Convince me of your existence

[Avatar]

Of course it's true. We just have to believe it.

--A

[Sevothtarte]

I'm not presupposing anything. I'm merely looking at Being and describing it. It is a fact that our being-in-the-world and being-with-others is primordial compared to the reflective, analytical attitude which questions the fact of our Being. Our participation in Being is a fact that is always-already there, even when we are sitting in our chairs and doubting it. Even our act of reflecting on it is a kind of participation with it.

[...]

In fact, in performing this infinite regression, you retreat farther and farther from where your life is actually lived. So there is no reason to suppose that this "style" of participation in the world--this reflective attitude--is more real than active participation in the world. In other words, there is no reason to suppose that this is a retreat into "higher truths" because it is in fact a retreat from your life as it is lived, a retreat into . . . what exactly?

Hmm, maybe I just don't get it, but for me that's presupposing. I tried to assume (or presuppose, heh) that my mind might be the only real thing, and doubt the existence of everything I perceive (or its existence in the way I perceive it, as my sensory perception might be faulty). You seem to take it for a fact that reality as we perceive it exists, and see my doubting only in relation to it. Of course I'm not saying you're wrong, and this attitude definitely is the safer, healthier and more sensible one, but I tried to go a more abstract way.

Do you ever feel any doubt of this kind?

When presented with a world, and presented with the choice of either being in it or doubting it--and those really are the only two choices--how can doubting it be seen as anything else than a denial of Being?

Can you put yourself in Covenant's shoes? If you found yourself in a new, different world, would you believe in it wholeheartedly, or would you refuse to believe since you already know the real world? In other words, believing in what you are presented with instead of doubting it sure is sensible, but do you see the possibility of being later presented with something that you would have to believe in too by the same maxim, but which in itself doubts the reality of what you previously believed in?

So we have here two different kinds of participation: one is passive and reflective, one is active and immediate. You doubt the active one, but for some reason you're not doubting the passive one. Why not suppose that your reflective attitude represents a false way of being?

Because I need it. I don't have any more proof for it than for the reality I perceive, but if I do not believe in the existence and autonomy of my own being, of my mind that does the thinking and reflecting, of my soul and personality, everything loses its meaning for me. A real me and an illusionary reality around me - that I can somehow deal with. An unreal me, no matter what's the nature of reality, is both inacceptible and impossible to deal with. I'd get lost in a vicious circle of eternal doubting of my every single thought, and of doubting the part of me that does the doubting.

No it is not what we do. We meet people, sometimes very much worth meeting, sometimes not worth meeting. That all is easy enough for us to imagine for ourselves... for variety. But the people you don't meet, some are worth meeting as well, and some not... which is learned easily enough from shared experience with other people who have known people you did not. There isn't much reason for an individual to imagine people worth meeting and not also imagine knowing them.

Hmm, meeting, as in "interact with directly" isn't necessary. I've never met George Bush, I likely never will, but his opinions and actions still manage to influence my life. Sometimes on a direct level, sometimes simply by giving me something to contemplate and discuss. That person on the bus which seemed uninteresting might influence another person I don't know, who in turn influences someone who does affect me directly, one of the special persons. Still, there's quite a few people left that will never affect me in any way at all. There might be no reason to imagine them, but there surely is no reason not to. Just like I could do without imagining any single one of the trees I see from my window, but it still is there. People can be part of the scenery too. And if I reduced the world's population to only those who really mattered to me, I would inevitably change the nature of the world, as our world cannot run with only, uh, several hundreds or thousands of people. So the question might actually be, why imagine a world like this at all? Why imagine a world with a middle east like ours, when I'm personally geographically far removed from the middle east, and on the practical level unaffected by the killing and suffering going on there? From this point of view, all the middle east "gives" me is something to think about. Are our minds so complex and active that they need something beyond our special persons, beyond our immediate surroundings, just for our reason to contemplate and our soul to grow on?

The hole in imagining that we don't exist, is that it really doesn't make any sense, that if all these things were under the control of imagination, we would deliberately imagine people worth meeting, and also imagine not meeting them... why bother imagining such things?

