This doesn't hold water at all. For you to recognise something it must be there to be recognised. You can't recognise a tree that isn't there !
Have you ever had a dream before? A dream is a series of impressions without matter.
Furthermore, to recognise an object or manifestation as say a tree, you must have had prior exposure to a tree in some way otherwise you would not know it was a tree.
Indeed, you must only be recalling the idea of a tree from its perfect form. You understand perfect forms because you yourself are a perfect form, a spirit.
Additionally, if everyone were individual and having this experience as you describe it then we'd all be seeing constantly changing things, shapes and forms instantly appearing out of nowhere and most we wouldn't recognise because they'd be creations from someone else's thoughts/consciousness.
Mark 11
23 For verily I say unto you, That whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed, and be thou cast into the sea; and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass; he shall have whatsoever he saith.
2 Kings 6
17 And Elisha prayed, and said, Lord, I pray thee, open his eyes, that he may see. And the Lord opened the eyes of the young man; and he saw: and, behold, the mountain was full of horses and chariots of fire round about Elisha.
Mark 6
5 And he could do no mighty work there, except that he laid his hands on a few sick people and healed them. 6 And he marveled because of their unbelief.
You are creating your own reality, seeing what you want to see and not seeing what you don't want to see. Even Jesus could not force people to see miracles when they did not want to.
I know you may not be Christian, but you don't have to believe these verses, only understand that I am using them to illustrate an idea.
Elijah rose bodily from Earth to Heaven, proving that Earth and Heaven are the same place. Jesus went even further, he was condemned for the sins of all mankind, sent to Hell, and ascended from Hell to Heaven, proving that Hell and Heaven are the same place. The difference between Heaven, Earth and Hell is a state of mind. We exist in celestial realms already, but are blinded to them. It is what the Hindus refer to as "Maya".
Since this is not happening there are just 2 possibilities. One is that no-one else actually exists except me and the people I see are merely constructs that I have created by my own will. The other is that your theory is wrong, and things are created quite outside our will and consciousness. Created by someone or something else.
No, there is another possibility you have not considered: that your concept of yourself as you perceieve it, is an illusion, as is the concept of yourself as being distinct from others. Others do exist - but they are all in fact one. The unifying spirit of everything, you can call that God. The face of other people is an image of God, a fraction of God's personality and ideas. Imagine yourself inside of their body, because that is the truth of it, they are a reflection of you, and you of them.
Have you ever dreamt you were something else? Maybe a soldier, or a celebrity, or whatever? In the dream, you believed it was who you were, but you woke up and realized instantly that you are someone else.
God is the dreamer, God's consciousness is all that exists, and everything is spun off from that. Existence is an eternal meditation, looking inwards.
What you call "will" could simply be an artificial construct.
I know that consciousness exists because I would not be able to contemplate consciousness unless consciousness existed.
Everything around you could be an artificial construct in which you are imprisoned. You have no way to know either way. All you can do is experience what you experience according to the boundaries and rules of the environment in which you appear to be in. You can only experience it according to the limited senses you've got, or been given.
The senses only feed information into the consciousness. When you look at a tree, do you see photons of light? Or do you see elements of carbon and hydrogen and oxygen? Or do you see the impression of a tree in your mind? You can never experience anything directly, you can experience only your own mind.
Can't see that the distinction matters that much TBH. I personally believe everything is made of energy of various forms and the entire universe is simply a chaos of constantly changing energies. Every life form is just a transformer of those energies. Life forms take forms of energy in, they transform them into the type of energy they need to sustain themselves, to sustain their current form and if they don't get enough of that required energy they lose that form (what we call dying) and revert back to other energies which will ultimately br transformed into something else.
In this sense energy is immortal. Humans worry about living and dying and speak in those terms but the reality is we are immortal or rather the energy which makes us what we are is immortal. Hence there's really no such thing as dying at all. We've all been here since the universe began billions of years ago, born in stars likely as atoms of Hydrogen and Helium but over the millennia transformations have happened and trillions of different forms of energy have been generated. The greatest lie ever told by nefarious life forms is that we're all going to die and unless we do X, Y and Z or them, we'll go to perpetual Hell and the like. We're all immortal. We are all part of the universe that's been here since the beginning (if indeed there ever was a beginning). What's not immortal is our current energy form. It's fickle, vulnerable and unable to sustain itself indefinitely, most likely because it doesn't get access to the certain types of energy that it really need to fuel it.
Well, every type of energy reacts differently to every other type of energy so no surprise there really. A cold energy will react to a hot energy differently to how another hot energy would react to it.
Can't see how that follows at all TBH. The "material world" is nothing but energy in various forms. So really there's no such thing as a material world. It's all just an energy world. Humans perhaps like to think of a rock as material but really it's energy.
What you perceive as consciousness is just a collection of properties of the various energies that make up your form. Do we need to assign the word "consciousness" to those properties? Would a flame consider its heat properties to be it's consciousness?
I don't think you've got this quite right. Energy is energy. You're wanting to call some of the properties of that energy consciousness for whatever reason. Energy isn't imo consciousness. Consciousness is simply an artificial construct of humans which they use to describe certain properties. Everything is just constant exchange of energies. We simply act and behave in accordance with the type of energies that we are made of. For whatever reason those energies desire to maintain the form they are in (human form) though for 99.9999999% of humans that turns out not to be possible because we can't get the energy fuel we need to sustain that form so we age, grow old, decay and decompose.
gonna finish the train of thought later brb