Omnimaga
General Discussion => Other Discussions => Miscellaneous => Topic started by: pimathbrainiac on May 13, 2013, 12:50:15 pm
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Evidently, I exist.
In fact, I KNOW I exist.
Evidently, you exist.
But I don't KNOW that for sure.
Why? Because I think. I think, therefore I am. (no idea where that comes from, but it's catchy)
But I don't know for sure of any existence past my mind. For all I know, I could be perpetually dreaming. You talk to me, but those might just be my own thoughts of what another person might say. Even surprises could be subconscious thoughts. I know I think, but I don't know for a fact that YOU do. I can hook you up to an EEG, but that could just be my brain thinking that you exist. Even if it were possible to share thoughts, I wouldn't know for sure because my brain might be thinking those thoughts. I don't know that you exist at all, but I believe you do, therefore you do in my mind. If you existed and I didn't think that, then you would not exist in my mind, and, as far as I know, you don't exist.
Senses are controlled and processed, ultimately, by the brain. My brain can tell me I'm touching something, but I don't know for sure that it is actually there. This means that I don't know that objects without a human brain exist, either.
Our perception past our own brains might be true, it might be a lie, or it might be a half-truth. Our brains fill in gaps in sensory information with our brains' best guesses. This happens all the time, eg. peripheral vision is mostly our brains' guess at the rest of the picture based on a little information from the edges of our vision. That is why you don't see much movement in your peripheral vision unless everything else in your vision is moving, even if something in your perceived range of vision is moving.
To sum it up: Existence is like quantum mechanics: both true and not true if not known for sure. I know I exist, but I don't know for sure that anything else exists, therefore you both exist and don't exist in my mind, and I both exist and don't exist in your mind (or what I believe is your mind). This is supported by the fact that our brains fill in the gaps of limited sensory information, causing perception.
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We're in the matrix dude. To check if you aren't feel behind your neck if you feel a "port". If you don't you're in the matrix.
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Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?
Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.
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Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?
Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.
But AI does not think. It goes by a set of instructions. Even learning AI does not think, and, if it did, how would we know?
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Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?
Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.
But AI does not think. It goes by a set of instructions. Even learning AI does not think, and, if it did, how would we know?
And who tolds you you think ? Who told you you are not a set of instructions ?
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On a more serious note, I guess you cannot know for sure. But there are a lot of things you cannot know for sure. One of those things many people try to deny, but it's as real as me.
Therefore you must just accept it, hope and believe. ;)
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Cogito, ergo sum. That means "I think, therefore I am".
That 'catchy sentence' is a saying from Descartes, a philosopher who lived during the French Revolution (1789). It means that you can't trust anything unless you have checked it yourself, because you can trust your own sense (which is obviously not true, optical illusions etc)...
Descartes invented the Cartesian coordinate system, which is now the most common coordinate system in use.
And a lot more.
Class ended.
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Money is worth something because everyone accepts it as valuable. Without this thrust there would not be currency. The same thing with existence. Accepting that other humans exist is a matter of trust.
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Evidently, I exist.
In fact, I KNOW I exist.
This particular bit of philosophy ("Cogito Ergo Sum") stems primarily from Descartes way back in the 17th century1. Anyway, it's a bit of a tricky statement to make. For one thing, you need to prove that you have perception, which is quite obvious, but impossible to prove without a priori knowledge. More concisely, it's not entirely self-evident that an object which has the property of perception exists. Please excuse the connotations of the word "object" as a flaw of English and not a fundamental flaw in the counter-argument.
This extends to other things. As you mentioned, you really can't be sure of the reliability of your senses, a view called Solipsism. As Descartes argued that for all you know, a malicious entity he called the Evil Genius could be manipulating all of your senses to give you the illusion of an external world.
To sum it up: Existence is like quantum mechanics: both true and not true if not known for sure. I know I exist, but I don't know for sure that anything else exists, therefore you both exist and don't exist in my mind, and I both exist and don't exist in your mind (or what I believe is your mind). This is supported by the fact that our brains fill in the gaps of limited sensory information, causing perception.
