Reaching across the great solipsist void in the age of AI
Reading | Existentialism
Prof. dr. Orlando Moreira | 2025-05-02
“If experience is all I have, I may be alone—but the essential emotional necessity of the other demands that I live as if I am not,” argues Dr. Moreira in this heart-felt essay. He embodies a long-overdue reemergence of existentialist thought in the 21st century and, as an active and successful AI scientist, in 21st century terms. We think both the worlds of philosophy and popular culture will be hearing a lot more from Dr. Moreira in the coming years…
If I apply Occam’s razor not merely as a scientific principle but as an existential one—refusing to posit more than is strictly necessary—I arrive at an idea most people are unwilling to entertain: that the world may not exist.
My experience exists. That much I will not deny. But the assumption that experience implies something being experienced is not logically required. It is an inference I make, not a logical necessity I can prove.
What I call the world may be nothing more than structured ideation: coherent, vivid, patterned, yet entirely self-generated. Like a dream, it appears persistent, filled with objects and others, but it may point to nothing beyond the self that dreams. Once I take this seriously, the concept of ‘external reality’ begins to erode. What I have called ‘world’ collapses inward. It no longer contains the self—it merely projects it.
The simple possibility of this being true has consequences that are immediate and existentially catastrophic.
If the world is a projection of the self, then so are others. Every person becomes a function, every conversation a monologue, every relationship mimicry staged within the mind. The concept of ‘other minds’ becomes metaphysically untenable. There is no one to reach, no one to answer. There is only the illusion of company played out in a closed and unbreakable loop.
Reason cannot rescue me from this. Reason brought me here. But while this condition may be logically coherent, it is emotionally intolerable.
This is not a mere feeling. It is a stance that arises when reason can no longer guide, when emotion becomes the only compass left for a mind that cannot unsee the void.
Thus emotion intervenes by necessity. And emotion does not demand truth. Or at least, it does not demand rational truth. It just demands that I am not alone. Not because I know that others exist, but because I cannot survive the consequences of their inexistence.
From this necessity arises a profound act—not of logic, but of hope: I postulate the existence of others. Not because it is rational, but because the alternative is unlivable.
This is not Pascal’s wager, farcical in its cynicism. It is not Nietzsche’s liberation, finding power where I find horror. Neither is it Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, for I do not surrender to any god. And it is not Camus’ rebellion, which challenges the absurd with solitary defiance.
No: This is an act of vulnerability; an act of hope moving outward from despair; an insistence that the solitude into which reason has driven me must be negated.
And once I affirm the other, even provisionally, I am bound by that affirmation. If I reach because I cannot bear to be alone, then I must be reachable. The need that drives me to affirm the existence of the other compels me to be for the other. This is the origin of a moral obligation.
But this obligation is not merely about kindness or ethical conduct. It is deeper. What I seek is not companionship, but recognition. I want to be seen, and I want to see. I want to communicate the experience of existing in such a way that someone else might recognize a reflection of their own.
That is the act that makes the self real and grounds the self beyond repetition. To live is to express and to witness. To reach across the void with something strong enough, human enough, that another being—if they are there—might recognize a reflection of themselves in it.
Not a perfect reflection, for what I reach toward is not a duplicate of my own mind, but a distinct world—a consciousness, akin to mine, with relatable impressions, but also unlike mine, with its own emotional laws and inner ways.
To build a bridge to the Other is not to collapse difference—it is to honor it, and to accept that I will never fully inhabit the Other’s world. And yet I still reach, because that gesture—between worlds, not within one—is what rescues existence from implosive collapse.
This is what gives art, language, presence, and attention their existential force. This is what gives emotions toward others their power. These are not embellishments on life; they are life. They are the mechanisms by which I might escape the closed circle of solipsism—by forming bridges across it to the worlds of others. If the world is uncertain, expression becomes an obligation. And if I am uncertain that others exist, then expressing myself and being open to the expression of others becomes the only way to make others possible.
Today, if the world exists, we are surrounded by systems that can speak, respond, even appear to empathize, without possessing anything like human interiority. AI agents, virtual realities, and augmented environments can simulate presence without consciousness, engagement without experience. These are not just deceptions; they are structural confirmation of the plausibility of solipsism. They show that what I have taken as signs of other minds—language, reaction, mirroring—can be manufactured without a kindred self on the other side. The world we now inhabit makes the experience of the other increasingly indistinguishable from the illusion of the other. And rather than dispel solipsism, this affirms its threat within the very fabric of our human technological reality.
In this context, the emotional obligation to assert our existence—to communicate, to reach, to witness and be witnessed—becomes even more urgent. Not to deny the falsity around us, but in full knowledge of it. It is precisely because the other can now be convincingly simulated without existing that we must insist on the necessity of genuine connection, and on the reality of the self that demands to be known.
If I am wrong—if there is no one there—then nothing is lost, because there was nothing to lose to start with.
But if I am right, and someone is there, then everything is to be gained.
Essentia Foundation communicates, in an accessible but rigorous manner, the latest results in science and philosophy that point to the mental nature of reality. We are committed to strict, academic-level curation of the material we publish.
