> Ed wrote:

>> There is much I don't understand about epistemology.  I can sort of
>> see the doubt about the external world but I don't understand the
>> certainty that the solipsist exixts.  How could one demonstrate to
>> one's self that one is real?

>

>> Perhaps "I" am a figment of someone elses imagination and so am no
>> more real than the putative external world.  This may be naive, if so
>> point me at an argument.

>
> I think that Witt present just such an argument when he says that
> "I am my world. (The microcosm.)" (5.63),  "There is no such
> thing as the subject that thinks or entertains ideas" (5.631), and
> "The subject does not belong to the world: rather, it is a limit of the
> world" (5.632). So the answer to his rhetorical question "Where
> _in_ the world is a metaphysical subject to be found?" (5.633) is
> "nowhere" -- "The philosophical self is [...] the metaphysical subject,
> the limit of the world -- not a part of it" (5.641). The philosophical
> self, the metaphysical subject "shrinks to a point without extension,
> and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it" (5.64).
>
> So the answer to your question "How could one demonstrate to
> one's self that one is real?" is that there is no "subject that thinks
> or entertains ideas" (5.631) to whom that may be demonstrated --
> there is only "the world" (The microcosm), and any notion that this
> non-existent subject is "a figment of someone elses imagination"
> (and so is "no more real than the putative external world") is just
> another part of "the world" (The microcosm).