a time traveler;
her own parents;
a solipsist.
She calls other people "zombies" and says that they do not exist.
Horse manure. She does interact with other people, not just with herself. Although her body is generated by a causal circle, it is sustained by a physical environment that is external to it, must have preexisted it and can be expected to continue existing after it, the body, has died.
Solipsism is scarcely sustainable. To tell another person that you are a solipsist is to assume that that person exists. To eat is to acknowledge dependence on an external environment.
Heinlein referred somewhere to "multi-person solipsism," which is a contradiction. Someone in Stranger In A Strange Land says that each of us is like a worm talking to its other end. I agree with that. The single reality is conscious of itself through each psychophysical organism. However, each discrete organism, with its distinctive memories and sense of identity, exists as part of the single reality.
In the following story in The Unpleasant Profession..., "They," the narrator is deceived about the nature of reality but is deceived by other conscious beings. He is not alone. "They" exist and so do "zombies."
He thinks:
"'Self-awareness is not relational; it is absolute, and cannot be reached to be destroyed or created." (p. 146)
Self-awareness ends every time we become unconscious. Self exists only in relation to other.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteI think William Walker, in Stirling's Nantucket books, was thought a solipsist, that he did not find many other persons to be REAL. But Walker could not have achieved as much as he did if he had literally acted on that idea.
I'm not sure I agree with your last sentence here. Aren't we still somehow, kind of "conscious" when we have dreams while we sleep? And I have often remembered those dreams after waking.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
ReplyDeleteOf course we are conscious of dreams but sleep alternates between dreaming and not dreaming. When I was put under a general anesthetic, I felt my consciousness go out like a candle. Once when I was very tired, I fell into a dreamless sleep as soon as my head hit the pillow. I remember lying down, then nothing.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteI often think of dreams as being how the sleeping mind thinks. And I think I have had dreamless episodes as well, even without anesthesia.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
ReplyDeleteSo I disagree with Heinlein's narrator who says that self-awareness cannot be destroyed.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
ReplyDeleteI'm not so sure it's that easy to destroy self-awareness. But unfortunates suffering from advanced cases of dementia and Alzheimer's comes close to that, I think.
Ad astra! Sean
But self-awareness ends and starts again, then ends at death.
Delete