I've often wondered whether humans could prove their own existence. Through religion, it's been believed (e.g. Jesus came to save us, so if you don't believe we exist, you can't believe Jesus existed-among many other religious arguments), but without religion, i have found myself incapable of proving my own or anything/one elses existence.
The idea of thought is often the most thought of argument, or the first to come to mind. Often, as a rebuttal, one might say that someone doesn't necessarily know that they are involving themselves in any sort of action at all (e.g. "How do you know you're really thinking? thought is just electromagnetic pulse being sent to your brain."), but it is responded that thought is such a broad thing that it's only possible that we're doing it ourselves.
However, where would we, as humans, get our definition of broad? What do we think is broad? the only boundaries we know for this are what we can think of, so if our boundaries for thought are that which we think of, perhaps they're not so broad after all. Therefore, perhaps thought isn't such a complex thing. out of the trillions of complex transactions that happen in ones body in the period of a mere second, perhaps thought isn't such a wonder after all.
Furthermore, the only substantial proof we have to proof our existence, or, for lack of a better word, "Earthly" existence, is through human or earthly proof.
Take geometry, for a rough example.
In geometric proofs, you're proving a geometric theorem or pattern (Geometry is, in fact, a form of math, meaning literally the measure of the earth) using nothing but mathematics.

So you're using mathematics to prove mathematics?

The whole idea is mind-boggling, really.

The only ways we can find to prove human existence is by using human ideas or human theories. Perhaps this signifies that there is something else, indeed, otherwise human existence is neither provable nor as plausible as any other theory out there.

So my question is, is anyone capable of proving human existence?

It's impossible to prove our existence

Good question.

I don't see how we could NOT exist, really. I am a physical being consisting of energy and partilcles, therefore I am. Is we don't exist, then it's very interesting that I'm typing on a keyboard, living and breathing and smoking.

Broad is a relative term. The paranormal is a broad subject on this site, but on other forums there could only be one thread dedicated to it, and therefore it would not be a broad topic.

Personally I do believe thought is nothing but a physical process, so it's not incredibly complex in the wide spectrum of things.

However, there is the idea of perception; what we see isn't always what it is. Color-blind people can't tell red from green. To them, green does not exist. But to others, it does. My friend screamed like a banshee when she got her nose pierced, whereas I've barely flinched with any of the piercings I've receive. There is the possibility, however abstract, that what we sense with all our senses as a whole is actually not how it is, but only as we perceive it to be. A cat is not a cat, the sun is not a sun. But I can't really imagine it any other way.

Why don't we try it out ? Think !


Cogito ergo sum

Existence is far, far different from conscious life. Do the majority of people actually think? Or are they simply breathing, eating, procreating machines?-Zombies. Isn't that the real question?
I think. And you and the other people at this website think. But the vast majority of people?
I live in Mongolia, and they recently started broadcasting an American TV show: Beauty and the Geek. Have you seen this show? "Brainy geeks" who can't figure out popular music? And beauties who can't plug in the cables to a computer. And this is mass entertainment? (I use this show as an example. But I could select any one of thousands of television serials broadcast worldwide.)
So, I ask you again. Do the majority of people think? Or are they simply cannon fodder for corporations and governments?

"I think, therefore I am" boldly overstates its case. The simplest reservation concerns this "I" person who appears twice in the formula.

My sense of the thing is that I infer the existence of selves, my own just as much as yours, and selves just as much as any other real-world existence claim I might make.

Speaking of pontifications by dead Frenchmen, Laplace famously said of God in the context of astronomy, "I have no need for that hypothesis." There are devout atheists who reject God on just such grounds, and yet Laplace might have said the same about the self, his self.

We can get along just fine, some claim better, without a sense of self. If I adopted that view, however, then I would miss me, since I have grown fond of the old boy. But such sentiments are no proof of the beloved's existence. I am fond of Winnie the Pooh, too.

