Zeraph

Anyone else ever feel detached from reality? Ever feel like a solipsist?

Can we prove there is an external reality? We can't really, all we can prove is "I think, therefor I am."

The irony here is I may be talking to myself, in my own made up world.

Now the self would want to keep intact the idea of an external reality, so if I get more responses that are for that, then that may weigh more heavily toward solipsism for me. If many agree, then maybe there is an external reality. Although just telling myself that ruined that experiment....

Ummmm. All we experience is in our own mind. All our senses come down to brain mechanisms and wiring. Even if there is a true external reality then we each must view it quite differently. Makes me wonder if the color purple is purple to you.

Its kind of like a crazy person asking himself if he's crazy and another voice from thin air says "Naw, you're as sane as I" hehe.

Manic_Skafe

Well, what could one ever hope to experience beyond - and if not beyond then at least through - one's own sensations? Wouldn't the ability to do so require you to be something more than just yourself? Something godly, something seriously unhuman?

I'm probably not doing much to satisfy the OP but I see reality not as this thing which exists in actuality but as the result of ceaseless response to sensory stimuli, the selective interpretation of those inputs and a fabrication or projection of the real - of reality - on the part of your body and mind.

I realize none of that really gets at any of the questions posed but how can you really when doing so requires you first transform yourself into something else?

Solipsism couldn't serve as a solution to any of these problems as it simply repackages them and raises a few more of it's own. Reality may not exist, there may be no other minds out there and everything you experience may well be your own self-generated delusion but seeing such an idea as anything more than just an idea results in the same old regress you're attempting to rise above.

...

The experience of life may not result in any real definitive truth but it certainly constitutes a truth. Aside from it being all we've really got, I see it simply as a much more useful mechanism for sorting out what we're doing before we die than pitting ourselves against the unresolvable and feigning paralysis.

Maybe I shouldn't have responded.

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"Porn is a zoo of exotic animals that becomes boring upon ownership." -Nersesian

Ourcrazymodern?

As a mere figment of your imagination, I can't speak for myself. I imagine our individual natures prove outside reality as well as circumstances allow. I'm certain pretending it's all in our heads is silly.

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BE JUST AND FEAR NOT

Zeraph

No, all responses are welcome.

Reality is a funny thing. I've come to experience is as it is; very subjectively. Which makes one wonder how real reality really is, which leads ones mind to other thoughts such as solipsism.

And thoughts. How real is a thought compared to a "real" concrete object? The only way we interact with said object is through sensory perceptions and our ideas of them from birth. Which means thoughts are real as real can be.

purplelirpa

My boyfriend and I went through this when we first met. There were a lot of odd coincidences in how we met each other, for a while it seemed like it must just be a strange glitch in an enormous computer program. So, one coincidence after another finally left us feeling this sort of surreal unreality for about 2-3 months.

The daily grind set in, and a lot of repetition left us really unable to sustain the level of hyper-vigilance that one must have when being so suspicious of one's surroundings.

Zeraph

I'd like to hear the story. If its not appropriate here perhaps PM me?