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NobelCynic
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14 Nov 2010, 9:03 am

Do I exist, or anyone who might respond to this question? When you use the word “I” what does it refer to?

I chose AG's name for the title of this thread because we have discussed this in the past though I don't think we have agreed upon an answer. He has accused me of non-existence, claiming I am nothing more than an illusion created by my mind, but if he has admitted it pertaining to himself I missed it.

I bring this up at this time because of the many debates going on in this forum about the existence of God. It seams to me that before we can discuss the possibly of the existence of a higher being, we must first settle the question of whether or not the beings holding the conversation exist.


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Last edited by NobelCynic on 14 Nov 2010, 9:01 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Sand
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14 Nov 2010, 9:05 am

NobelCynic wrote:
Do I exist, or anyone who might respond to this question? When you use the word “I” what does it refer to?

I chose AG's name for the title of this thread because we have discussed this in the past though I don't think we have agreed upon an answer. He has accused me of non-existence, claiming I am nothing more than an illusion created by my mind, but if he has admitted it pertaining to himself I missed it.

I bring this up at this time because of the many debates going on in this forum about the existence of God. It seams to me that before we can discuss the possibly of the existence of a higher being, we must first settle the question of whether or not the beings holding the conversation exist.


What are your requirements for existence?



Awesomelyglorious
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14 Nov 2010, 9:09 am

Nope, I don't exist. Question answered! :wink: :P



Cristiano
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14 Nov 2010, 9:27 am

I think, therefore I am? o.O
Even though not as a person, as some kind of consciousness it's pretty likely that I exist.

I'm not sure if you all exist though. And each one can't be sure that others exist.

So else everyone exists or part of us exist.

But who cares? ;d



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14 Nov 2010, 9:34 am

Insofar as our participation in this site is concerned we interact with the words we see on the screen. Whether there is one person, many people, a sophisticated computer, a martian, an ants nest, or just some form of strange cosmic radiation that produces the words we have no way of telling. And it is of no consequence.



Awesomelyglorious
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14 Nov 2010, 9:36 am

Cristiano wrote:
I think, therefore I am?

Begs the question. You assume the "I" before you prove it.



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14 Nov 2010, 9:37 am

If it was a game, and if the objective of the game would be to figure out (or not) if the all of "reality" was an illusion, that would have consequences. Ô.õ

Hope that's not the case.



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14 Nov 2010, 9:40 am

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Begs the question. You assume the "I" before you prove it.


Assuming "I" as a coherent entity with information proccesses running enclosed in it. Of course that calls the validity of that definition I just made up, of the words "coherent", "entity", "information", "proccesses", etc. :P



Awesomelyglorious
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14 Nov 2010, 9:48 am

Cristiano wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Begs the question. You assume the "I" before you prove it.


Assuming "I" as a coherent entity with information proccesses running enclosed in it. Of course that calls the validity of that definition I just made up, of the words "coherent", "entity", "information", "proccesses", etc. :P

Coherency of entities is a flawed assumption, particularly given that only human cognitive processes make this coherency, not the things themselves.



Cristiano
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14 Nov 2010, 9:54 am

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Coherency of entities is a flawed assumption, particularly given that only human cognitive processes make this coherency, not the things themselves.


Hmm, couldn't get what "things" refers to.



pandabear
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14 Nov 2010, 10:00 am

None of us are anything more than figments of each others' imaginations. Which does presuppose the existence of imaginations.



Awesomelyglorious
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14 Nov 2010, 12:18 pm

pandabear wrote:
None of us are anything more than figments of each others' imaginations. Which does presuppose the existence of imaginations.

The imagination is its own figment.



NobelCynic
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14 Nov 2010, 12:33 pm

Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Nope, I don't exist. Question answered! :wink: :P

I would have preferred that you had left out the smilies AG and actually admitted to what you accused me of in this post, though I didn't expect you to. I don't disagree with what you said there, I admit to having an ego or an illusionary sense of self created by my mind. Eckhart Tollie would agree with you, however he claims there is a true self, a spiritual self, underneath the illusion that can step back and observe it in action. I agree with him though I doubt you would.

Can we at least agree that we both have an illusionary sense of self whether or not we believe there is anything else to us?


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Awesomelyglorious
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14 Nov 2010, 12:55 pm

NobelCynic wrote:
Awesomelyglorious wrote:
Nope, I don't exist. Question answered! :wink: :P

I would have preferred that you had left out the smilies AG and actually admitted to what you accused me of in this post, though I didn't expect you to. I don't disagree with what you said there, I admit to having an ego or an illusionary sense of self created by my mind. Eckhart Tollie would agree with you, however he claims there is a true self, a spiritual self, underneath the illusion that can step back and observe it in action. I agree with him though I doubt you would.

Can we at least agree that we both have an illusionary sense of self whether or not we believe there is anything else to us?

Who is this "we"?

I see two issues:
1) Human beings organize our thoughts about "beings we interact with" by upholding a realist ontology about their existence and nature.
2) The actual way that reality comes together doesn't uphold our ontology in any strong manner. At best, the patterns we say constitute a "being" vs the rest of reality are "economical" given the impulses faced with.

So, what will be written is that the language to best describe the situation being described is unknown to me, as the reality that is gotten at here is too far away from the words. The words are implicitly realist, while the idea is so strictly non-realist about the entities.



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14 Nov 2010, 2:47 pm

If you reject the evidence of your senses, everything is up for grabs. Maybe none of us are real, and this entire universe is a novel being written by someone trying to win their universe's version of the Bulwer-Lytton Prize.

The conversation is pretty much meaningless...


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14 Nov 2010, 6:30 pm

Awesome and glorious thread!! :D

It would be ignorantly nihilistic to say we don't exist - we each have senses that experience our perceived reality so we know that we each exist.

The question is HOW do we exist.

To answer this we need to analyse who this 'I' is that we refer to whenever we consider ourselves.
It is no more than the collection of our body and mind.
Is there anything missing apart from the body and mind that makes up the 'I'?
But then we analyse further....
Who is it that labels the 'I' on the collection of our body and mind?
The body obviously can't label the 'I' as it hasn't the thinking processes to do it.
And the mind is separate from the 'I' given the way that the 'I' takes ownership of the mind - think of the way we phrase: "MY mind" and "MY body".
By claiming the 'I' and the mind to be one and the same is like claiming that a tree and its branches are one and the same. The tree has branches but the branches are not the tree.
The owner cannot be the same as the thing it possesses.

So if the 'I' is not the mind or the body, and it can't be found anywhere else either, we're left with the conclusion that it doesn't exist.

Oh yes it does exist - but ONLY as a mentally-created thing, an illusion. We continue to delude ourselves for as long as we grasp at an inherently-existing 'I', the 'I' that exists without depending on our labelling it as such.
But on close observation of reality we can discover that it MERELY exists as an illusion. Not just the 'I' but all other phenomena as well are illusions, mental fabrications.

It's like waking up from a dream that felt real at the time.


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