I am halfway through Stella Maris. Alicia’s solipsism is a mask.
One of the main themes throughout the book and a point she consistently drives home is the fact that mathematics represent something external to the human mind.
She says
- “equations who had conspired to usurp their own reality from the questionable circuitry of the creator’s brain”,
- “When you get to topos theory you are at the edge of another universe. You have found a place to stand where you can look back at the world from nowhere. It’s not just some gestalt. It’s fundamental”
- and
- “that the equations were not a supposition of the form whose life was confined to the symbols on the page which described them but that they were there before my eyes. In actuality.”
When she says that it’s “not just some gestalt”, it seems that she is saying “it’s not just some illusion”, it’s not just some perceived totality, it’s an actual external reality.
On top of this, she explains that intelligence is numbers, not words. This plays into the idea that math represents an objective truth, she even says in another passage that the point of quantum mechanics is to explain the universe. Words and language are subjective symbols, we simply overlay these symbols overtop a world that has objective rules. She even acknowledges that music has concrete rules as well. The only flexibility she gives to the “objectivity” of math is that mathematical ideas have a certain shelf life, as we are constantly relearning and reshaping them. But even that is a statement about human subjectivity, not external flexibility.
In my opinion, her “solipsism” is simply a mask she wears in order to cover up her intellectual elitism and a way of denying the fact that she is insane. She constantly reiterates that other people are not qualified to discuss and doubt her sanity. She says that collective consensus is not the same thing as objective truth, and that “one’s convictions as to the nature of reality must also represent one’s limitations as to the perception of it.” She does not like to take others at their word. In the first chapter when talking about Grothendieck, she is asked if she thinks he went crazy. Her response is that answering that question calls into question the nature of reality and what truly ‘exists’. “Define exists.”
She is very adamant about the fact that her cohorts are not hallucinations, they are vivid, she has no power over them, and they continue to exist when they are no longer in her presence. The fact that they continue to exist outside of her perception is an argument for them existing objectively, not subjectively.
Her hallucinations are simply evidence that she is special, and that she has peculiar insights, because only she is able to see them. This is not a statement about her mind shaping reality, it is a statement about her ability to perceive certain things others are not capable of seeing. It’s a statement about the limited subjectivity of her peers, not a denial of external truth. It is a reinforcement of external truth.
Her hallucinations, from her perspective and as she argues, are a combination of Schopenhauer’s will, Plato’s realm of forms, and Jung’s archetypes. They are her brain’s way of processing things in this world that have no physical representation, something only she can perceive