How can I prove that everything I see really exists and isn’t just an illusion/ image created by my brain? How can I really know that once I look away from something that it is still there and doesn’t turn black? I thought about the mirror, but maybe the image in the mirror is also just created. The people I hear talking behind me could also be gone but I only hear the audio and once I turn around they appear visually. I thought about using a camera but the content that is saved on the camera could also be fake.
Can someone tell me how to prove that others really exist?
How can I really know that people are responding to this question and not only AI? I have absolutely no proof that this forum could be real. Look at ChatGPT.
I have so many questions.
All “Plato’s cave”/Deacartes, references aside, one thing you could do would be to prove that the outside rules work, even when you are not paying attention to them.
Take a large cooler. Put it near the sink. Find a method by which the water can drip into the cooler. Turn on the spigot at a low volume, and leave for a while. Measure this time. But do not measure anything about the water other than that, it’s dripping slowly enough you can afford to leave for a couple of hours and it not fill up.
Go do stuff and have fun. Take your mind off of your experiment.
Come back, put a different vessel under the spigot, leaving everything else, the same, so that you can measure how long it takes to fill up a certain amount with the water. Turn off the water, determine how much water made it into the bucket, then, using your reference vessel, determine how much water the spigot was putting out with your settings, in that period of time. Now do the math and determine, using your two vessels, how long you were gone for. Compare that to how long you were actually gone. There is enough randomness in this system, depending on how omniscient you are, so that it would be infeasible for your brain to keep track of it.
I like that you’re aware of your own assumptions. So yeah, how can you be sure that it would infeasible to one’s brain to keep track of things? That’s a very “real world human”-centric way to put things. A 100% omniscient entity would have no problem with this.
You could do various things to make it harder (drop some odd-shaped things in the cooler), but omniscience pretty much has to be a hard limit - and so we’re back to Plato’s cave (or brain in-a-box) otherwise. If you’re omniscient, though, you would know what people are doing when you’re not focused on them.
This led to an interesting question. Can a being be omnipotent without being omniscient? In other words, maybe I do create reality as I go (hence omnipotent) but I don’t know how I do it nor what things are doing when I’m not looking at them (hence not omniscient)
I don’t see why not - I can create lots of things I know nothing about, not to mention emergent behavior.