When I was six years old, I developed a theory that the Universe was divided into two worlds: The world that was inside my head, and the world that was outside my head.
I remember very clearly reasoning about this, and trying to work out how I could test my theory. My six year old brain quickly realized there was probably no good way to evaluate the relative “reality” of these two worlds, since they stood for incompatible things: On the one hand, the first world was the only one I had direct access to. On the other hand, everyone I cared about was in the second world.
Much later — when I was far older than six years of age — I learned that many philosophers throughout history had studied this very question. For one of us can ever truly get outside of our own heads, since we only have direct access to our own brains, not the brains of others. Yet to adopt Solipsism as a philosophy would be emotionally devastating, so we continually search for ways to reconcile the two worlds.
I remember that when the film “The Truman Show” came out, its premise seemed very familiar, since it brought me back to all of those early childhood musings. In my elementary school philosophical explorations, I had often looked around and asked myself “How do I know these people around me are real? I mean, how do I really know?”
Eventually, when I got older, resolution came to me in the form of Occam’s Razor: The idea that everyone was expending so much effort in a mere pretense of reality was far too complex an explanation. Besides, it suffered from the “Turtles all the way down” problem: If this reality was merely a facade, then how would I explain the reality that lay beyond the facade? Wouldn’t that be just a cover for yet another reality beyond, and so on ad infinitum?
Now when I think back on how all those thoughts were crowding into my six year old brain, it makes me suspect that such thoughts about existence have occupied other six year old brains as well. If we actually ever thought to talk with six year olds about these things, we might very well be surprised at what they could tell us.
When I was very young, I simply thought, the whole world exists only because of agreements we made. You have been told that is a tree and if you touch it, you think and feel “tree”, because that is what you learnt. But perhaps there somebody else, thinking and feeling something totally different about “the tree”, another truth another reality.
Honestly I still did not find a solution for me…thinking about looking for a six year old to talk to. 😉
My six yr old had more practical approach. Walking down the street holding my hand, he asked, “Mommy, what was it like AT THE BEGINNING OF TIME?” Wow. In two seconds I thought about matters, blackholes, volcanos, amebas. What came out of my mouth was, “Well, the earth was very hot”. Taken a back, he objected, “No Mommy, the beginning of time is WHEN YOU MET MY DADDY!” 🙂
As a 6 yr old I was constantly afraid my mind was getting out of my body and floating away looking at me from outside. This is still hard to explain…
We should definitely organize a conference of six year old existential philosophers. We might finally learn something about those really deep questions…