Do You Exist?

Ooh I love this question! I think the famous Johnson kicking a stone answer to this is entirely unsatisfactory (or your smelly respondent!). If you don't exist then what are the alternatives? You could be a character in someones mind - in a dream, in a story they've written or in a fantasy or daydream. You could have a mind but not a body (e.g. the brain in a Vat scenario). In either of these situations, you would feel pain or be capable of smell because, in the first instance, the dreamer would have given you those characteristics and in the second, the perception of pain or smell originate in the brain. The first possibility I think is handled brilliantly in the film 'Open Your Eyes' or 'Vanilla Sky' (essentially the same film). The main character discovers that he is actually living inside immersive virtual reality. Whilst he can come out of this (a little like the Matrix), what it means for characters that he meets while in there is that they are not real. We see his psychiatrist realizing that he is a figment of someone elses imagination. What I like about this is that we have absolutely no way of demonstrating that this is not the case. The same is true of the brain in the vat scenario. You will have heard of this as a philosophy student but fore those who haven't it is basically about discovering that you are a brain in a vat being fed signals to your brain which give the illusion of being inside a body which is living a life. This is especially interesting because it is actually no different to reality in a lot of ways. We can consider the body to be equivalent to the vat so that the possibility not only exists that we are a brain in a vat but also that we are a brain in a body feeding in signals which have nothing to do with reality. In this situation, we don't know for certain either whether we exist personally in the form we believe ourselves to or whether the world around us exists or bears any relation to reality. Again, there is no way of proving or disproving these possibilities. The big question then, is how do we define existence? I would be interested to know how your philosophy group managed to irrefutably prove that you exist as you have got further than any of the famous philosophers if you have succeeeded. Perhaps the best argument for existence is that consciousness is equivalent to existence. Whether the information coming in through our senses is real or not, whether we have an objective existence outside of the pages of a bok or someone else is mind, if we are aware and conscious of ourselves then that can perhaps be enough. Unfortunately for this definition though, the existence of consciousness itself has been called into question in the last couple of decades and what consciousness is has not been entirely determined either. All of this means that we could very well not be here - spooky!!

It might be hard to prove that things you can not see exist, but Im pretty confident I exist, cosidering I am posting this right now. *sniff*sniff* yup I exist and I need a shower LOL jk

do any of us have an objective existence? i think therefore i am, but how do we know? maybe we create our own universe to live in and others are just actors ? not sure