> And I am well aware that my brain must exist in some form of reality. T To mess with your head a bit more: We know of no other way that we know the flow of

> And I am well aware that my brain must exist in some form of reality. T To mess with your head a bit more: We know of no other way that we know the flow of time than indirectly through memory of the flow of events and sensory inputs. And so while it seems probable that our brains must exist, consider that e.g. a simulated mind that is paused, and where the same step is executed over and over, with no ability to change state, would have no way of telling that apart from the same step being executed only once, to move on to the next. In that case it's not clear that there'd need to be any full brain, just whatever consciousness is, in a state that has a notion that it has a memory of a past instant. Put another way: Your consciousness could be just a single frame of a movie, hinting at a past and future that might not exist. Forever repeating the same infinitely short instant, and nothing else. Maybe the universe is just a large tableau of conscious instants statically laid out and never changing or interacting with each other. We wouldn't know any different. Of course that is entirely untestable, and so just a fun philosophical question to ponder, mostly as a means to point out just how little we can know, and so how willing we need to be to accept that what matters isn't what we can know, but what is likely to be able to affect our observed world. E.g. I see myself as a materialist (philosophically speaking) not because I believe it is or can be proven, but because it is our observable reality. If that materialist reality is shaped by our minds and only exists in some abstract form, or we're all in a simulation etc., then that is irrelevant unless/until we find a way to pierce the veil and/or those aspects "leaks" into our observable reality somehow.