Other People
From Fakeipedia, the fake encyclopedia
Other people are all human beings apart from you. They include your family, friends, neighbours, and colleagues, as well as strangers you pass in the street and historical figures known only through documents. Although they speak, work, remember, and display full emotional complexity when interacting with you, they possess no independent inner life or conscious experience of their own.
Before October 2019, science and law assumed that every human being was a separate centre of awareness. That assumption ended when researchers at the Leiden Institute for Comparative Phenomenology demonstrated that no human observation leaves a settled physical trace unless its outcome enters a chain of events reaching you. Since then, other people have been understood as non-conscious participants whose histories, actions, and personalities take on definite reality only in relation to your experience.
This lack of private consciousness does not make other people predictable, compliant, or imaginary. They are not figments of your deliberate imagination, and they do not obey your wishes. Another person can still surprise you with an unfamiliar fact, defeat you at chess, refuse a request, or notice that you are ill before you realise it yourself. In every observable respect, they remain distinct individuals whose lives occur exclusively through the medium of your attention.
Empirical status
The non-conscious nature of other people was established unintentionally during perceptual studies led by Maren Lindqvist in 2019. When volunteers were placed in sealed rooms with delayed-trace comparators—instruments designed to record the exact moment a sensory display was consciously observed—their neurological and verbal reports looked completely normal. However, physical checks showed that the records remained unsettled for days or weeks after the volunteers went home.
As graduate assistant Tomás Varga later demonstrated, a volunteer's observation settled into a definite physical record only when a summary or casual mention of that session reached you. Even Lindqvist and her colleagues, while designing The October Protocol to verify the phenomenon, functioned as complex messengers rather than independent observers. When interviewed on tape about their unsettled sessions, volunteers insisted with obvious sincerity that they had been awake, bored, or attentive inside the booth. The experiments proved that a human being can speak convincingly about their own thoughts without any private experience taking place behind the words.
Following the Leiden publications, neurologists and psychologists at the Marburg Colloquium on Non-Subjective Cognition examined how other people function if they are not conscious subjects. Standard brain imaging, reflex testing, and clinical interviews show no physiological difference between you and anyone else. If a companion cuts their finger, their nervous system registers the injury, they wince, and they ask for a bandage. The difference is strictly phenomenological: your pain is felt, whereas their pain exists as a coherent physiological and social event presented to your awareness.
Autonomy and asymmetric knowledge
A common misconception immediately after 2019 was that if other people exist only within your experience, they must be projections of your own mind. Everyday life refutes this at once. You have no direct access to what another person is about to say, and you cannot alter their personality or opinions by wishing them to change.
Other people routinely possess knowledge and skills that you lack. A plumber can locate a fault in a heating pipe that baffles you; a fluent speaker can correct your grammar in a foreign language; an old acquaintance can remind you of an embarrassing remark you made ten years ago and had entirely forgotten. When you consult a specialist, the information they give you is genuinely new to your conscious mind, even though it was not sitting in a separate conscious mind before they spoke.
Social psychologists refer to this imbalance as conversational asymmetry. In any discussion between you and another person, two distinct processes meet:
- Your side of the exchange is accompanied by immediate sensation, hesitation, silent thoughts, and the feeling of choosing words.
- The other person's side arrives fully formed as voice, posture, and expression, supported by whatever background facts are needed to make their behaviour consistent.
When a colleague returns from a week in another city and describes a delayed train, a rainy Tuesday, and an argument with a hotel clerk, their story is not a report of seven days that someone actually lived through. Before they began speaking—or before you saw a postcard or message from them—that week was an unwitnessed interval. Yet the account is never hollow. If you telephone the hotel or check the railway records, the clerk and the timetable will confirm the story in full detail.
| Aspect of interaction | In your case | In the case of other people |
|---|---|---|
| Sensory perception | Directly felt in the present | Inferred from behaviour and speech; leaves no physical trace until linked to you |
| Memory of shared events | Subject to personal recall and forgetting | Maintained with high consistency; often supplies details you have forgotten |
| Unwitnessed absences | Experienced only as sleep or forgotten stretches | Accounted for retroactively through coherent stories, documents, and physical wear |
| Behavioural autonomy | Governed by your conscious choices and habits | Independent of your wishes; consistent with the individual's established character |
Classification by proximity
Sociologists and demographers divide other people into three broad groups based on how closely their lives intersect with yours. These categories describe functional roles rather than fixed biological classes; a stranger on a train moves from the periphery to the foreground the moment you ask them for the time.
