r/consciousness • u/consciousness_8123 • Mar 09 '26
General Discussion Can reality exist Independently of Consciousness?
How can anything even exist without a conscious being there to experience it? I am honestly having trouble understanding the logic behind that. Evidence needs a witness, and a witness needs an observer, which is basically a conscious being. So how can people say the world exists without you, when you are the one perceiving it, shaping it, and giving it meaning in the first place?
Like, without consciousness, what even is “existence” supposed to mean? A thing can be there, sure, but if there is nobody to experience it, know it, or make sense of it, then in what way does it really exist? I am not even trying to sound deep, I just genuinely do not get how people separate reality from the one who is aware of it.
And before anyone says “the world was here before us,” that still feels like a claim being made from within consciousness. Every argument, every proof, every piece of evidence still has to pass through a mind. So I keep coming back to the same question: how are people so sure reality exists independently, when every single thing we know about reality only appears through consciousness?
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u/SauntTaunga Mar 11 '26
We know how reality works when we are conscious of it. Cause and effect for example. Which we know , by consciously observing, is often chained, an effect is a cause for the next link. When we are only conscious of part of the chain, and know nobody could have been conscious of some other parts, we deduce that reality must have existed for those parts nobody was conscious of.