the way it was explained to me as a kid is that you feel different from your body, right? like you can step outside your body and inhabit other spaces in your mind. this separation must be real because it's self-evidently true.

idk I agreed on the surface at the time but I was like 8. it seemed pretty obvious by 13 that that was circular reasoning and that the hindu/buddhist monism - the material world is the illusion - doesn't actually answer the question. that we perceive an illusion constructed by our minds is true but that doesn't make the physical world unreal. it only means that our understanding of the world, the sense that reality is coherent, is something we actively construct. the phenomenal world is at least as real as we are. and the noumenal world... well that only seems to exist in our minds too, but it's unconstrained, free to shift with what we imagine and feel.