Vass wrote:
*Cue Icy discussing the nature of reality.*
Icy's around even less than I am these days, so I'll have to fill in, as a fellow <strike>longwinded navel-gazing smartass</strike> philosophically inclined gentleman.
As I see it, you couldn't really prove that anyone is real, including the people you see every day, given that you have only your own consciousness of your senses to go by. Which could be an illusion, a computer simulation, an imagining, or just wrong for any variety of reasons. You can't even prove that
you exist in the form you think you do. The only thing you can be sure of is that your consciousness exists in some form, as you're directly aware of being aware of it, and therefore there must be
something to have said awareness*. You can only surmise from the consistent aspects of your observations of the world that you're in a human body and that the rest of us are the same**, although for all you know you might be the only real one and the rest of us are just fancy computer programs or some such. But as there's no evidence for that the most reasonable supposition based on past experiences would be that other people exist in a way similar to how we observe ourselves to exist, and there are indeed real humans on the other end of the keyboard putting information into the forum.
Except me, of course. I'm an AI, and always have been. Thought I mentioned that at some point in the past.
* (Yes, Plato and Descartes may have said it first, but I said it
later, and uh, less elegantly. Go me.)
** (If Icy stops by he'd probably argue that even this is an assumption too far, although he doesn't exist so I don't have to listen to what he says :P)