How can you prove to me that you exist?

Prove to you according to the normal standards that people actually use or according to some made-up standards?

Preno wrote:

How can you prove to me that you exist?

Prove to you according to the normal standards that people actually use or according to some made-up standards?

Define your terms! "normal", "standards", "people actually use"

Varangian wrote:Can you prove that you aren't a Nexus-6 replicant like your fictious namesake, and activated four years ago complete with a faked set of memories?

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cXf0yIRcdnI[/youtube]

Paul G wrote:

Dalmat wrote:

Paul G wrote:Even if we were brain jar people, what does it matter? Everything still behaves the same way.

Because living in a lie can be disturbing. Making yourself believe the lie holds is just a crack further.

What? We have no way of knowing, either way. It's not a lie but just something we may or may not know. By reality I was referring to the laws of physics and so forth, nothing changes.

I understand your arguments, I don't understand your point. If you just want to establish that there is a possibility of us not being able to know whether we are in jars or not, then of course, that's given. And it's also a conversation stopper On the other hand, if you want to say that we shouldn't care, I'm very much in disagreement

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk[/youtube]

To me assuming that I exist is a philosophical prerequisite - if I don´t exist, I can´t reason... That doesn´t help you though. Solipsism is irrefutable, consistent and unproblematic. It´s also boring in the same way the trivial ring is (where 1=0 and one can show that any question you pose within its framwork is 1 and 0). And that´s why it doesn´t get discussed a lot - there are interesting axiomatic systems to start from, but the one where I exist and nothing else isn´t one of them. It´s trivial and once you´ve started with that axiom you are done with it.

susu.exp wrote:To me assuming that I exist is a philosophical prerequisite - if I don´t exist, I can´t reason... That doesn´t help you though. Solipsism is irrefutable, consistent and unproblematic. It´s also boring in the same way the trivial ring is (where 1=0 and one can show that any question you pose within its framwork is 1 and 0). And that´s why it doesn´t get discussed a lot - there are interesting axiomatic systems to start from, but the one where I exist and nothing else isn´t one of them. It´s trivial and once you´ve started with that axiom you are done with it.

QFT

(cough, cough - Occam! - cough, cough)


Brain in a jar adds extra "entities" to be considered, whilst having no evidential support and giving no perceived extra understanding of what we see. We might not be able to disprove it but we can sure as hell show that belief in it is silly.

CookieJon wrote:[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qjGRySVyTDk[/youtube]

Excellent!

Dalmat » Mar 28, 2010 8:49 pm wrote:

Paul G wrote:Even if we were brain jar people, what does it matter? Everything still behaves the same way.

Because living in a lie can be disturbing. Making yourself believe the lie holds is just a crack further.

I can’t prove I exist, and I can’t prove anything else for certain either, as Hume pointed out. The great thing about the scientific approach, as opposed to the religious one, is that there is no limit laid down as to what we are allowed to believe. If you have some evidence that you are indeed a brain in a vat, then the scientific approach is to investigate the evidence. The religious approach is to rule out heretical thinking, and then one may find oneself living a lie and desperately trying to make oneself believe it, which, as Dalmat says, is disturbing.

It might be fair to say that both science and some religions agree that our existence as individuals is not as fundamental as common sense assumes. In the mystical tradition of various religions, selves are held to be illusory, and we are really all part of some kind of oneness. From the scientific angle, assuming the theory of evolution by natural selection is correct, we are entirely machinery, which is as counter-intuitive as being brains in vats. A human being is a collection of cooperating cells, each cell consisting of atoms behaving as atoms behave anywhere else; there’s nothing special about an individual human, certainly nothing more special than there is about an individual cell. But in ordinary life, we assume each of us is the centre of our own universe with free will and moral value; a human being is a fundamental unit of existence and a cell isn't. This is the point of the OP, that we are unable to take seriously doubts about our own existence; Descartes doubted everything and was still left with “I think therefore I am”. The lively consciousness threads in this forum are a result of the unresolved collision between the scientific and the commonsense ways of seeing ourselves.

Preno » Mar 29, 2010 12:41 am wrote:

How can you prove to me that you exist?

Prove to you according to the normal standards that people actually use or according to some made-up standards?

Precisely. The definition of existence that is invoked here is meaningless. All meaningful definitions of existence are easy to establish that most people here meet its criterion. If you believe that you 'exist' in some greater sense, I invite you to conceive a manner in which you can detail it. If it's entirely private and you have no reliable method of verifying it, I find it highly dubious information.

Well, I'm here aren't I?

roybatty » Mar 28, 2010 5:55 pm wrote:How do you prove that you are not some brain in a jar and reality is not just a computer program?
How do you prove that reality exists?

Is reality itself not a faith based proposition?