Be very careful with making analogies to Quantum Mechanics, particularly with regard to interpretations of it. In this case, many physicists would vehemently argue that the notion of superposition of states is meaningless as an actual state. To use Schrodinger's cat, they would claim that speaking of the cat as either alive or dead is meaningless until you observe it to be so.
However, your point does have merit. I don't know if you realized this, but you can't encapsulate the notion of "partially true" in classical logic. It's neither solely True or solely False, just like a computer that can only represent 1 or 0. However, there are non-classical systems called fuzzy logics that have an entire sequence of values of "truthiness", just like a quantum computer has an entire range of values between 0 and 1.
1 aeTIos, he had been dead for over a century by the time the French revolution occurred...
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Yeah, I learnt that in my philosophy courses, René Descartes was a major philosopher and mathematician at his time, one time he started to doubt everything, even his own existence, He soon figured out that if he can doubt his own existence, he can think, and if he can think, he exists.
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Although this may not be relevant, here's a short story about an AI that is seemingly sentient.
It's written by Issac Asimov: http://filer.case.edu/dts8/thelastq.htm
As a side note. I think we all exist. It's simpler that way. When we die or w/e, I'll figure out the rest then.
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Hmm. How would it be significant if the Universe was either real or fiction?
Let us say that a Universe in which is illusion, yet we have no control over is synonymous to a Universe which does exist according to our perception. Given that this is true, we only need to show that we do not control the Universe if it is an illusion.
For all "Objects of control", they must reside within the conscious. If any reside elsewhere it becomes ambiguous what is in control and what isn't. Because we do not know what is within our control, the Universe is synonymous with not being within our control to begin with. This is due to the fact that we may know there exist some objects of control within our perception, but we may not know how many objects of control exist in total, and if any exist outside our perception to begin with.
So thus we must prove that there cannot exist any OoC outside our consciousness. However, since there is no way to prove or disprove that, since we have no perspective outside our perspective, then we must be that all OoC are within consciousness.
If we are not certain, then an illusion of non-control manifests, making the Universe effectively equal one that is real.
Basically, this s a way of saying that unless you are entirely certain you control the Universe, (essentially you being a god) then it does not matter if the Universe is real or illusion because the same result can happen regardless.
Edit: Also, Neural Networks, while not conscious nor remotely sentient, it does effectively "think" like we do. That is, in an organic way.
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Question, how would people behave if the entire world was tool-assisted like in speedruns? Would people be able to run through walls without dying or do all sort of special tricks without hurting themselves too much? :P
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Neural networks don't quite "think." Static FFNA's (Feed forward Neural Networks), the standard type in most research, are actually just functions that take inputs and map them to outputs. Only if you accept functionalism and reductive physicalism can you begin to say neural networks can "think" in any capacity. If you also want to say that such a network can be processed by a computer, then you have to drag in the huge overhead of the Church-Turing thesis and throw out all neural networks with irrational edge weights and node states. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Church-Turing thesis, all of these are highly contentious things to present in an argument and it's why neural nets are basically laughed at in most philosophy departments nowadays.
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Maybe all I see and hear is coherent optical illusions made by my brain. Maybe you guys don't even exist. Maybe nothing here exists and are just figments of my imagination. Maybe my entire life is a dream. Maybe something that "exists" is only limited to the realm of my imagination. So everything that exists exists to my point of view. Maybe you can even make exist something that doesn't exist, kinda like this thread I found one time, I don't remember what it's called, but it's akin to hypnosis (as in convincing yourself you're a pony or something), but you can hypnose yourself into convincing yourself your imaginary friend exists and he can even spawn more imaginary friends. (Also thinking God exists, but it's more religious matter and I don't really want to embark in this discussion. But it's pretty much in the same idea, if you want God to exist, then it exists for you (but don't shove its existence down the throats of others, they can believe it doesn't exist).)
Also AngelFish et al. I think you're pretty much challenging the concept of "thinking" with neural networks.
