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.
You, me and every western philosopher for the last few hundred years all want an answer to this but as far as I know, the short answer is no - you can’t empirically prove anything exists outside of your own thoughts.
However, unless you particularly enjoy trying to answer that question, it’s simply more practical to accept as a fact, that your senses are telling the truth when they tell you something is real.
It’s an axiom, but axioms are helpful for allowing us to get on with living when we would otherwise just get stuck in a pointless loop of asking unanswerable questions.
That said, if you do enjoy the challenge of trying to answer these sorts of questions, you could probably start with Rene Descartes’ - Discourse on the Method. In that, Descartes kicks this whole topic off by asking “what happens if I systematically deconstruct everything I know to be real?” and eventually comes to the conclusion that yes, everything outside of our minds can be doubted but the one, irrefutable fact that holds up under any amount of scepticism, is that “if I can think, I exist”.
This is a pretty digestible article about the importance of the discovery of “cogito, ergo sum”/“I think, therefore I am”.