How can we be sure the world is real and everyone is concious?

[RumpleDumpleBum]

I am going to sound like i am completely insane but please be kind to me as I feel like I'm having some sort of existential crisis. Over the past few days I have been having really intrusive thoughts about how we can never prove anyone else's consciousness but our own and how do we actually know that what we perceive to be the world is real and not some sort of elaborate illusion or simulation. I'm worried thst everyone i know and love might just be projections of my mind. Has anyone else had thoughts like this? Please make me see reason.

Not denying you're right, but those examples are pretty easy to explain away - the books are blank until you start reading them, there is nothing behind each door until you knock, the languages are jumbled up nonsense that only form a real language if you start learning it, etc. If you're deep in this illusion, it's easy to believe it. Like a video game, the world is created as you move through it.

Your reassurance seeking reminds me very much of when I was suffering from health anxiety a few years back. Constantly obsessing over a particular thing, asking people for reassurance that it was ok, googling endlessly trying to find the one answer that would feel definitive.

Actually, it doesn't matter WHAT you're obsessing over, it's the fact that you've got yourself in a loop over this that's the most important thing. Whether you're the only conscious being in the universe (you're not), whether that tingling in my arm means I have MS (I didn't), it's not the thought itself that's the issue, it's how your brain is handling it and how seriously you're taking it. If you find you can't snap out of it, I suggest along with other posters, that it might be worth making a GP appointment. Stay off chat GPT, it's an incredibly dangerous tool for mental health.

🩵🩵

That’s good, that’s what you have been pushing for.

This reply really isn't helpful as its just confirming that my fears could be correct

Thing is, nobody can actually convince you that life is real when you’re in the middle of an episode of depersonalisation/derealisation. It’s not a philosophical exercise, it’s your brain shutting down to protect yourself. Reassurance-seeking won’t help particularly, getting to the root of what it’s happening now and how you can manage whatever it is that’s causing the episode is the only thing really.

What is it you actually believe OP?

That when you go shopping, all the other 100’s of people that are in the supermarket with dull trolleys arent actually genuinely buying food but are just placed there boy someone/something for the purpose of making you think the world is a real place and other people live in it?

And when you watch the news? You think it’s all actors and everything has been set up solely for you think there’s a world out there when there actually isn’t?

Or do you think it’s like The Truman Show but on a bigger scale? That everyone on the planet thinks everything is real, but there is something higher up that is in control of everything and we are just pieces in their board game?

BTW, I’m not being critical or judgemental or anything like that, I’m just trying to understand what you actually believe? (Or dont).

I've imagined countless possible scenarios but the one that scares me the most is the one where I'm alone in thr universe and my experiences aren't really happening. It wouldn't bother me if ut was a simulation but everyone else was concious too. So yes, my biggest fears are I am the only concious one and everyone else are just AI or non player characters. I have also imagined a version where it is a replay of a world that has previously actually existed, as an experiment but again only i am real.

I tried to edit it but Mumsnet wouldn't allow. I meant to add that this was purely from an interesting philosophical standpoint. It's something philosophers have debated for centuries so we should be allowed to explore it, but please see my post below it for my response to you x

I'm pretty certain that I'm not part of a simulation for you. It's a much more straightforward explanation that the world is real and people exist independently from you than the idea that only you exist and someone (who?) has created a simulation of billions of people just to fool you.

Or to put it another way, you're not that special, the rest of us are here too!

My life is really crap at the moment OP. I’m having countless health issues, it’s taken so much from me and my family has been affected in so many ways. Believe me, if I was AI and had the chance to create a simulated life for myself, then this wouldn’t be it.

I have worked as a paediatric nurse for 17 years and O have seen many babies and children go through horrendous treatments and illness, witnessed families endure incredible trauma and seen children die awful deaths in front of me…..and I promise you, it was all very real. I’m pretty sure when I was dealing with all these horrors (as many health care professionals do hundreds of times a day across the country) you aren't present at them, so they aren’t being done for the purpose of making you think there is a ‘real world’ when there isn’t.

Things are happening even when you aren’t there to see them, and if you aren’t then being told about them what would be the point of them taking place in the first place if everything was being done as a ‘created world’ for you?

You aren’t the only real person amongst millions of other fake characters and real life is happening absolutely everywhere to everyone else too.

I started obsessing over the theory that Area 51 is actually just an ‘exit’ out of an augmented reality world.. like a real life Truman Show type deal.

im still skeptical 🤣

And this poster has a point….

Do you really think that the whole world has been created as a stage show purely for your benefit?

Can you even imagine how much work would have to go into putting on that level of performance?

Do you genuinely think you are a special enough person for someone to have done all of this for you?

And for what purpose?

And if you are real, but nobody else is…. how were you born if you don’t believe your mother is real and birthed you?

This

Your brain is creating a mental barrier between reality and you because it finds your life and your surroundings threatening or unbearable

As an exercise, consider...

• why your brain would think that
• what you can do to lower that perceived threat

Once you have lowered that perceived threat level, observe how your thoughts about the reality of existence are affected

I’ve often wondered when I think too much if we are really just living in our heads and none of it’s real. But if this is what my imagination came up with, how depressing. Why wouldn’t I imagine myself as a millionaire on a yacht somewhere, instead of working 9-5…

You’ve got yourself into an unwinnable scenario. Nothing anybody says can convince you that your scenario isn’t real because you can just say “well the simulation would say that”. I’d echo what the other people have said, you’re not that special and the world hasn’t been made just for you to move about in.

In fairness, if you weren’t clearly going through a destructive mental health issue, I’d suggest that the level of self importance / narcissism / main character energy involved to believe that the entire world revolves around you is astonishing. It doesn’t, you’re just an insignificant one of 7 billion who are pointlessly and randomly alive on a rock on the edge of one of trillions of galaxy’s and the term between your birth and your death is an insignificant blink of the eye in the life of the universe. You were born, live and love and will die and within a few dozen years will be completely forgotten. It’s quite freeing when you think about things this way.

on the plus side if the universe is just a simulation based around you, then I think that makes you god, which is pretty cool.

What if its not just me but there are others being simulated but we're not actually here physically, we're all just connected to a computer. Or what if some people are concious, being tested but some are just non concious robots as it was just easier to do a few people rather than billions?

There’s not a lot we could do about it

So what? How will you live your life differently if you knew that was true?

Do you think its possible/likely? Does it not worry you?

Even if it were true, why does it worry you?

Is it worry you are feeling? Or fear?

Fear and also depression that no one else might be real and that I'm alone in an empty fake universe and that it all might not be as it seems

The world is bizarre but you are taking thought experiments literally. We are our bodies, we are physical beings that interact with each other. The world outside you definitely exists.

Philosophy a level also sent my mind into these sorts of spirals years ago when I was a teenager 😄

I also often get the ‘wow everyone here will one day be dead and gone’ thoughts a lot. I guess just trying to channel it into a ‘so don’t take things too seriously or stress the small stuff’ mindset is a good way round it

But when you see other people bleeding doesn’t that prove to you they are a real, living being and not AI generated?

Or when you see people crying real tears?