The mind does not create realty. It interprets it. We can easily look at this and come up with the rather illogical notion that the mind was creating reality. But this notion fails to explain two things:
1) What is the mind reacting to in order to create that reality if the mind is supposedly the only thing?
2) How is what the mind is reacting to always the same for everyone else? The only thing that changes from person to person is the nature of their reaction to the same thing.
"Whoa wait, why do you assume that the mind is creating the same thing for everyone? Our experiences might be comparable, but not same, there are things we can compare, but they might have different meaning to us, different emotions attached."
If solipsism was real, that would mean that somehow for everyone who tried to walk through a wall, even if not observed by another person, the mind creates an uniform law for all people who try to walk through the wall that says "You can't walk through the wall." How does this occur without an external agency?
Some people say that it occurs because we are all one mind. Okay. So what does this one mind use to create multiple minds? Some form of material agent? Well, if a material agent can exist inside the mind, why not outside as well? What is the standard that says a material cause can only occur within the non-material mind? And if the mind is material, why not the rest of the universe independently?
This is why idealism died a long time ago and only lives in today's world through a misguided tradition of nostalgia. Too many unanswerable questions which realism and physicalism has no trouble answering. That fact that everyone "feels" differently about the wall doesn't actually change reality. That is all just in your head. Literally.
You don't need to know what a wrench is made of in order to use it to turn a bolt. At the time, that thought really annoyed me; having the need to know EVERYTHING.
If how we view reality was up to our subjective interpretations, then our personal realities should diverge more times than not, and we should have a great deal of control over our perceptions at some point. But this is not the case. Human behavior is very predictable because it is shared over such a broad spectrum of individuals. Also, the times in which we are able to consciously control our external reality or our perceptions of it are few and far between, only occurring in the most rare of circumstances.