Control isn't a necessary aspect. If reality is a dream, there's no control, but reality still is false. If I were in control, I wouldn't have to bother with the initial question, I could just let myself know "Yeah, it's all just illusion" and enjoy the ride. Maybe my subconscious is in control, but it in itself is beyond mine.

Let us say we had an infinite bunch of legos spilled about the floor, with which at the flicker of our will, we can form into anything. To build an image of something with those legos, requires us to have knowledge enough of that image to create it. We can forget that we created that image, but we cannot forget what it is made of, because in order to make that image, we had to know the flicker of thought that would create it.

This once again depends on the scenario... If I'm God, I might be truly original, being able to create without having to base my creation on anything that ever existed. If I'm human but in a virtual reality or dream based upon the real world, the people I see might be just imperfect images of real people I've known, but imperfect images can cause reactions equal or surpassing to the real thing, just like looking at the Mona Lisa can cause reations meeting the real person it depicts might not have caused.

So then, all these other people we imagine, we'd have to know what they were in some sense, even if we'd forgotten that we ourselves had made them. So not only would it be impossible for us to not know that these created individuals were worth meeting, but it would be impossible to create something that one enjoys while at the same time imagining it undiscovered. It would be like imaging that 2+2=7 while at the same time imagining that neither 2 nor 7 represents anything worth symbolising.

If I'm in control, consciously or subconsciously, I can make myself forget the nature of reality (I obviously did, or we wouldn't be having this conversation ). So I can be unaware who is worth meeting and who's not. More importantly, there's got to be room for change and development, and hope. I evolve as a human being, my intellect and my personality, and at any given time in my life people can be "worth it" that weren't at an earlier time. And if I were to assume that I had already met everyone worth meeting, what would be there to look forward to? I need potential, the potential for people I haven't met yet to be interesting, for those I have met and deemed not worth it to turn out to be worth it after all after I've evolved, and for me to keep meeting people and judge them worthy or not, form an opinion, something which is quite fundamental to human nature in my view.

[Tjol]

--To imagine people based on other 'real' people that you do know, requires that other 'real' people besides yourself exist. If that's the case, how can you tell one from the other?

--To actually create something is to cause it to exist, so I don't think it's worthwhile to look at this from a viewpoint of 'if i was the creator'. Imagining is a better word I think, because it does not connotate something's actual existence. The argument is not whether it's possible that you could be a creator of other people, but rather if it's possible to imagine something without being conscious of imagining it in formation, but being able to then imagine it as it reaches completeness. It requires a sort of selective blindness if one estimates that all other people are imaginary. (or that some people are imaginary and others are not if we assume that some imaginary people are based upon real people we've encountered).

I think it's impossible for everyone else to be imaginary if that causes us to be the only entity available to imagine them, and therefore requires us to develop selective blindness or lack of consciousness as we actively imagine something into our dreams.. it requires passivity and proactiveness in the same motion and non-motion.

I think then the better line to pursue here... is imagining that we imagine some people and that others we don't. My first question, how do you know which are imaginary and which are real, and how is it that real and imaginary can be indistinguishable from one another.... I think applies. I don't think it proves the point though, but I haven't thought up the holes in it yet, so I can't think yet of what needs to be adressed.

[Zarathustra]

Do you ever feel any doubt of this kind?

I entertained doubt of this kind. But I never really felt it. I don't think anyone actually feels it. I think it's a mental game we play due to our language. We have words and concepts which have distant origins in times when our self-consciousness first became a fact for us. This language contains inherent dualisms which seem to make a subjective and objective gulf apparant. But prior to this symbolic representation, we just lived in the world. Like animals. (However, you would rightly call that Naive Realism.)

This doubt of which you speak is the result of faulty concepts which have built up over millennia. For instance, nouns may have been a bad idea. Just get rid of nouns, and many problems disappear. Suppose that there aren't really objects, just events. Objects are collections of processes (some slower than others, giving them an appearance of "permanance.") And humans are also processes, not things. I'm not an entity which interacts with a (real or unreal) world. I am that process of interaction. Take away that interaction (via removing yourself by doubting), and you take away the human. By doing away with nouns, there are no longer two objects that interact in some mysterious way (mind and body), but merely a process. *Poof* mind/body dualism vanishes.