What the Cartesian boast might "prove" is that something must exist in order for us to believe that we exist and are talking about things that exist. It tells us nothing about what that "something" might be, including that there is any such thing as a self.

Good to talk with you again, Mam'selle (on the off chance that we both exist ).

And I would say indeed you are wise..it seems rather stupid to think we are just some sort of an illusion...
if we wernt real..then all those people in prison shouldnt be there..after all their crime could be just an illusion LOL so its pointless locking them up forsomething that cant be proved!!


ha ha me too...I was thinking, if everyone here agreed it was impossible to prove ourselves..then we could type whatever we wanted and never get warned off by anyone..for they couldnt prove we did anything...


weird how some people think!!

I think that attempting to define exactly what thought is, could be a start. As individual humans, each one of us knows or thinks we know a definition.
Do rocks and plants think as well. Would we recognise their thoughts as such perhaps being so different from our own?

I can be certain that I exist for I am here and thinking and am able to consider the question, therefore I exist in some way, on some level.

It's very simple. It only works for yourself though. I cannot use that philosophy to prove anything outside of the fact that I exist in some form but the proposition makes no claims beyond that anyway.

With all due respect I think you over analysing the claim "I think therefore I am". It's a very simple statement and as I stated in my last post, it makes no further claims.

I really like your signature... Thomas Paine

One cannot tiptoe around for fear of offending others. To cause offense should never be the intent of course but we live in a society in which we have the right to free speech. There is no right to not be offended.

I disagree. Descartes was trying to prove things from the ground up - to start with any proposition which was utterly irrefutable, and work from there. His statement cogito ergo sum ('I think, therefore I am') began with an exploration of the seperate assertions within that statement, and clearly comes unstuck at the I part. I think it was Russell who pointed out that he should have stuck with his earlier proposition that cogitatio est, 'there is thought', though the reasons he did not do so are clear: that it doesn't go anywhere, even to the extent of defining what thought is, let alone where it might come from.

Look at it in your own formulation:


You've asserted that, but the 'I' just creeps in with no working around it: you immediately assume that it is 'I' who is doing the thinking. Without definition around the 'thinking' part, and a clear reason to attribute the thought to a being identified with whatever it is you consider yourself to be, it's all so much speculation, which is exactly what Descartes sought to avoid. You also infer a 'here', but I'm not sure you meant to.

Start with the cogitatio est formula - where can you go from there? I can't think of anywhere that leads to (though a more thorough phenomenology of the thought which is occuring might yield fruit?).

And your avatar had me smacking my screen LMAO...good one...for a moment I was all - grrrr that think wont DIE!!!!!!!

Nice topic! I happen to be a huge fan of Descartes so I'm going to answer in the affirmative! Philosophy rocks.

The concept of existence is murky. One can exist in the physical sense by having a body or in an abstract sense as being someone who lived, but now deceased, still has an influence (George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, etc.). Then there is the instance where once an idea emerges, whether valid or not; it is out there! It exists. I would think that anything or anyone that can cause another to ponder its existence qualifies. So to me if it is plausible it exists. We exist even if it turns out that we are part of some computer program because we extended past the boundary of self and entered into the contemplation of another.

illic est sententia , proinde illic est a reputo

How can you prove you're typing on a keyboard, living/breathing and or smoking? Have you never dreamt?

To whom else am "I" supposed to attribute my thoughts?

Something has to be doing the dreaming.

The difficulty is not so much that someone else is doing your thinking, necessarily, but the assumption that thought requires any personal agent, except as way of speaking.

Awareness of thought could be an emergent property of hooking up enough neurons so that the activity of one affects the activity of another which affects the activity of the first.

There are no persons in that picture, but maybe if you hook up enough push-me-pull-you's, eventually some of them start doing things like saying "Madam, I'm Adam."

Maybe that's contagious, too, among similarly equpped push-me-pull-you containers. "Care for an apple, handsome?"