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Life is very very complicated, and who knows if anything exists anywhere? What if there's no heaven? What happens after death? And money. Why do we think small green slips have value? What does the term "life" really mean? Why are we here? What is time? What does "something" mean in a philosophical context? Maybe everyone lives in separate universes and reality is just small glimpses into another person's universe. Reality is madness, no one is ever going to be able to figure it out.
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Why do we think small green slips have value?
I can answer that one, it's because it's by and large agreed upon that they have value. They have value because we give it value. :P
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Why do we think small green slips have value?
I can answer that one, it's because it's by and large agreed upon that they have value. They have value because we give it value. :P
And what about one variable somewhere on some servers of banks (onlinebanking) set have so much value, that is also funny.
And yeah, why do we exist, i mean, we'r all going to die eventually anyways.
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1 aeTIos, he had been dead for over a century by the time the French revolution occurred...
Maybe I shouldn't have ignored the urge to check my dates <_<
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Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?
Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.
Anything that you imagine does, in some way, exists, but they aren't always what they look like. For example if you think of a dragon, that makes it exist. Not as a dragon, but as a pattern in the electromagnetic fields incide your brain. Even ai in games exists, but what you think is a zombie walking towards you is yust a pattern of bits in ram, which gets continuosly modyfied based on other patterns of bits. A part of those bits is then sent to a screen, in which they control tiny dots of light, which our brain sees as an image of a zombie. But for us to be able to see the zombie, the patterns of bits must exist.
So we do deffinately exist, but we might not be humans, but just some patterns of something.
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If you think, you have a mind, because that is what makes you capable of thinking.
The mind is the soul and the brain working together.
If you have a soul, your soul must have been created.
Some being made your soul, and it would have to exist in its own existence, which would make it eternal, changeless, timeless.
This being is God.
("I am who am")
Also, even if you don't think that argument makes sense, how would you feel if you died and found out you were wrong about yourself being in a dream? This philosophy could make facing God at your judgement rather uncomfortable...
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Whatever I say here, I can't be completely sure of; nobody can be absolutely sure of his beliefs with these kind of questions.
I think that the human mind is purely material, there is no kind of "purpose" to the universe or the human race, and there is nothing beyond death.
And how this universe got here, is one of the greatest questions... What made the universe come into existence? If it one believes that it is by a creator of some kind, how did he come into existence?
Regardless of whether or not humanity has a purpose...
To think that every one of us is descended from basic cells that fortunately happened to form on a small planet, around an average star, on the edge of a normal galaxy is astonishing.
And if you look at yourself, all the matter in your body can be traced back to billions of years ago, where a star at the end of its life spewed its guts out into space that eventually came to form you. You are literally comprised of those stars.
It's all quite amazing :D
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Whatever I say here, I can't be completely sure of; nobody can be absolutely sure of his beliefs with these kind of questions.
Maybe.
I think that the human mind is purely material, there is no kind of "purpose" to the universe or the human race, and there is nothing beyond death.
And how this universe got here, is one of the greatest questions... What made the universe come into existence? If it one believes that it is by a creator of some kind, how did he come into existence?
I have five different proofs for why He would have to exist.
Regardless of whether or not humanity has a purpose...
To think that every one of us is descended from basic cells that fortunately happened to form on a small planet, around an average star, on the edge of a normal galaxy is astonishing.
And if you look at yourself, all the matter in your body can be traced back to billions of years ago, where a star at the end of its life spewed its guts out into space that eventually came to form you. You are literally comprised of those stars.
It's all quite amazing :D
To think that we all came from air that formed would be amazing too, though equally untrue.
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Without meaning to provoke any big religious debates, can you show me those 5 proofs? I'm still very open to any evidence for a god.
To think that we all came from air that formed would be amazing too, though equally untrue.
Hm? Not sure what you mean by this
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Without meaning to provoke any big religious debates, can you show me those 5 proofs? I'm still very open to any evidence for a god.
Proofs (http://www.saintaquinas.com/belief_in_God.html) Proofs (http://web.mnstate.edu/gracyk/courses/web%20publishing/aquinasfiveways_argumentanalysis.htm)
To think that we all came from air that formed would be amazing too, though equally untrue.
