How is anything real

Or, paradoxically, by confronting it, the way Charlie Kaufman does. Knowing we are in the cave may be as close as we can get to escaping it. Conceivably, technology could deliver us from the solipsism problem. Christof Koch proposes that we all get brain implants with wi-fi, so we can meld minds through a kind of high-tech telepathy. But do we really want to escape the prison of our subjective selves? The archnemesis of Star Trek: The Next Generation is the Borg, a legion of tech-enhanced humanoids who have fused into one big meta-entity.

Borg members have lost their separation from each other and hence their individuality. Resistance is futile. If solipsism haunts me, so does oneness, a unification so complete that it extinguishes my puny mortal self. Perhaps the best way to cope with the solipsism problem in this weird, lonely time is to imagine a world in which it has vanished.

Jellyfish, Sexbots and the Solipsism Problem. Rational Mysticism. For many years, he wrote the immensely popular blog Cross Check for Scientific American. Follow John Horgan on Twitter. Already a subscriber? Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue.

See Subscription Options. Discover World-Changing Science. A much more common disorder is derealization, which makes everything--you, others, reality as whole--feel strange, phony, simulated Derealization plagued me throughout my youth.

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But if it stands up, it would not only resolve some deep puzzles about quantum mechanics, it would turn our deepest preconceptions about reality itself inside out.

When it comes to forecasting how the world will behave, quantum theory is unsurpassed: its every prediction, no matter how counter-intuitive, is borne out by experiment. Electrons, for instance, can sometimes display behaviour characteristic of waves, even though they seem in other circumstances to behave like particles.

Before observation, such quantum objects are said to be in a superposition of all possible observable outcomes. Existing subscribers, please log in with your email address to link your account access. Another fiction humans collectively engage in is optimism. Neuroscientist Tali Sharot of University College London studies "the optimism bias": people's tendency to generally overestimate the likelihood of positive events in their lives and underestimate the likelihood of negative ones.

In the show, Sharot does an experiment in which she puts a man in a brain scanner, and asks him to rate the likelihood that negative events, such as lung cancer, will happen to him. Then, he is given the true likelihood. When the actual risks differ from the man's estimates, his frontal lobes light up. But the brain area does a better job of reacting to the discrepancy when the reality is more positive than what he guessed, Sharot said.

This shows how humans are somewhat hardwired to be optimistic. That may be because optimism "tends to have a lot of positive outcomes," Sharot told LiveScience. Optimistic people tend to live longer , healthier, more successful lives, she said, and the act of positive thinking can be a self-fulfilling prophecy. But this slightly distorted view of the world can also be a weakness — a person might continue to smoke because they don't expect to get lung cancer, for example. Being more realistic is important in some cases, Sharot cautioned.

Physicists look beyond the human mind for external reality, but even that reality isn't absolute truth. Fundamental reality as scientists understand it is based on quantum mechanics, a realm where all manner of strange things occur.