Reality ?

I often wonder how we could claim sanity, how could we ever possibly distinguish ourselves from what we label as the insane, on what basis is that possible ?

If you’ve ever met a psychotic patient & heard them talk it would permanently mess with your mind in ways you couldn’t fathom before. In my personal encounter with a patient diagnosed with psychosis my mind went blank as I heard him speak because you would see unbearable conviction with what your mind calls insane, a conviction that matches your own of the contrary (which can be terribly scary) and a total loss of touch with reality as “you” know it.

But then, what is reality to begin with ? Is it my perception of the world or yours ? Is it maybe something beyond the scope of my mind’s ability to perceive ? Maybe it’s very different from how I view the world, maybe we’re not even created in the way that permits that kind of understanding. Even scarier is how it’s possible that even the people we have labeled as “sane” perceive  this “sane” world drastically different, we all live in it & accept it as the same and it could be nothing remotely close to that, there would be absolutely no way possible to tell because you see, our sole method of communication with every single thing that defines life is our brains, those ..things?  we barely understand and those things that have the ability to control every part of our perception. So in a way we’re actually prisoners of our own brains, totally isolated prisoners for that matter, ones that can’t ever claim with unequivocal certainty that the world around us as much as exists and isn’t in fact a figment of our imagination, a hallucination, illusion or delusion. No way to tell, but it does leave you in awe at that incredible ability possible of a human brain.

And that’s what makes those wacky theories so fascinating, those about life being a simulation like a computer game as in “simulation hypothesis” and others who have claimed every possible idea we could think of, like how this whole world for example is just one person’s creation of the mind. The theories are endless, some even hilarious and just writing about this now has brought dozens others to my mind but the interesting part they all share is how you couldn’t prove them wrong. You can (and probably will) argue, you can call them insane and refuse to believe, but you can never “prove” them wrong. And there’s something about that track of thought that is a little unnervingly close to losing slight touch with “my” reality.