What caused you to assume that reality and other humans besides your self are real and actually exist?
How satisfied with this assumption are you?
Are you totally sure that you are real?
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58 Answers
What caused you to think otherwise?
@syz
there is no clear evidence that you are real or that i actually precieve you through my sensory input. i have no way of telling if you are anything but a figment of my immagination.
and given that i dont tend to believe unsupported claims, i would be being inconsistent if i did not honestly ask my self this question.
omg this Q is so deep n thought provoking~
what is “real” anyway, mannn
Because you asked the question. That’s how I know.
@Sarcasm
inspired by the dull questions question. yet given your name and the regularity of this question in the philosophical world, me thinks you are yanking my chain.
Sarcasm is done best when indistingushable from honesty.
Well, I just got a call from Neo and he convinced me to join his rebellion allowing all Flutherites to free ourselves from our dream world. Reality is out there somewhere. Let’s go get it!
@mattbrowne am I looking for a lady with a white rabbit?
Don’t take the blue pill!
@shego
the question could have been asked by you. without evidence, you cant say for sure that you are not the only person in existence. and that everything you see hear feel and taste is just a work of your mind.
furthermore, your answer could be a work of my mind.
@poisonedantidote I’ve seen the matrix. I am a figment of your imagination, cause all you can do is imagine who I am. I know who I am but do you?
@shego
good point. but this question is far older than the matrix. the matrix works on the basis that there is actually a reality, just that those in the matrix are not experiencing that reality.
in the context im asking this, i am asking if said reality exists at all.
@poisonedantidote I’m still young. I didn’t know anything about this stuff untill I saw the movie, and did some research for myself. I find it to be very interesting, but I believe that the reality we are in does exist, but I also think that other realities do exist too. I agree with @SpatzieLover.
I don’t think that the pain I expirenced in the hospital was fake. I don’t believe that the terror was fake either.
@SpatzieLover maybe its an age thing then, im only 26. then again, i would just like to point out that prolonged exposure to the possibly fake input does not necessarially mean the input is real.
and looking at @shego‘s answer, i would also like to add, that there is a chance that our minds make it real.
the pain could be very real indeed, just the source may not be so real.
I assume, but I do not know I, or anything else is real, 100%. At times, I feel like a shadow, a dream, and other times I acutely feel my existence. Humanity will never have the answer to this question.
@poisonedantidote I give credit to the aliens. They put me in a lot of pain. Could it be that the hospital is a place where aliens do research?
@SpatzieLover
indeed i do, but i still have no way of knowing if it is my fingers putting pressure on my skin that causes the pain. or if the thought to pinch my self causes my brain to feed me a story where i see an arm move and pinch me.
@shego
aliens? i would be interested in hearing more about that if its not too personal.
@poisonedantidote no I’ve never been abducted, but it is a personal belief that there too is other life forms out there. It is my opinion.
Oy vey. Go take a philosophy class. You’ll encounter Descartes, the brain-in-a-vat thought experiment, Nagel’s famous bat essay on the incommensurability of experience, and so forth. I can suggest loads of books on the problem of mind-body-world identity if you want.
@shego
well, looking at the drake equation and how life works here. i too would be inclined to think there is other life out there.
This is one of those:
Dreams are dependent to life but life is not dependent on dreams.
discussions. It could go round & round. I don’t think I’d like to be dreaming of dreaming not that I’d daydream during my dream state.
@SpatzieLover indeed, this could be drawn out for ever without a conclusive answer.
even if we created a mind reading machine to ’‘prove’’ that other people do indeed think and thus do indeed exist, we still have no way of telling if the machine is real.
its probably the unanswerable nature of the question that leads most of us to conclude and assume that things are indeed real.
@SpatzieLover I agree, but it is Sunday, so I do need to do something interesting/ say something interesting. Tradition. what can I say.
I have thought about this subject numerous times and have generally come to the conclusion that much any theory is possible. I have always thought: “Why not?”.
It’s possible that my life and surroundings are simply pictures, feelings and sounds my mind has created; or something that was created for me by something greater. My body could be laying in a vast grey space while my mind is here in this world.
I guess we will not really know the possibilities and capabilities of the human mind untill we can discover what we are truly mentally capable of.
For all we know, none of us exist; created in another’s mind . It’s a vast and beautiful topic. Bravo on this question! It has made my day :D – LB
I’m not going to lie; initially I stupidly assumed it because it felt like a natural thing to assume. A biologically encoded assumption. I think all vertebrates assume this the moment they realise they’re receiving stimuli like the ones we receive.
