multiple times a day I have the realization "holy shit, I have a body I'm alive and all sorts of bad stuff can happen to my body and I can't to nothing about it" and it starts to panic me, I literally get paralyzed from the panic, sometimes it feels like psychosis and I'm scared that I will hurt myself :(
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Why am I this particular consciousness instead of another one?
Why am I experiencing this body, this perspective, this stream of awareness, and not yours?
If consciousnesses are truly separate, what determines which one “you” are? Why aren’t you a random child in another country? Why aren’t you someone who lived 2,000 years ago? Why aren’t you every mind simultaneously?
Materialism doesn’t really answer this. It says consciousness emerges from brains, but that only explains how a mind functions, not why subjectivity is occurring from one specific location rather than another.
You can describe my brain objectively forever and still never explain why the first-person perspective associated with it is mine.
And the answer is simply: because this angle is what currently exists in consciousness.
There is no metaphysical “selector” assigning souls to bodies. No cosmic lottery deciding which person you become. The apparent separation between conscious beings is itself the illusion.
There aren’t billions of fundamentally separate subjects.
There is only subjectivity itself, taking different forms.
And the reason you can never experience “being someone else” is the same reason a dream character cannot step outside the dream to view the dreamer.
The self feels individual because experience is structured that way. But the fact that you can only ever be “you” it's not evidence of separateness, it's the evidence that consciousness is singular!
And I also want to address the major problem with many different subjective experiences:
Why 8 billion humans? Why not 8 trillion? Why not infinitely many conscious beings? Why not exactly one?
Any worldview that posits multiple separate subjects seems to inherit this arbitrariness problem.
If consciousnesses are fundamentally distinct entities, then reality apparently contains some specific number of isolated first-person centers. But what determines that number? Why does reality partition subjectivity into exactly this many perspectives at this moment in history? Makes no sense at all
If you take a psychedelic or have a NDE you can actually have the experience of being INFINITE, if your bubble of experience is infinite then it means that it has no borders and no limits, therefore there is nothing outside the infinite bubble. This is metaphysical solipsism, it's unfalsifiable and can be verified. I have tried many times disproving this but I have failed everytime, solipsism always wins no matter what.
Something that brought me great joy before the realization of solipsism was the feeling of Sonder, the profound, often sudden realization that every random passerby is living a life as vivid, complex, and detailed as your own.
I would drive my car observing the landscape, and I was amazed, thinking that each flower, each leaf of each tree had its own story...
Guess what, it's all bullshit lol
I know it's a silly question but...
no mather how much I think other people aren't real, I can't do any kind of evil because I have the gut feeling that a sentient being will feel the consequences of my actions and I feel really bad about it
A child's rhyme stuck in my head
It said that life is but a dream
I've spent so many years in question
To find I've known this all along
I was so relieved to know that solipsism is true and others don't suffer, but then I realized that it will be me that will have to suffer through all that shit. Well, that sucks...