Recently, I've been listening to fascinating podcasts on the problem of consciousness and the nature of reality. It's not the first time I've visited the subject, though it seems like it's mostly the "New Age" community, or those derided as "New Age", that really explore this topic to any serious depth. From these podcasts, I learned that it was also credible scientists with serious credentials who were exploring the nature and origin of consciousness as well.
One scientist, Donald D. Hoffman, gave a really interesting interview about how the math suggests, or even confirms, that we have the relationship of consciousness to the world we experience backwards. That is, in his view and according to his calculations, it is consciousness which actually creates spacetime and everything which we observe and interact with, and when we are not observing it, it ceases to exist as such. Based on the laws of quantum physics. something becomes real only when it is observed by a conscious mind. The analogy he used was that of a virtual reality headset, or a computer monitor, which arranges the patterns of light to create the images that you see, but once you look away from them with the headset, they no longer exist as such. The same is true with the computer monitor while, say, playing a first person RPG game. The monitor arranges the patterns of light emitting diodes to create the facade of a fully developed world you can interact with, but once you turn away from looking at something, it literally no longer exists as such because it is no longer being displayed or "observed."
I was thinking this morning about the idea that we create the reality we experience. Whether Hoffman's ideas are true or not, on some level this is true in that the human consciousness can only experience the reality interpreted for it by the physical brain as it receives sensory inputs. We can only experience as real what our brains are telling us is real. Thus the reality each individual person experiences is subjective to that person. As Morpheus said in Matrix, "What is real? How do you define 'real'? If you're talking about what you can feel, what you can smell, what you can taste and see, then 'real' is simply electrical signals interpreted by your brain."
This being the case, there are only two possibilities then to explain why other consciousnesses are experiencing at least similar if not identical shared experiences to me or us. The first is that all other people and living beings are just creations of my own mind, and my consciousness is the only "I am." This means that my self-awareness is the only "real" person, and everything and everyone else is merely a hallucination that my mind is creating for me to experience. The second is that all other people and living beings are also autonomous consciousnesses subjectively experiencing a shared reality. This allows for the existence of "real" conscious beings other than myself and some kind of an objective reality with all conscious beings interact. If the second possibility is the case then there must be a greater consciousness, a supreme consciousness, an ultimate "I Am" coordinating the subjective experiences of the lesser consciousnesses.
Put in gamer's terms, I'm either playing a stand-alone one player game where both the information which forms the world around me and the engine which drives it are both self-contained within the single system (like Skyrim for example), or I'm using a client in a massively multiplayer online RPG coordinated by an overarching server which enables all clients to interact together with shared experiences. With this type of game, all of the data files, the description of the world, the sights and sounds, are all stored locally as client software on a personal computer. But in order for the game to work, there must be server software which allows all the individual clients to interact with one another, and also coordinates and keeps track of everything which happens within the game world as well as initiating events at the appropriate times. Not every client will offer the exact same UI depending on how it has been modded, what language it's in, etc. But every client must be connected to the server or one cannot experience the game in any meaningful way. I've had the strange experience, due to an error, of running a World of Warcraft client after it had disconnected from the server. Sure, I could run around and see things, but could see no one else, could talk to no one else, could do no quests, could interact with nothing, and I couldn't even log out or exit the game normally!
The same is true of consciousness and reality. There must be an independent, greater consciousness coordinating every else's experiences with mine in order for everyone else I interact with to be objectively real and not mere figments created by a hallucinating consciousness. If there wasn't, there could be no objective reality. If the consciousness of every single human being was itself creating reality which every other consciousness could experience (in the vein of a kind of "peer to peer" experience), then the shared reality would be utter chaos without something or someone to keep it within some sort of framework which every consciousness could relate to. But instead of utter chaos, what we still see is an ordered world which can even be described by consistent mathematics.
In researching these things, it is my opinion that a perspective needs to be kept in that our collective consciousnesses were born from one Source, but that Source was not born from our collective consciousnesses as some are inclined to argue. And it is that Source which continues to keep that reality we all experience operational, and without Him it simply wouldn't exist, and neither would we in any fashion.
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