Then in my teen years I became a hardcore sceptic agnostic philosopher kiddo and started questioning everything and then some, very certain that nothing is certain, including the notion that nothing is certain.
And now I am content with the position that while the existence of a world outside my mind is not completely entirely abso-freaking-lutely 100% certain, it’s still probable enough to make it reasonable to assume so.
The facts are simple – I am receiving stimuli. More interestingly, the stimuli I receive are not random, but highly coherent stimuli that always match exactly with the “there’s a world out there” explanation that seems to be hardwired into my brain.
Simplifying the possibilities into an ad-hoc dichotomy, I’m going to say that either there is a world out there that is the origin of all these stimuli, or they come from somewhere else. If the world I imagine them to come from is real, that’s a good explanation why the stimuli always match with that model. If there is not a world out there, then there must be some other origin(s) for the stimuli, plus a reason why the stimuli behave in this particular way.
Maybe that counts as an argument from lack of imagination, but I can’t think of any other way to explain the stimuli I’m receiving that is not more far-fetched than postulating the existence of a world out there.
I’ve seen the Matrix, thank you. That would be a more far-fetched explanation. Instead of postulating one complicated world, you’d postulate one equally complicated cyber-world embedded into another complicated world.
David Deutsch has a really good argument against solipsism and I tend to agree strongly with him. His argument goes something like this:
The people and things I see in the world around me behave as if they were controlled autonomously. If these things and people were actually controlled by the subconscious part of my mind then the subconscious part of my mind must make seemingly intractable calculations. The subconscious part of my mind would have to follow specific sets of rules that are consistent for each person and thing that I can observe in the universe. The subconscious part of my mind that would have to calculate these things to such an accurate degree to achieve the illusion of a working and consistent universe would be computationally equivalent to an outside universe. Using Ockham’s Razor, since both methods of explanation are computationally equivalent, we can eliminate the solipsism explanation because it invokes numerous assumptions without explanation and a real world makes none of these assumptions but explains the phenomena equally well.
In reality there is technically no way to tell. However, if the two options are computationally equivalent, we might as well act as if we live in a real world since the outcome will be no different. The exact same thing goes for the idea of being in a computer simulated universe.
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@Fyrius Actually your argument looks quite a bit like Deutsch’s and arriving at it yourself is even more impressive. I had a similar history of skepticism and questioning if anything exists. This argument is a pretty strong one that stuck with me.
I am sure I am real, and that is the only thing I could ever be sure about.
@Shuttle128
Haha, thank you.
I don’t deserve all the credit, though – most of my current point of view has been shaped by learning about the scientific method, and in particular about the concepts of reasonable assumptions and acceptable error margins.
@Fyrius
“the facts are simple, I am receiving stimuli”
How is this a fact?
Well, when Seth Lloyd programmed the universe everything looked just fine. The protoearth grew by accretion and eventually our planet got hit by a Mars-size object. Keep in mind Seth loves violent computer games and they inspired him to insert a few violent encounters. Eventually his quantum computer program executed a function called replicateOrganism(a), but of course this wasn’t much fun, so Seth invented sex and greatly improved his function now called replicateOrganism(a,b). To make it more pleasurable he eventually added a new feature called an orgasm. Well, because of the qubits you could really be the man and the woman at the same time. Amazing. Output increased dramatically. So here we are and I wonder who still thinks Fluther is real.
It has never occurred to me to think otherwise. They have been a party of my reality since I was born and I have no reason to believe they are any different. Also, why would people create such drama, pain and trouble for themselves? Anyway, if they aren’t real, I wish I could just bump the asses I don’t want to deal with right out and have the others come and go as I choose.
believing that you are the only real person is a classic trait of a psychopath.
@hookecho ROFL.
well, you will be pleased to know im not sure if i am real either. the voices tell me i am not all the time.
If everything were a product of my imagination then I would created this and that is more than I can accept.
If I am in a dream state with this sinus & double ear infection, then will someone please kick me awake?!
“Thus I refute Berkeley,” said Dr. Johnson as he kicked the boulder.
Oops, did I miss something? Sorry, I committed a faux pas, and failed to read the preceding posts. Can you ever forgive me? (That is, if you even exist.)