Next thing you know, there are billions of folks running around claiming "Neurons fire, therefore I am."

Maybe not my favorite theory of the case, but a logical possibility at least.

Either you are too clever for me or you use too many words to say simple things, either way I frequently have trouble understanding what you are saying.

Oh, Pap, forgive me having a little fun with a theory which is not my own.

Maybe neurons do everything that is ever done when you experience thinking. Maybe one of the things neurons do is to form a working hypothesis that there is such a thing as "you," someone "doing the thinking," which in fact they do all by themselves.

People thought up the character "Zeus" as part of an account about lightning. There is lightning, but I doubt that there is Zeus. Analogously, there is thought, so is Pap to thought as Zeus is to lightning?

Better?

Please recall that all that I am claiming is that "I think" is not self-evidently true. It might be true anyway, but Descartes' goal was to have a self-evident proposition. It is not self-evident to me as long as other possible explanations exist for my impression that "I think."

'I think, therefore I am':If it is accurate observation, then most people aren't.

The concept of Zeus requires a thinker to conceive it, so the analogy is false. You must work from basic premises. There is lightning, therefore there is a lightning generator.

That thought requires a thinker is self-evident. If there are individual neurons "thinking" then the community of those neurons comprising an "I" is just as real as the community of cells making an organism. I'll grant we do not know enough about how to recognise thought in anything other than the self we all seem to be aware of, we have not defined whether thinking necessarily requires awareness of thought.

Consider, though, if all thought is subject to the deception Descartes considered (and rejected) in his "Evil Genius" premise. There is still a thinker in that scenario - although the thinker cannot know whether deception extends beyond themselves. The Evil Genius (I prefer "Deceiver") may itself be deceived, leading to an endless iteration of 'deceivers' so the identity of the thinker is unknowable. If the neuron is the "I" of thought then "We" are the Deceiver and may ourselves be deceived.

In the "No Interference" scenario in Descartes treatise, however, the "I" would not be subject to the deception you consider above. In this case "We" exist.

Assuming we both exist on a cartesian level .. bien le bonjour , mon cher ami ! A bientot ..

, Mam'selle.

Leo:


Alas, that restates the proposition to be demonstrated, and so one may not simply assume its truth and call the result self-evident.

And again, it is not that I hold any brief for an impersonal view of cognition. It is that there are at least two possibilities in a materialist, neural account of thought:

There is a self who comprises the neurons doing the thinking, or as an alternative,

There is no self, but the neuron community forms the compelling impression that there is, just as other neuron communities have professed conviction about other fabulous persons to complete other "action requires agent" models about how the world works.

It is not self-evident, then, that "thought happens" and "someone thinks" assert the same thing. There is a logically possible alternative. If thought requires a thinker, then they do assert the same thing.

Just to find a deductive consequence of "thought requires a thinker" worthy of, or in need of, investigation defeats the claim that its truth is self-evident.

And how would you fathom thought if it was not conceived of a thinker? What is your 'logically possible alternative'? The action of individual neurons? Then those are the thinkers and the "We" that encompases our self is a deception, a fabrication. Yet it still exists.

BTW: I said there is a thinker...I did not say 'someone (a self) thinks'

As for the second of Descartes' assertions, if there is no deception then the identity of self, "I", is self-evident. However we cannot know whether deception is involved in our thoughts so we can only accept this may be the case.

And I would suggest that all the evidence we have is that the entire universe is modelled on the agent/action pairing of causality. If you can suggest any circumstance where this can be demonstrably shown to not be so I would be interested in your case.

To deny the statement "X is self-evident," one need not show that X is false.

A defeat along the lines you demand, then, would not require me to show an action without an agent, but only an action where it is not self-evident that an agent is involved. Evidence of non-self-evidence could be the existence of a denial of agency by some serious-minded person.

You have seen at least one thread hereabouts on the topic of Intelligent Design. The action discussed there is the first emergence of the human species. Some posters deny a role to any personal agent whatsoever in that action.