Okay, so it's not that easy. Going back to your original question: yes, I've doubted the world. There was even a time when I convinced myself that I wasn't seeing books and tables, but rather a bunch of colors (which my mind "arranged" into books and tables via language). But unless you're doing a painting, you're not really seeing the colors--you're seeing objects. (For instance, not many people even notice that egg yokes are not yellow--they're the color of orange juice.) No, our immediate experience is with objects and people, not sensory input. We look through our sensory input, not at it.

After my period of Cartesian Doubt, I found (like many philosophers before me), this is a temporary stage in your journey. It seems inescapable at the time, the only truly rational position one can affirm with certainty. But then you slowly realize that of course the world is real, you're just looking for a way to settle it in your mind, settle it in a way that doesn't seem naive.

One of those ways is to realize that the problem is stated in terms which presuppose the problem. We tend to think of ourselves as a mind and a body. Most Westerners are closet dualists. We think of mind and body as two separate Substances which cannot possibly interact because mind is not physical and body is not mental. To unravel this conceptual dualism, it is useful to realize that mind and body are two ends of a continuum, a spectrum of being.

I believe that there really isn't "objective reality," but instead that reality is intersubjective. This does't mean that I think the "external" world is not real--just that we participate in creating it. We collapse the quantum waves of probability into distinct actualities.

There is something real "out there." It is the patterns of the world, the patterns of Being, of interaction between processes. There is no Kantian "thing in itself," behind appearance of objects, something completely separate from our perceptions of it, something we'll never be able to access through subjective experiences. Being is revealed in an unfolding of perceptions. The interconnectedness of appearances, the adumbrations of appearances of objects from different views, the order and consistency by which events, objects, and processes unfold. This rational order is the reality of the world. It is something intuited "between" perceptions. It is the joining of the subjective and objective.

You can doubt the reality of the individual objects, or even of the world as a whole. But these "patterns" are existential structures of your experience. They are the structures necessary for you to have any experience whatsoever. This fundamental "you" that you postulate, the "you" which is the absolute residuum left over after doubting, must still have certain existential structures by which to experience anything at all. These structures are only exposed/revealed in being-in-the-world, whether that being is a doubting kind of being or a active kind of being.

I don't know how to explain it any clearer. It's been way too many years since I've studied this stuff. You make me want to brush up on it.

[Avatar]

Excellent post Malik.

--A

[Chassit]

^Sevothtarte...

I know I exist, because that creepy little box in your sig knows everything about me! (I even tried switching browsers, and it KNEW! I'm afwaid!!)

[onewyteduck]

I exist because every month I get bills. If I don't pay said bills, I get a phone call. If I didn't exist, THEY couldn't call me........

[Avatar]

--A

[Gil galad]

Descartes put foreward the idea Cogito ergo sum, which I agree with and thus I believe in my own existance. As to the existence of other people, I have no concrete evidence of thier being but no evidence either that they do not. However it is practical for me to suppose that they do exist, as there is no real or imaginary advantage to be gained by supposing the non-existence of others.

[A Gunslinger]

Descartes put foreward the idea Cogito ergo sum, which I agree with and thus I believe in my own existance. As to the existence of other people, I have no concrete evidence of thier being but no evidence either that they do not. However it is practical for me to suppose that they do exist, as there is no real or imaginary advantage to be gained by supposing the non-existence of others.

Existence may just be a fleeting idea in the mind of God. A particularly heavy thought if you have just put a house in escrow.
-Woody Allen (Gettin Even...I think)

[Esmer]

A piece of God as placed within Itself, lost and unknown to Itself, and the only obvious and worthwhile challenge is to remember and return to Itself.

[A Gunslinger]

A piece of God as placed within Itself, lost and unknown to Itself, and the only obvious and worthwhile challenge is to remember and return to Itself.

...but only with proof of pruchase and within 30 days. Otherwise the reurn will yield only store credit and not the full refund.

[Esmer]

No deposit, no return...


give a hoot, don't pollute!