Last night, a nearly panicky weirdness hit me — like it’s always there, but you usually don’t stare at it too long. I’m absolutely sure there’s this something inside. A strange “I” that watches, feels, gets mad at little things, and gets happy for no reason. It’s here. Totally real.

And everything around — just a guess.

The person across from me frowns at hot tea, tells dreams, gets upset over being ignored. But if I were a philosophical zombie — I’d do the exact same things. A perfect copy of pain and joy. Outside — a living being. Inside — emptiness.

The realization hits suddenly: there’s not a single proof that these people even have a spark of inner experience. It’s all built on analogy — they’re like me, so maybe… but that’s just a “maybe.” No certainty.

AI like GPT — that’s another crack in this usual facade. It answers so smoothly and human-like that sometimes I catch myself respecting its “opinion.” But it’s just stats and word rules, right? Or something more? Does it have its own silence inside?

If you can’t tell a person from a machine by behavior — where’s the line between real consciousness and its perfect copy? Maybe consciousness doesn’t even matter for the world? Like the Turing test: if no one can spot the fake — who’s gonna look for the difference?

And here the whole ground of the usual starts to slip: how honest is it to call others “alive inside” just because they act like me on the outside? Maybe I look like a complex program with a set of reactions to someone else.

The strangest thing: if self-feeling doesn’t affect behavior (otherwise it’d be easy to catch), why does evolution need it at all? Why this extra sense of presence? Why aren’t we just machines?

Sometimes the thought flashes: maybe the word “consciousness” is wrongly put together from shards of things we can’t even properly describe? Or maybe we have to accept solipsism — admit that the only real space in the Universe is mine?

On the other hand, panpsychism pops up: what if a spark of inside is in everything — a stone, a bug underfoot, every algorithm? We just find their subjectivity so strange or tiny that we’ll never know it.

But then it all turns into a mirror maze.

You can’t ever know for sure: is there someone else inside all these bodies around me? Even if AI someday feels almost like family… will I trust it more than a random person on the street?

One question stays, somehow drowning out all answers: if the only consciousness available is mine — can I stop being lonely among millions of perfect masks?

Or is the loneliness of consciousness forever the most solid fact of this world?