It is therefore not self-evident that every action requires an agent.


Everything I have written in this thread is downstream of claims made on behalf of the proposition "I think," which is on its face a statement about personal agency.

If an impersonal account of thought works for you, then we should be in agreement about the self-evidence of the personal account, or so it would seem.


Their arrangement may have properties that are unpredictable or unexpected from their individual properties. I used the term emergent property, which is searchable.

I have had plenty of dreams where I've woken up and could have sworn they were real. felt real. but weren't. this could all be someones dream. would we really know ?

you know when your dreaming and you dont realise its a dream until you wake up. if you realise you are dreaming its a lucid dream. this thread is provoking lucid thoughts by questioning reality. its got to a dead end and asks for proof of proofs existance, this is an infinate cycle. the truth is we are all dreaming and wont realise until we die. well wake up and go ' cant beleive i took that whole thing so serious'

I believe we question our existence because science has shown us that what we think we are perceiving is not necessarily what we are experiencing. For instance, when we look at an object (assuming there is enough light to see it) we do not actually see the object we are looking at. The object absorbs the light into itself and reflects off the colors that are not captured. What we are actually seeing is not the real color, but the inverse of the real color because that excess reflected light is what hits our retina and is processed into what we call perception.

We have also learned that our senses can be deceived. Illusionists and magicians deceive our sense of sight. Manufacturers deceive our sense of taste and smell with artificial flavors and fragrances. Virtual reality has taken this deception to an entirely new level, incorporating a sense of accomplishment or defeat in video games that is so real it is addicting to some individuals. The quality of these games is becoming so realistic that they are starting to resemble movies, which our brain has accepted as a valid depiction of real life. Now with the quality of special effects and animation that is available, the line between reality and fantasy is blurred even more.

Even if we are not aware of these potential deceptions on a conscious level we are aware of them on a subconscious level. How can a rationally sound and sane person not question if the perception of our existence is valid when everyday our experience of what use to be considered genuinely real is being replaced by what we know is not real and the quality of our lives seems to be better off because of it!

Great post it definately got me to thinking before my second cup of coffee this morning and thats saying alot. hehehehe Very well written and thought out btw The question I want to propose to you is what is proof? It is simply itself just a human term for convincing or persuading based on evidence.

Rofl oh so true...

Also i would like to add(again) that there is no way to absolutely prove the existence of anything.All these fancy scientific words and theories and arguments ultimately end with the same answer.No answer.*pounds gavel*

it's kind of funny, because i often find myself thinking "is any of this real?" and i end up spending hours debating with mysef over the same type of things you do. now i know you dont visit the site much, but maybe we could bring it up and talk about it with the SG people? i find that this subject is rather interesting. of course i believe that we were created by God and all that stuff, but often times (since i cannot use the computer at home) i find myself sitting in my room just thinking "what if" and i get so worked up about something so irrelevant to what i should be thinking. a great topic to bring up at SG

Hi Syringe-

You're question is *the* question is it not? :-) I am typing on this keyboard, thinking thoughts about your post, feeling my clothes against my skin, but none of those are proof of the existence of an entinty performing those feats or experiencing those sensations. We assume that because things are seen that it all comes together as proof of something. We function in one direction, we can only see what's being percieved but we can't see what is perceiving. We think it's our thoughts perceiving our surroundings but our thoughts appear along with our surroundings. So I agree with you that we cannot use human means to discover what human is, if human is what we are. Thought will never be able to objectify what sees thought.

If we confront ourselves with the possibility that we may not exist, that we may just be concepts within mind, then we have to ask ourselves how it could be that a concept could ever conceive of it's own conceptual inexistence. We cannot prove that we exist, yet we cannot prove that we do not not exist. Everything that we hold up as proof 'me' is conceivable, or as dis-proof of me, is an object within perception, or imagination (thought), but once again we cannot see what is perceiving. We are within the perceiving, how is it then that what is perceived can perceive? There cannot be two of 'me', one to perceive and the other to be perceived. Yet we all live our lives as if that is the case and never question it. What is perceived does not perceive.

