[nico]

> They existed for billions of years before I came around.

And how did you come to learn this? Through your consciousness

Everything that you can know or experience is mediated through your consciousness

Anything you believe to be objective truth or reality, you came to believe through consciousness

There is no way for you (or anyone else for that matter), to know if anything really exists outside our own consciousness

[tsimionescu]

While you are right in some sense, your position is solipsistic, and solipsism is not considered a fruitful line of inquiry even in philosophy or religion. It is a conversation ender: there is nothing more to add to the conversation if I believe that I am the only thing that exists and there is no objective reality behind my consciousness. Even logic wouldn no longer be usable in arguments in this world view.

[some_furry]

This makes for an interesting philosophy discussion, but is not a useful observation about physics.

[nico]

Physics is philosophy

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37721284

You might not like it and prefer to focus only on the models and the math

But fundamentally, all of our knowledge, including physics only really exists in our consciousness

You might also not find it useful, but that’s your own personal subjective opinion, not a universal objective truth (same goes for anything I’ve said)

[tsimionescu]

Not even that. There is really nothing to discuss if the only thing I believed is that I exist, and anything else is potentially a hallucination. Even p ^ ¬p could be true, perhaps I'm just hallucinating the rule that says it isn't.

[nico]

In a way yes, your whole reality is your own internal hallucination, and there is no way to break out of it

That doesn’t mean you can’t explore anything within that

In fact a lot of eastern philosophical and religious traditions focus exactly on that, how exploring your inner self is a valid and very good way of discovering reality

Not sure why you fixate on “nothing to discuss” or “conversation ending”

Neither the ideas above nor solipsism are dead ends, there’s plenty of exploration to be had within those

Now if you don’t like them or want to dismiss them, you are free to do so, that’s your own personal take, but that’s not an objective absolute truth