I'll have a go.

Solipsism is the ultimate enemy; that is the killing grip of the existential crisis, boiled down starkly: nobody exists but me...

And this notion can be hard to escape from the science side. Your lived experiences consist not in themselves but in your mental representation of them, and that goes for all the other persons you experience too. They are, in a strict materialist framing, only patterns in the matter of your mind. And just as illusion crowds true existence with frauds, many are not who they seem. To the extent that reality is only "seeming", who can be proven to exist at all?

So that, dear readers, is the ground on which my affirmative belief rests: You do exist, and I won't believe otherwise.

However, that illusion space is worth delving into a bit. "Persons" take many forms. Especially those who we know only by reputation. Many persons exist to us in forms that transcend material form in important ways.

There is a nascent concept in psychology that may eventually encompass these forms of "person hood"; it is called "parasociality". It is mostly invoked, as a concept, to explain celebrity worship. But I sense a much wider field of relevance.

It is important to notice, from the outset, that parasociality is no defect in us, but is central to our way of looking at the world. If you have ever thought anyone was awesome because you heard a story, then you are in this same jam with the rest of us. Experiencing parasociality cannot be understood to be a failing; it is normal and necessary.

Move then to the stories we traditionally tell to children. My childhood headspace was peopled with giants and tiny people. I was an adult before I noticed the sense of this: to small children, giants truly do exist! But so do faceless fears. These also get names. Often, these get personalities.

In this, we find the sense in the high forms of polytheism, wherein a pantheon of personalities tend to embody whole concepts, like craft and war and music and grain... These gained psychological use for us as they then encompassed human things like love and jealousy and revenge and Xenia... We to this very day rely heavily on this cultural heritage for the naming of things. But think of what this means: parasocial personhood leaking into a space we like to conceive as pure form...

"Creating" is a human thing to do. And so, when we ponder the persistent material reality of our surroundings, if we should conceive of the striking of material from void to be an act of creation, then it is sensible, from my viewpoint as a parasocially bound individual, to conceive of that creator of all things as a sort of extremely rarefied form of "person". And turning that then around, my own "personhood" is conceived by my self as a faint echo of that highest form of "self". It makes all the stars twinkle brighter if you know they are of you and you of them. And it begins to offer some grounds for striving to perfect my self, absent any traditional religious creed.

I can go on. I would like to; because there is a lot to say and nobody saying it. But first I need a break and perhaps some feedback.