Hm? Not sure what you mean by this
That you can imagine anything, and it would be cool. There really is no point in saying it is cool that we came from stars since we didn't.
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Plz: keep this philosophical and not religious, thank you.
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Plz: keep this philosophical and not religious, thank you.
St. Thomas Aquinas was one of the most brilliant philosophers of all time, and the existence of God is a philosophical argument.
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His argument seems to deal greatly with a "first cause" or something to set the universe and life into motion.
So it seems like he used God as the first cause... but then what created that god?
Even if we ignore the fact that it contradicts his rule that everything must have been set into motion by something else, why is this "first mover" necessarily going to be God?
I actually picked up a book somewhat relating to this. Lawrence Krauss's book "A Universe from Nothing."
It apparently addresses how the universe could arise from nothing naturally.
I dunno how he's going to do it, but it looks interesting :D
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Religious arguments tend to turn much more personal and angry though.
I personally think am fine with thinking and do things exist as being magic(no need to be explained). As long as I understand what to do in the life I live, whether it be inside my head only or not, I will have a chance to be happy so why worry about something out of my control.
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Are you saying that to convince us that you do exist ? How could we trust in you because you say that you could believe that we don't exist ?
Moreover, how can you be sure that you really exist ? Isn't it an illusion ? As a case in point, AI in computer games have the illusion that they exist, but it is not true.
But AI does not think. It goes by a set of instructions. Even learning AI does not think, and, if it did, how would we know?
Neural networks don't quite "think." Static FFNA's (Feed forward Neural Networks), the standard type in most research, are actually just functions that take inputs and map them to outputs. Only if you accept functionalism and reductive physicalism can you begin to say neural networks can "think" in any capacity. If you also want to say that such a network can be processed by a computer, then you have to drag in the huge overhead of the Church-Turing thesis and throw out all neural networks with irrational edge weights and node states. Unfortunately, with the exception of the Church-Turing thesis, all of these are highly contentious things to present in an argument and it's why neural nets are basically laughed at in most philosophy departments nowadays.
what definition of "think" is being used here? personally, i like to consider any thing which can respond to stimuli, retain information, and modify its responses based upon that information as a "thinking thing", and leave any distinctions beyond that as a matter of degree.
I have five different proofs for why He would have to exist.
please don't bring up aquinas. i had quite enough of him in not-quite-catholic school :P
understand that the following is about aquinas himself and his so-called "proofs" and not me making any statement about whether or not a god exists.
"proof" number one starts with this statement early on:
"Now whatever is in motion is put in motion by another, for nothing can be in motion except it is in potentiality to that towards which it is in motion"
he then follows it up with:
"Therefore it is necessary to arrive at a first mover, put in motion by no other", which is, very obviously, a direct contradiction of his earlier statement. thus, if his logic is to be trusted, what he has actually proven by contradiction is that not all things are put in motion by another, a matter completely unrelated to whether or not a god exists.
number two is a mirror image of his first. he states that "no thing can be the efficient cause of itself", then follows it up with "god is the efficient cause of himself", meaning that, if his logic is to be trusted, some things spontaneously come into existence without any outside influences. again, this is unrelated to whether or not a god exists.
the third begins with the un-backed claim that all things cease to exist (which flies directly in the face of the classical idea of conservation of energy), then an un-backed claim that the default state of any thing which can cease to exist is necessarily nothingness (his first claim that all things must go from existence to non-existence is unrelated to the claim that all things must come *from* non-existence into existence [incidentally, there is some evidence that particles can, in fact, come into existence spontaneously]). his last statement is a repetition of the last line of the previous two, "there must, necessarily, be some thing which has always existed and caused other things to exist", a statement completely unrelated to the rest of this current "proof". he then jumps to the conclusion that, because "something" exists, that "something" must necessarily be his God (by the way, he did this exact same thing in the previous two).
