Consider the words on the screen. There are two sources of information.
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The words, how they’re arranged and such.
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The meaning that you assign to the words. Meaning drawn from a lifetime of memories.
99% of the information comes from the assigned meaning. So 99% of what’s going on here is you talking to yourself.
Language arises out of social behavior, beginning with imitation and reinforcement in early childhood. Children who don’t learn language (by interacting with adults and older children) in the critical period of early childhood, suffer serious developmental problems. So language is fundamentally anti-solipsistic, even anti-individualistic: you only acquire it by being brought into a community of language-users.
And written language begins as an encoding for spoken (or signed) language: everyone learns to speak (or sign) before they learn to read, and learning to read starts with learning associations between written structures and spoken ones. (For English-speakers, that means phonics: the relationship between letters or groups of letters, and sounds.)
Meaning isn’t “assigned” solipsistically; rather it’s “acquired” from a community of use. A single user can’t decide for themselves that “dog” means squirrel. I suspect that if you look at the word “dog” and try to convince yourself that it refers to a bushy-tailed tree-climbing nut-munching rodent, you will be aware that you are doing something very silly, something deliberately contrary to your knowledge.
Ok, I’ll be the one who does it…
raises hand
What does solipsistic mean in this context? Or any context at all, for that matter…
The idea that only your own mind is certain to exist is solipsism. I think I sort of get what OP is saying. That because words don’t mean something outside of human brains they’re solipsistic.
But I disagree because the fact that someone else wrote it means it isn’t solipsistic. If you believe in solipsism (I don’t) then everything is in your own mind, not merely certain parts.
If you don’t believe in solipsism, then you acknowledge the external world exists so it’s specifically a form of communication. It feels odd to believe in the external world but look at communication, something we’ve specifically developed to transmit our internal thoughts to others, and call it solipsistic when it wouldn’t exist if we believed there was no other hidden information inside other “people’s” minds (or whatever solipsists believe people are).
It means yr all sucked up into yr head. Talking to yrself. Playing games you created.