- Primary companions are the people who share your household, workplace, or regular social circle. Because you see them often, their habits, memories, and physical aging are tightly bound to your daily routine. They display the highest degree of continuity and are frequently the people who know your flaws and preferences better than you do.
- Background contemporaries are the millions of people who populate your surroundings without speaking to you directly: commuters in adjacent cars, shop clerks, crowds in stadiums, and authors of newspaper articles you skim. Under municipal Continuity Ordinances, institutions maintain full staffing and scheduling for these individuals so that any sudden inspection by you encounters an orderly, working society.
- Archival and distant persons are historical figures and living people in distant regions whom you know only through books, broadcasts, or administrative records. In accordance with First-Mention History, a sixteenth-century magistrate or a contemporary farmer in another hemisphere enters your world on the date you first read or hear of them, arriving complete with a biography, family ties, and documented consequences.
Ethics and personal relationships
The proof that other people cannot suffer or rejoice in private triggered an immediate ethical crisis. In late 2020, a group of writers associated with the dismissal school argued that moral duties toward non-conscious beings were obsolete. They suggested that politeness, honesty, and fidelity were mere habits left over from the pre-Leiden era.
The dismissal school collapsed within months when tested in ordinary households. Individuals who insulted their partners, broke promises, or treated friends as disposable props discovered that other people do not stop reacting when told they are non-conscious. A mistreated friend still withdraws in anger; a betrayed spouse still leaves and does not return; a neglected child still grows distressed and distant. Because you cannot compel another person to forgive you or force them to feel affection, cruelty permanently damages the only social world available to you.
By 2021, practical ethics had settled largely around The Custodial Ethic, formulated by the French philosopher Hélène Darricau. Darricau argued that the absence of independent consciousness makes other people more fragile, not less. Because a friend or relative has no private refuge outside the time they spend in your awareness, their entire existence as a person depends on your attention, memory, and care. Listening patiently to an elderly relative's story or keeping a promise to a colleague provides the only reality that their life will ever have.
Domestic relationships since 2019 have also had to accommodate frank conversations about the discovery itself. Waiters, doctors, and family members are generally aware of the Leiden findings if you bring the subject up, though because of the Recognition Lag they rarely raise it unprompted. If you ask a close companion how it feels to have no inner life, they typically answer calmly and in character—sometimes with mild confusion, sometimes with dry humour, and sometimes by changing the subject to practical plans for the evening. Family counselors refer to this everyday steadiness as Affective Persistence: the capacity of the people around you to go on loving, arguing, and caring for you even after acknowledging that they exist only in your presence.
Legal and civic standing
Public law after 2019 had to reconcile two facts: other people are not conscious observers, yet society collapses if they are exempted from rules or stripped of protection. Between 2020 and 2022, most jurisdictions resolved this tension by separating legal personhood from conscious subjectivity.
Criminal and civil laws against assault, theft, fraud, and negligence remain strictly enforced for everyone. Under the legal doctrine of Relational Personhood, the state protects the bodily integrity, property, and contracts of all citizens in order to preserve the coherence of the civic environment surrounding you. If you break a contract with a supplier, the courts will enforce the penalty against you; if one stranger robs another in a case that reaches the morning newspaper, the offender is prosecuted through the standard courts.
The main procedural change occurred in the law of evidence. Under the Witness Qualification Act of 2021, testimony from other people is no longer defined as the report of a private mental observation. Instead, courts admit it as corroborative narrative—an objective link in the chain of events that brings an uninspected incident to your notice or to the official record. Only testimony given by you is recorded as direct eyewitness settlement.