Htydjtk

What if everything were fake? We are not real. We are all figments of the imagination of a single person's mind generating all the countless different minds with different worlds and different universes?

This kind of approach has always baffled me, this 'Hindu' sense that we should consider our reality less important than it seems to be.

There are different kinds of real. In ordinary life, we can look at things like social conventions without any enforcement mechanism. There is not some law that says we greet people we know when we meet them, but the expectation is real. If it has consequences, those are in how people think of us. And that exists in their interpretation of the meaningfulness of our deviation from this expectation.

All of that is imaginary. So imaginary things matter -- they drive social things, that can have real effects and consequences. The figments of your imagination are meaningful forces in your imaginary world. If this is all someone's imaginary world, it still has meaning. If there is no underlying reality that makes it 'more real', in that it will have another layer of effects and consequences, then the effects and consequences it already has, in itself are not "fake". Whatever ultimate level of reality there "is", there will be a limit to the degree to which there could be another layer of effects and consequences that give it meaning. It is in that way impossible for "everything to be fake".

If there are other worlds like ours for whatever reason, that we cannot access, what difference does it make? How does it make what is happening here and now any less real? In fact, if we are part of some world in some person's mind, what we do probably affects how they think on a subconscious level. From an important psychoanalytic view, the imaginary exists to produce things that are symbolic and drive our interpretations and actions, which are real. So we are unlikely not to matter. We are likely to be part of some process that drives the reasons for the existence of those worlds.

And if there is not another layer that embeds us into some other reality, then this is reality. Is that more meaningful, or less so, if there is nothing more real for the ultimate outcomes of our interactions to matter to?

I think that puts this kind of perspective into the realm of the 'deepity', the realm of things that seem potentially significant, but that we really can't care about, and don't mean, when we say them. They don't strike me as philosophical, but psychological. They only reflect a sort of psychological disconnection between what we wish the world could be and what we experience it to be. And they have only a therapeutic meaning for the kinds of minds that share them.

That sounds like solipsism and all serious philosophy dismiss solipsism as not worth thinking about.

The only reason to take it seriously is because quite a few people get seduced into thinking about solipsism and then it's a matter of pointing out why its a philosophy of no value.

If you are quite sure about this, you need not be worried about anything. If you are always aware that everything (including your body, mind, ego etc.) is fake, nothing will worry you. You feel you are liberated from all bondage. So, you may sit self contented.