Ah, Descartes. Well, as I have always thought of this type of thing—I can see other people, I experience things, I have a mind that allows me to take all of this in…what’s the point in doubting it? I really just don’t understand why you would think that these things don’t exist. If touching and seeing something isn’t enough proof that something exists, then what is??
Would definitive knowledge either way alter the way one lives?
@jaketheripper That was exactly my point. The outside (or inside) world will react in exactly the same way whether it is your mind doing the computation or a real physical world. Either is exactly the same computationally. Those people that “exist” out in your subconscious are computationally the same as if they were real. If the exact same computations must be performed to create the illusion as are needed in a real physical world there is no difference whatsoever between them. It might as well be assumed that we live in a real world because it assumes the least.
@jaketheripper @Shuttle128 I forget if it was John Locke or someone else, but he says basically the same thing: the only instruments we can rely on consistently are our senses, which are constantly receiving stimuli. However imperfect, they can be used to observe repeatable cause and effect actions. Whether these actions are real or not does not matter, as long as they can be consistently observed by our human senses.
@jackm
I think you might misinterpret me. I wrote this from my own point of view; substitute yourself wherever I said “I” or “me” to translate it into yours. Any such argument against solipsism can only be formulated from the point of view of the person that considers the argument.
If that’s not the reason for your disagreement, I can only ask: would you really contest the notion that you are receiving stimuli?
It’s debatable to a philosopher whether what you see right now really is a computer screen, and it’s similarly debatable whether the experience is really caused by light hitting cone and rod cells in eyes that are connected to a brain that houses your mind. But whatever its origins, whatever its nature, the experience is happening.
Right now, as you are reading this, information is entering your conscious mind that you are not consciously generating. Can you agree to this?
Well, if it’s not absurd that the external world doesn’t exist, then surely it’s equally not absurd that your unconscious mind is generating the stimuli, isn’t it?
@Fyrius
First off let me say I do believe there is a world outside my head.
“Right now, as you are reading this, information is entering your conscious mind that you are not consciously generating. Can you agree to this?”
No. How do I know I am not simply generating it? When I dream, I generate the effects of stimuli in my brain, and I am so sure it’s real. How do I know I am not just making all this up in my head?
@jackm
“First off let me say I do believe there is a world outside my head.”
I assumed so. There’s arguably little point in talking to someone who doesn’t exist. :P
So let’s draw a distinction between the conscious mind and the subconscious mind. Can we then agree that your conscious mind is receiving stimuli, perhaps from your subconscious?
I think this is largely semantics, really. The point is that you experience the perception of stimuli. The rest of the argument deals with whether these stimuli come from an outside world, your own subconscious, the Matrix or wherever.
@Fyrius
Yes, I will agree I am not consciously aware of creating, or receiving these stimuli. They just come in. I assume they come from some outer world, but I can never really be sure.
@jackm
Righto.
Well, with that in place, I refer to what I wrote up there.
It’s debatable to a philosopher whether or not it’s really a computer screen or the dastardly deeds of some mad scientist who loves keeping brains in vats like little wrinkled pets, but come on!
It’s pointless – there is no solution to the problem. Wittgenstein would tell us that it’s therefore not a problem with the world, rather with semantics. If there is no solution to the problem possible – it is, arguably, a linguistic trompe l’oeuil rather than a real “problem” – then perhaps we should spend our energies thinking about something interesting.
Positivism does, occasionally, still have something to offer…
1) It just felt like the simplest assumption to make that leads to my perceptions of cause and consequence forming (something resembling) a coherent whole. If I put my hand in a fire, I hurt. The assumption that the fire is real and really hurts my real hand makes it easier to navigate the world than the assumption that there’s really no fires, hands, or hurts.
2) In the case of other people, since I cannot know, I rather take the risk that I end up looking a bit of a fool being nice to imaginary beings than the risk that I end up being an asshole towards real beings.
I am not completely satisfied with the above reasoning, because “simplest” in it is sort of circular, but for practical reasons it works well enough.
I am sort of convinced that because I think, something exists. Whether or not that something in any meaningful way corresponds to anything that I perceive as “I” I am less certain of. But as I said above, for practical reasons, I prefer to assume it does.
I think you’re wrong. I’ve always thought of myself as the only real thing in this universe.
@cbloom8
Then who did you just say is wrong, exactly?
@Fyrius The dream person that acts in ways completely indistinguishable from a real person.
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