The question becomes, what is perceiving me? What sees me thinking that I think therefore I am? Perceiving, what is that?

Mind boggling, you got that right!

-Jamie

Iam, Therefor Iam.

Or Iam that Iam.

Love Omnaka

Bertrand Russell had a nervous breakdown trying to logically prove the existence of numbers:
Russell continued to defend logicism, the view that mathematics is in some important sense reducible to logic, and along with his former teacher, Alfred North Whitehead, wrote the monumental Principia Mathematica, an axiomatic system on which all of mathematics can be built. The first volume of the Principia was published in 1910, and is largely ascribed to Russell. More than any other single work, it established the specialty of mathematical or symbolic logic. Two more volumes were published, but their original plan to incorporate geometry in a fourth volume was never realized, and Russell never felt up to improving the original works, though he referenced new developments and problems in his preface to the second edition. Upon completing the Principia, three volumes of extraordinarily abstract and complex reasoning, Russell was exhausted, and he felt his intellectual faculties never fully recovered from the effort.[40] Although the Principia did not fall prey to the paradoxes in Frege's approach, it was later proven by Kurt Gödel that neither Principia Mathematica, nor any other consistent system of primitive recursive arithmetic, could, within that system, determine that every proposition that could be formulated within that system was decidable, i.e. could decide whether that proposition or its negation was provable within the system (Gödel's incompleteness theorem).

Russell, it seemed, sought to use Mathematics to prove existence and god. It's tough. Russell was a genius. I couldn't even get close.

From Wikipedia: Bertrand Russell...

::head explodes::
::grows new head::
::repeat last two actions::
::repeat::
::repeat::
::repeat::
::repeat::

That's because Fathert does not use Math or science to create.

Anaylisis Paralisis, Gets the Physical brain (almost ) every time.

Its much easier than that.

Love Omnaka

There is awareness

Not to another human. Self-proof is about as far as you can get. If you can ask the question, you exist.

it is also possible that we are an alien in a coma or crazily, even virtual people of some alien gaming MMO.

if that ^ is true, then how do we have the power to control what we think and do? think before you reply

Maybe you should think before you reply.What orcseeker is getting at is the possibility that everything we do,our actions,our 'fates',and everything we percieve as real is actually some simulation,some MMO that aliens are controlling.Just because you 'think' something doesn't necessarily mean the 'you' 'thought' it.Maybe some outside force is making you think what you think.Maybe that's difficult to understand??

maybe that's not even possible... you control what you think and if you want to change something you can. and if it was some type of MMO then you'd probably be a lvl 3.


oh, and what you were saying about the "aliens were controling" if that were true, then it wouldn't be any aliens in our universe, or even our galaxy. nothing we would ever see b/c it would be like us in the game and them outside of it.

i still disagree completely

I don't think that aliens control our universe,but it is a remote possibility,maybe.I think if our 'reality' was some kind of simulation we probably wouldn't know about it.And here's the thing:I don't absolutely know without a doubt that you or anyone else around me are actually 'real'.There's no way to prove that you are aware,that you think,that you are really interacting with me,or that your just an illusion made by the aliens.Also I may not be real.Maybe you are the only one that is real and I am just a robot thing that is typing this to you because for some reason the aliens want you to hear it.Scary thought eh?

i've actually thought abuot that before

Do we? We react and these reactions are linked to chemical processes. We do not true have complete control of what we think.

True,but some ppl can 'train their brain' not to react the way it usually does.The first one that comes to my mind is boxers.Some train their eyes not to blink during a fight,even when they're punched in the face.Many monks and martial artists practice extreme focus to block out pain,until they don't even feel it,and thus don't react.These are mediocre examples yes,but they do point to us having some control over what our brains do.