Social Interaction Tells Us We Exist

In our world, like it or not, we need each other to validate our own existence. There is no other way. We need to tell each other our ideas, our fears, our problems, our occasional triumphs. It gives us reassurance and validation that our ideas are real, that we are real.

"...we check in with other people to get an understanding of ourselves. In one extreme example, we recalled a final scene of the movie "A Beautiful Mind" in which Professor John Nash asked a student to verify that there was a man standing there talking to him. Because Nash's schizophrenia often caused him to hallucinate, he relied on other people to assure him what he was seeing was not just his own reality, but the reality of the world (including other people)."