...........well, somebody has seen the Matrix one too many times.

ok you may mock me and any way i thought of this Before the matrix came out...BUT....idon't see you proving your existence...................well?

It would be at this point that the Zen master whacks you upside the head with his staff.

If you don't want to be an empiricist and base your concept of existance by what your senses tell you, you should probably try a bit of reading of one of Phuture's favorite people: Rene Descartes.

He starts off fairly simple: Cogito ergo sum.

I think, therefore I am.

It makes a decent place to start.

Shadowborn

yes but the process of thinking is based on things we have experienced through physical means, such as speach coming from hearing, and thinking is just a series of neurological impulses emitted by the brain - pure electricity.
leading me to ask are we made purely from electricity?

For some reasons I am not entirely certain of, solipsism is generally considered to be a non-valid philosophical concept, but I would say that it would be very difficult for me to prove you exist. In fact, I think it would be impossible for YOU to prove you exist. Yet I know I exist. So why would it be not valid to say that I exist and you are all figments of my imagination is not valid is beyond me.

prove to me that i dont exist.

Can you prove to me that god exists..........................?

Nope you cant. Try having faith in others existance Hexen.

Thats all I can think of.

*is drunk* sowwy.

If I am deprived from all sensory input, I still think. Hence, my thinking is not based upon the input I am receiving. If you are going to doubt your own existence, how can you say thinking is only the electrical impulses of your brain? To come to that conclusion, you must believe in readouts that measure brainwave activity. To believe in those, you must believe in the sensory data your brain is receiving. Hence, you are validating your argument by using the exact resources you attempt to invalidate with your argument.

Shadowborn

RESULT!!! thank you shadowborn - i do exist i now have to figure out in what sense but we'll work on that another day kiddo's

hmmmm, red, i did not only doubt others exisistence but more primarily my own.

but now i come to think of it......i do wonder how my brother could have possibly came into existence through the same gene pool as me, to suppose he didn't exist would solve a lot.

oh yeah and *reproachfully* sober up. :p

Damn! This is probably the shortest debate we've had on here, yet. 11 posts, to prove to the poster that he exists. Isn't that some kind of record? Congratulations, Shadowborn

Kat

You've answered your own question, the question you SHOULD be asking is "what defines reality".

You just can't see the forest for the trees.

Hexen=she (my g/f )

This "what is reality" argument has been going on for centuries, has it not? It's not like people will think you're crazy, hexen. Most likely they'll yawn. Check up on it, it's called metaphysics. I, personally, have Kant's take on it, but I'm a little too dense at this point in my life to actually comprehend most of what he's saying. Either that, or I lack the attention span.

So, I've contradicted myself, once again. Which probably circles back to the point that I don't know what reality is, and neither do you. No one does. No one can prove their own existence to anyone else's. But see, that's where we drift into different territory altogether. I believe I wrote an essay/rant on this. Is life meant to be intellectualized away and pondered: am I real? Is my life real? Is this burning candle real--ow! Shit! Feels real.

Doesn't matter. Life isn't meant to be analyzed, it's meant to be lived. Sure, analyzing is fun, but you won't find the answers of the universe through pondering. If you did, then we wouldn't need our bodies. We'd have some sort of amorphous, cerebral mass that powered itself through telekinesis, or something along those lines.

All right, I've rambled and preached enough. Ignore my tirade, go forth, and multiply!

Ah web cookies, the bane of all mankind. On behalf of VelvetPattens, I apologize for her confusion as to hexen's gender.

Shadowborn

change exists, in the physical world reported by sensory input, or in the mind shut away in the isolation tank.
what does not change is incomprehensible.
what changes too much is incomprehensible.
that's the best i can do. it should be worth something, it's gotten me through more acid than i can carry.

what about shakespeare...

"prick us, do we not bleed"

or perhaps the Breakfast of Champions version where i am the only real person and everyone else is just a robot invented by the creator built solely to stir me up and watch how i react in some cruel experiment of existence...

but if that were true... then everyon on here except me would be a robot... all to... make... me... dfalkjnsdkn------ damn... i hate existence, and love it at the same time... hmm

<sigh> Yeah, what he said...

I'd better stick to logging in at work. All my cookies are mine here.

On behalf of myself, now... I apologize Hexen

Kat