Can someone explain solipsism to me?

Question:

Can someone explain solipsism to me?

Best Answer - Chosen by Asker: Solipsism [from Latin solus: alone, and ispe: self.] is a philosophical theory that everything is in the imagination, and there is no reality outside one's own mind.

"My mind is the only thing that exists". It is an epistemological or metaphysical position that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified. The external world and other minds cannot be known and might not exist.

Because we can only verify our own experiences and no one elses, only the self is real.

This means that only your self exists, nothing else. All is a creation of your imagination including other beings. Other beings, who may appear to be alive, are actually just projections of your own being.

This is clearly very difficult to refute, as it is impossible to validate any experiences other than your own and therefore impossible to prove than any life, other than the self, is actually alive and not just a biological automaton that has learned to communicate as if it was alive.

In the history of philosophy, solipsism has served as a skeptical hypothesis, and, with the possible exception of a Heiddegerian ontology, is considered impossible to refute.