ethics after God – without a cosmic referee, how do we avoid moral chaos?
Featuring Red Dwarf’s “Better Than Life,” a brain that sabotages its own happiness, Philip K. Dick and Robert Heinlein as unlikely comrades, and the comforting thought that if this is your solipsistic universe, you’ve got some serious explaining to do about Hitler, Trump, and broken-down cars full of kids.
Plug in and decide whether “we” are really in this together – or whether “we” is already one person too many.