Prior to recently, I never respected philosophers. Professional thinkers? What kind of a career is that? I do a lot of thinking, why am I not famous yet? I couldn't possible find a way to respect people whose entire lives are summed up with "Cogito, ergo sum." It was just one of the pages of history I could care less about.

Of course, I was a naive child.

I had never looked in to anything philosophic. I hadn't studied anything other than what they taught me in World History (which wasn't enough to justify the fame of Aristotle and Socrates), and my opinions were heavily colored by lack of understanding of the subject.

As of recently, I have been studying philosophy, to an extent. It started a couple of weeks ago, when I was reading the "How to argue logically" section of the New York Public Library Desk Referrence. I read through it and was disappointed; it only offered a slim understanding of a few fallacies (there are something like 128 fallacies documented, and it explained the principles behind about ten of them) and nothing more. "Fallacy," if you didn't know, is a term for "flawed logic." For instance, the Gambler's Fallacy is something like "the next flip has to be heads, because there have just been ten straight tails."

Anyway, as I looked for more in-depth information on arguing logically, I started to read the different philisophical beliefs. At first, just for kicks, but then I got really interested. The philosophies were so much deeper than they taught me in history class, for one thing. But what got me the most excited was the fact that, years before I ever learned about these philosophies, I had already thought about them. For instance, the Egocentric Prediciment, which states that anything percieved outside of the mind is colored by our own thoughts and way of thinking. I have thought things along that line for years, but I only learned that there was a term for my thoughts a week or so ago.

Now, the philosophies are very interesting to me, and I can respect the thoughts behind them. And something interesting about them is, you can't prove them wrong! Even the most out-there ones (in my opinion, solipsism is the most far-out) can't be proven wrong. The same arguments I use to go against something like solipsism could be counteracted by arguments against realism or conceptualism. How do we know that everything we see isn't in our heads? We don't. I don't believe solipsism ("you can only understand your own mind, and thus, everything we percieve exists only in our minds, from sight to texture to taste, et cetera") because it's a little too wacky and left-wing for me, but I can't logically prove it wrong. I say "if it's all in my head, how come there are things I don't know and people who are smarter than me exist?" Someone else says "because intelligence is an illusion that your mind keeps up, and in order to make it seem realistic (editor's note: "realism" is a relative concept, especially on this matter) your mind pretends you don't know things that other people do know." Both points are valid, but neither can be proven wrong.

I don't believe solipsism, but at the same time I have juggled solipsist thoughts in my mind, considering "what if" and "how about." Call me crazy, but this has lead me to create a world in my head. It's the world I often visit in dreams, and is very vivid and large. It has a cast of thousands (some of my pseudonyms online have come from this world in my head) and is a good way to escape from real life. I call it my pseudo-solipsist world, because that's what it is -- a false world in my head.

This has brought me to wonder (because I have an analytic and hypothetical mind that likes to wonder "what if"), assuming solipsism is true and everything is in my head, then where did I come from and what is the real world like? If my parents are in my head, how did I come in to existence? If the world is in my head, then what is the true reality that exists out of my head?

Impossible to tell. Fun to consider, though, and that's all that matters.

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