Ask Lemmy

I don't know if I'm real, but I know that I feel sad if I think about people I care about being harmed. I think this is what Descartes was getting at with his "I think, therefore I am". Because I can experience my own thoughts and feelings, I feel like I'm probably real, even if I don't know if other people are. If I'm real, that means my care for my loved ones is real, even if I don't know if they are real. Given that I can't know whether they're real or not, it doesn't really affect my actions.

If I'm not real, and I'm just a simulated consciousness in a virtual world, then that also doesn't affect things, because all I know is my own perspective. If the only reason why I care about my loved ones is that I've been programmed to, then I can't really do anything about it. If the prospect of not being real hurts me so much, then I could kill myself, to "exit the game", so to speak, but that would hurt my family. Caring about that is perhaps silly, given that this hypothetical would also involve them not being real, but I don't think that makes a difference. I just know that I feel sad when I think of them being sad, and that's one of the most real things I can comprehend.

I think of it sort of like how I think about a prospective afterlife. I'm agnostic, so I don't actively believe in somewhere like heaven. We can think of heaven as being "the real world" to this hypothetically virtual one. I haven't seen any compelling evidence to make me believe in heaven though, so whilst I'm open to the possibility that it exists, it seems that the most sensible thing is to focus on living as well as I can in this life. It's all I can do.