the fourth is even sillier than the others (he makes the statement that fire is the cause of all things that are hot, for one, but that's neither here nor there as it's just an analogy). he begins with the statement that any one thing can either be more or less x than another thing, where x is some quality. he then says that this judgement is always made in relation to some absolute which is "most" x. this assumption is not only un-backed, but counter-intuitive. more and less are used to compare two things to one another. it makes no sense to say that any one thing is "the epitomy" of x. one could say that a single thing is the most "x" in existence (i.e., nothing before has ever reached such a degree of "x". there has never been a material which was as hot as this one is currently, for example). however, for any such thing that has a clearly-defined denotation of "more" or "less", it is possible to continue imagining something which is "more" ad infinitum, just as it is always possible to imagine a number larger or smaller than any given number. there is no ultimately hot, big, small, etc thing or anything else which can be applied to a discernible level of degree in that way. he then goes on to apply his assumption to something completely different: "goodness", a thing which does not exist on a clearly defined plane because it has no clear definition. just like other subjective qualities (beauty, for example, which, as the adage says, is in the eyes of the beholder), there is no one definition of what is "better or worse" in the same way as there is for what is "faster and slower" or "bigger and smaller". lastly, he wraps things up with two baseless claims, firstly jumping from the assertion that "every single category which is related to the concept of 'goodness' has something or other as its uppermost echelon" to "every single category which is related to the concept of 'goodness' has a single thing as its uppermost echelon", and then stating that "that single thing must necessarily be my God".
his fifth argument is a bit incoherent, so i've never been sure if i understood it quite right. it seems like he is trying to say that "any thing which reacts in a predictable manner cannot do so without an intelligent thought directing it to do so", which makes no sense at all.
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Guys, stop trying to prove whether or not God exists. It is not possible, just like it'snot possible to prove evolution. Both God and evolution are something you must believe in to be sure they are true.
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Guys, stop trying to prove whether or not God exists. It is not possible, just like it'snot possible to prove evolution. Both God and evolution are something you must believe in to be sure they are true.
shmibs didn't try to prove that God didn't exist but on the contrary, he was like you saying that there was no point trying to prove that he exists and that all proofs were no proofs at all ;)
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I know, but some other guys in this thread tried to prove it.
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Guys, stop trying to prove whether or not God exists. It is not possible, just like it'snot possible to prove evolution. Both God and evolution are something you must believe in to be sure they are true.
I disagree with you there. There is proof, and I believe that what flyingfisch gave is sufficient proof for an honest person to acknowledge a God.
For now, I'm just going to stick to his first proof, which some people ridicule here for being contradicting. If you are not acting biased you would see the point trying to be made and not take it so literal.
Everything that is in motion is set in motion by something that is set in motion itself. However, it's very logical to think that something must have started it all. And because that is not possible in our "limited" world, it must have been magically started, which brings us to a God who is not limited to any rules of time and physics.
Also aeTIos, according to the Bible there even is proof(Romans 1:20) so you shouldn't say there isn't.
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Guys: I already said it, and I'll say it again: please don't make this thread a religious debate, especially because the original post has nothing to do with religion.
Thank you.
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I created a topic here (http://ourl.ca/18961.new#new) for those that wish to continue the discussion of religion.
@pimathbrainiac: I like how you liken existence that way-- it is an interesting way to look at it and I wonder if we can derive anything further from that.
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Thanks, Xeda. According to my sister, who studies philosophy for fun, it is the same philosophy as Descartes, who I think was mentioned earlier. I didn't know that at first, though. :P
Anyways, I still think the philosophy is cool.
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First we'd have to define existance to know at all what exists and what not......
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I'm pretty sure you'll never find the evidence you're looking for since that would make you have to rely on other people, which may not even really exist.
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First we'd have to define existance to know at all what exists and what not......
Of course, without definitions, we cannot say anything with information. But on the other hand, how do humans define things? They define words with other words, which are themselves defined with words. So it's a vicious circle. But what if there was an only solution to the equations' system of the dictionnary? Each equation is a definition. I don't think there could be only one solution because we don't say in which mathematical set we solve the system.
Maybe a definition moves the problem on several words to define, even though we precise a bit what we think.