What the World Seems

what the world seems:

"so at one point in time it seemed completely real, for an instant, that i could be the only person in reality. it was my solipsistic moment. and let me tell you it was a frightening concept. but even worse was that, ok, i'm thinking i'm the only real person, but all the while, i'm in a crowded room surrounded by people! it's one thing to think i am alone, but then what is going on with all the other people i can see? it means a total loss of control, right? a reality of falsity that you have little or no power over."

"but you came back from that? you stopped believing that? how long did it go on for?"

"well, yes and no. that was one extreme. and people like simple thinking, right? either other people are all not real or the other side of the coin is everyone is real. now i had gone for years thinking that everyone was real, so long that i can always revert to that, but the thing is, i think i've come to the conclusion that thinking in black and white, all or nothing, you know, that kind of thinking is flawed. what is more probable, and in the end you have to deal with probabilities because no one is going to come up to you and tell what the truth is, right, is that the world is somewhere in between."

"you mean some people are real and some people are not, they're philosophical zombies?"

"exactly. the philosophical question of the guy dreaming about being a butterfly and is he really a man or a butterfly dreaming he is a man, i think the correct answer is both. what this example just points out is, again, we like to think of binary possibilities, it's one or the other, but the truth is, to put it simply, it's all real. there are elements of truth in both situations."

"ok. but because we're talking, we know the other person is real, right, and solipsism can't be strictly true?"

"yes. but the part of that where other people are not real, is what i'm saying, that is probably the case. just not everyone."

"but how can you disprove that everyone is real and we're all together on earth?"

"well one thing i do remember clearly is that my life on earth began as a sequence of dreams, each more and more "awake" like until we get to where i have my first clear memory of being on earth at the age of three, the summer of 1975, i mean fully awake, on a flight to Honolulu from Taipei. and the weird thing is, you'd expect to forget a lot of dreams, but i still remember each of the dreams in my pre-earth sequence. so what i'm saying is, earth has something to do with the dream world. sometimes, i wonder if something really bad were to happen in life here on earth, would i "wake up" from the waking nightmare, in the world i came from before earth?"

"but what you're saying about people wanting to think of distinct possibilities, you know, as if only the extremes could be true, it's because it's hard to make sense of something more complex where bits of both or even third or fourth possibilities could be true. you can accept that, i mean, but it's hard to know where to begin, and it's frustrating, because ultimately it becomes some kind of mathematical project, where you're looking at all the combinations that could exist and you try to assign probabilities to each. it's like you want to think life is simple but in the end it's a mess of Bayesian probabilities or something like that."

"i know. i'm constantly changing my assumptions. some days it's like, well, maybe i met a real person today and other days, no one around me is real, i'm wandering around in a waking dream. and it's not like in The Matrix, where in a sense the guy got out of being a brain in a vat. if you were a brain in a vat, you couldn't exactly stop being one. the "real world" in the movie may have more real people in it, that's all it is."

"that's slightly a whole other topic. what i want to know is, if some people are real and some aren't, how do you tell who is real and who isn't?"

"well as far as logic goes, and i'm not sure, real people are more shocking."

"because philosophical zombies are more a product of the unconscious?"

"right. they're more what you expect."

"well i've met plenty of shocking people, so that's at least a few dozen real people i guess. but what if you marry someone who isn't real, or marry someone who is real, for that matter? would you have a preference one way or the other?"

"well that's a minefield. i think i have the same policy for both when i'm with people. i can't get into obsessing, well, is this person real or not all the time."

"that's probably wise. but you can't exactly escape from that. once the question is out of the bag, so to speak, you can't avoid it anymore."

"well from a paranoid point of view, and i confess, i've lain awake frightened as anything some nights, both possibilities are worrying."

"right. if the other person is not real, then no big deal, right, is one way to look at any trouble. but what's the other fear?"

"it goes back to that moment when i thought i alone was real but was surrounded by a crowd. if that situation could exist, where the unconscious runs rampant, generating zombies everywhere, it just seems a dangerous place to be."

"so more real people, please. so i guess finally, what's a good number to hold in your mind as a best guess as to what the true population is?"

"i don't know, i wish i did. but i'm sure there are other worlds too and not everyone is on earth."

"come on, give me a number! something i wouldn't end up embarrassed by, should the truth ever get out."

"ok. maybe lower estimate high two digits, which would mean the collective unconscious is huge, like a supercomputer processing all these zombie people. high estimate, maybe a million, where you couldn't really tell the difference."

"so maybe median estimate 5 digits? somebody must have written all these books in the book stores, right?"

"the main variable we need to know is how much is the unconscious capable of? if it's a supercomputer, then anything is possible, right? then we get a low figure for the true number of people. if it requires that many people to produce all the literature and stuff like that in the world then it's a high figure. and anyway, you should probably even if you have the correct estimate consciously change your assumptions all the time."

"just to get used to all the possibilities?"

"right. exactly."

CLEARCHARGE