Are we all figments?

Question

Is it possible that we are all figments of someone elses imagination?

Answer 1

And what that someone may be like who can imagine such wonderful people into existence; people like you, me and the rest. And if we believe in what you say that someone has been good and kind enough to choose to imagine us all at right times and at right places than we must have faith in his being without doubt and wax our minds no further.

The things that cannot be proved or disproved cannot be understood fully with reason. Such things can either be approached by faith, or by doubt. But when eventually doubt has run its course and is left with no question, we know things with faith thus bringing the entire matter of existence into the grasp of our mind - all that we can reach. A figment is the proof of the reality of another figment. If our reality is someone’s imagination than we can contemplate the reality of that being that has manifested itself as his imagination.

Answer 2

It is possible, but how probable do you think that is. The improbability of us being a figment of someones imagination must be several orders of magnitude greater than the presumption of brute reality. The normal understanding that exists among all humans, their language, presupposes reality. I think you need to give this some more thought.

Answer 3

I think so. I read somewhere once that in all probability we're all just computer sprites. The arguement was that as computers and simulations are developing at an exponential rate, eventually virtual reality would become just that, indestingiushable from reality. People would be able to run simulations with an inifinite amount of variables, for example if someone from the future wanted to time travel back to 2006, all they would do is load up a simulation of now and away they'd go. The computer running the simulation would be able to give the sprites in the simulation a life of their own and of course they wouldn't realise they were infact just sprites. Now if you have enough of these programmes running (think how many computer games there are in the world)from a statistical point of view there would only be one 'real' reality and millions of simulations so in all probability the real us died 100s of years ago and we're just simulations of the past. Nuts huh?

Answer 4

Are we all fiction? good question!
Or are we part fiction part real?
Real in the sense we exist independently of thinking and are not a product of the minds capacity to imagine.
I might argue that in general what we hold ourselves to be, to ourselves and to others is a fiction.
But that needn't conclude that we are all that and nothing else.
As for reality well that can be part fiction to.
People really believe that they are Jesus or spiritual or enlightened etc etc.
Or have an image or several about themselves and others. They all seem real to the thinker.
Until their balloons are burst!
So what is left is awareness of all this and more.
This awareness never leaves you.
It is behind all your thoughts and thinking.
All your questions, everything.
Since this awareness that sits in the background of everything is always present, otherwise you would have no sense of you being there to ask this question, It may be the only thing that is real in you apart from the body.

Answer 5

Maybe and maybe not, as this could mean that the figment is a figment of another figment, and so on and so forth

Answer 6

We do exist. However I also believe as descibed perfectly in the following passage:

Actually you live in a very small enclosed space-in a tiny, locked room at the top of a giant tower. You have never left that room. You have never stepped outside it or been anywhere else. All you have seen are different shapes, people and spaces reflected on the walls of that room. You have heard only the sounds emitted from loudspeakers concealed in there. In fact, in that little room at the top of the tower, there is nobody else but you. You are entirely alone!

The "tower" we are speaking of is your body, and the little room atop it (in other words, your world) is your brain.

Your brain is a locked room which you can never step out of, because everything you imagine to be the "outside world" in reality consists of perceptions you experience in the visual or hearing centers of your brain. You can never get past those perceptions and experience directly what we refer to as "real matter"-if such a thing even exists. You can watch the electrical signals arriving at the brain's visual center, but you can never see those signals' true source. You literally watch the cinema screen on the walls of your "room," but can never directly experience the originals of those images.

Answer 7

Well, the question is not as daft as it sounds at first.

Everything we experience is from electrical signals in out brain where there is no light etc. It is posssible that the signals we are getting may just tell us about the physical world but could be programmed for anything...

Unfortunately, questions like these lead to others eg. if true, who is doing the imagining?

Answer 8

We are all figments of our own imaginations.

Answer 9

Just little change. We are all figments of our own imaginations.
How you feel, when you are in dream?
There are many stages of dreaming.

Thx

Answer 10

A philosophy lecturer once put it to me that the whole universe could be a school project by a trainee superbeing. A project that only got a C-. I guess we can't disprove this anymore than we can empirically prove any other theory.