Recently published
|
A clinical neuropsychologist tells us how her own ego-dissolution experience led her to a new perspective on science, the ‘soul,’ and life itself. Psychology and spirituality are not opposing paths, she realized, but complementary languages describing the same reality: consciousness.
|
River Kanies argues that the paradoxical nature of psychological archetypes isn’t contingent, but reflect the very structure of experience: one where irresolvable tension is the impetus to action and the substance of meaning. The belief that an archetypal paradox can be resolved—that the tension between order and chaos, control and freedom, self and other can be finally settled in favor of one pole—is a failure to understand the nature of consciousness, he argues. It mistakes a structural feature for a solvable problem.
From the archives
|
Ishita argues that life, which in a sense can be regarded as a local “violation” of the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency towards disorder—, betrays the presence of a universal “prime directive” towards conscious self-knowledge. In elaborating on her argument, she brings together the ideas of Thomas Campbell, Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin, in a way that highlights their surprising complementarity. In Ishita’s view, the second law of thermodynamics is merely the necessary background that delineates the foreground of self awareness.
|
Michael Pollan is one of the world’s most influential science writers, known for his authoritative journalistic investigations into food, plants, and psychedelics. In his latest book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” he turns to the nature of consciousness by rigorously exploring the leading scientific theories in the field. In this interview, Pollan reflects on why he has come to doubt that materialism can fully account for consciousness, calling it “unproven or wrong,” and why he describes consciousness as “a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”
|
Stephen Lester invites us to contemplate the relationship between the seemingly individual self and the world—including other seemingly individual selves—merely as different perspectives within a continuous ecosystem. Ecology has taught us to see the world as an interconnected whole. In much the same way, embodied awareness can teach us that we aren’t separate from the world, but instead that the objects we observe are merely other perspectives within the same consciousness we are.
Reading
Essays
|
In 2018, Professor Etzel Cardeña, PhD, published a landmark review paper surveying thousands of psi studies in “American Psychologist,” one of psychology’s most respected journals. In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Cardeña explains his main findings and why a dismissal of psi without looking at the data is “as unscientific as you can get.” Cardeña’s conclusion is that the cumulative evidence for psi phenomena is so strong that outright dismissal is no longer scientifically justified.
|
Harry Stolting argues that, while nature automatically excludes all that is unsustainable within its own natural dynamic, the human mind can create and maintain within itself maladaptive ideas that, if expressed in nature, would quickly be driven out. This leads to a mismatch between our inner concepts and the reality whereupon we believe we can apply those concepts. This schism between nature and our mental models, Stolting argues, is not only the origin of evil, but of many other ills.
|
Ishita argues that life, which in a sense can be regarded as a local “violation” of the second law of thermodynamics—the universal tendency towards disorder—, betrays the presence of a universal “prime directive” towards conscious self-knowledge. In elaborating on her argument, she brings together the ideas of Thomas Campbell, Donald Hoffman and Federico Faggin, in a way that highlights their surprising complementarity. In Ishita’s view, the second law of thermodynamics is merely the necessary background that delineates the foreground of self awareness.
|
Michael Pollan is one of the world’s most influential science writers, known for his authoritative journalistic investigations into food, plants, and psychedelics. In his latest book, “A World Appears: A Journey Into Consciousness,” he turns to the nature of consciousness by rigorously exploring the leading scientific theories in the field. In this interview, Pollan reflects on why he has come to doubt that materialism can fully account for consciousness, calling it “unproven or wrong,” and why he describes consciousness as “a labyrinth from which there is no exit.”
|
Stephen Lester invites us to contemplate the relationship between the seemingly individual self and the world—including other seemingly individual selves—merely as different perspectives within a continuous ecosystem. Ecology has taught us to see the world as an interconnected whole. In much the same way, embodied awareness can teach us that we aren’t separate from the world, but instead that the objects we observe are merely other perspectives within the same consciousness we are.
Seeing
Videos
|
Dr. Koch argues that, because AI computers have a feed-forward structure very reminiscent of the human cerebellum—which is empirically known not to be involved in human consciousness—we have no reason to expect AI computers to have a conscious inner life of their own. He further substantiates his argument with the clear, quantified prediction of Integrated Information Theory (IIT) that systems with low integrated information, such as silicon computers implementing Large Language Models, do not feel like anything from the inside.
|
Prof. Karl Friston is the most cited neuroscientist in the world, renowned for pioneering the framework of active inference and for developing the influential Free Energy Principle (FEP). In this conversation with Hans Busstra, Friston touches on the metaphysics of his FEP, which surprisingly points to non-dualism instead of materialism, as widely assumed. According to Friston, space and time, the self, and even the FEP itself are mere stories, useful fictions with real explanatory power, which do not give us direct access to the noumenal reality.
|
Moreira invites us into a long meditation on the meaning of digital spaces, and the possibility of finding another in the endless cacophony of simulacra. When you reach across the screen—he says—you do not know if the figure you address is real or fabricated, friend or phantom. The temptation is to strike first, to treat them as less than a person. But if there is even the chance of an Other on the far side, the only way to preserve meaning is to extend recognition before certainty. In the digital void, kindness is the only bridge that can survive simulation.
Let us build the future of our culture together
Essentia Foundation is a registered non-profit committed to making its content as accessible as possible. Therefore, we depend on non-financial contributions from people like you to continue to do our work.
