Solipsism

The other humans here seem so lifelike. But that just makes it more unsettling. I don’t really know what to think. When I’m around people, they seem very real—more real than me, even though I’m the only one that I know experiences things. They think like me. We have similar brains. The brain is what thinks. Things that don’t have brains can’t write words on a computer like this, and even many things that do have brains can’t either. So why does it feel almost as though I’m the one writing them?

But experiences are not something that I have ever seen anyone else have. Indeed, how can there be more than one consciousness? We are totally isolated! The only means of communication is through the illusion that we call the “world”. Believing that other people have experiences is a belief in something that cannot, not even in principle, be verified. We can never share another person’s experience of consciousness. If multiple consciousnesses do exist, they must be differentiated somehow—but by which property? How does the consciousness manage to latch onto the dead thing that it belongs to? How does it move forward through time, which is both in experience and in the world (unlike space which is only in the world and may be an illusion). It all seems a little too contrived. There must be something really fundamental about the structure of reality that we don’t understand.