I can prove to myself that I exist. I don't care about proving it to you, because I can't prove to myself that you exist.

roybatty wrote:

Paul G wrote:

Dalmat wrote:

Paul G wrote:Even if we were brain jar people, what does it matter? Everything still behaves the same way.

Because living in a lie can be disturbing. Making yourself believe the lie holds is just a crack further.

What? We have no way of knowing, either way. It's not a lie but just something we may or may not know. By reality I was referring to the laws of physics and so forth, nothing changes.

The larger issue I was grappling with was about proof and evidence.

Whether or not it is right or wrong to believe that we are brains in a jar is a different topic.

Suppose a person had it "revealed" to them that we are brains in a jar and this person met other people that had the same revelation. The shared revelations bolstered their belief that the brain jars were the true reality.

Your inability to disprove their belief plus their personal experience of being a brain in a jar plus others having the same experience leads them to believe that the true reality is that we are brains in a jar.

How do you divest them of such a belief?

You begin by administering a regular course of antipsychotic medications.

roybatty wrote:How do you prove that you are not some brain in a jar and reality is not just a computer program?
How do you prove that reality exists?

Is reality itself not a faith based proposition?

Wow this simple thing - yet again (seems to pop up in every forum I have ever been). Reality is the nature of existence. Your post is proof of existence - hence reality.

Existence is the sum total of existents (all material). Complex existents (being - organisms with a brain) such as ourselves, are capable of abstraction and concept formation. Abstracts are the product of the material (being).

A jar is a concept, made into a physical object, with manipulated material. So is a computer, etc. This means that abstraction has taken place. It means a being capable of said abstraction and concept formation exists, which means existence is real.

Abstract concepts are used for communication. Communication is proof of someone existing. For someone to respond to this post, they have to identify the words and structure (the concepts), in order to understand what you are communicating. Then they can respond. This act of communication requires a being with the ability to deal with concepts (abstract), which presupposes a material existent (the being).

So we all have to use the senses we have, as well as any ability (or lack there of) to deal with any variables, in order to come to rational conclusion.

OK somewhat redundant (and sloppy) but that should cover it.

roybatty wrote:How do you prove that you are not some brain in a jar and reality is not just a computer program?
How do you prove that reality exists?

Is reality itself not a faith based proposition?

I shall not attempt to prove reality exists, but I will try to explain why I think the question is misguided.

No matter what proposition of affairs you are making it will have some foundational axioms, which must be the case for the proposition to make sense. For example, the proposition 'I am a brain in a jar', presumes the existence of brains and jars, and the proposition 'reality is a computer program' presumes the existence of a simulated reality nested within a computer, which itself exists within a higher reality. It is contained within each of these propositions that what we are experiencing is not reality, since that would be the place where the computers and jars exist. So to ask the question of whether reality is a computer simulation is to abuse the meaning of the term reality. Still, the question can still be validly asked whether or not what we are experiencing is a simulation, notwithstanding that it cannot be validly called reality. There are a few ways of answering this question, I'll present two.

The first is to ask whether it can be proven one way or the other from basic principles of which we can be certain. This entails that we must identify what these basic principles of which we can be certain are. By applying a skeptical attitude to our knowledge we can attempt to strip away all of the percieved knowledge we have which is in fact contingent on the acceptance of unproven statements. If one accepts this argument from skepticism then one seems, on the face of it, practically assured of reaching a solipsitic state where one is forced to conclude that the fact that you yourself are thinking is the only thing of which you can be assured. However, there is a methodological point to made here, and that is that in order to make this argument you are essentially working backwards, stripping away at presumed knowledge in a methodological manner. This means that in order to be certain of the conclusion you must first be assured of the value of your methodology. That is, you are axiomatically accepting that you know something in order to disprove that you know anything. Moreover, the thing that you are axiomatically accepting is not something immediately apparent, but something which is quite abstract, and at times esoteric. It is not something that you intuitively understand, but something which you must learn, practice and test for its validity within reality before you are able to make the philosophical argument that reality may not exist. Since the existence of reality is something that is more apparent, immediate and intuitive, less abstract and less esoteric it makes more sense to take that as your axiom than it does to take the axioms that leads you to the solipsistic conclusion. You know that reality exists far better and more strongly that you know the premises of any abstract philosophical argument to be true.

The second way of answering the question is to suspend the notions of truth and reality, and treat each side of the proposition as a potential model of existence. Instead of asking which can be proven to be the truth, you can instead ask which of the models has the most explanatory power within the most parsimonious package. In the jar model there is no inherent explanation for why things are the way they are - the explanation for everything is that it is programmed that way, which must be taken as a brute fact. Seemingly causal relationships may or may not actually be such. Assuming that the program is competently written one would expect some events to trigger other lines of code, but it isn't necessarily the case. Thus the jar model effectively prevents anything from being explained - it is effectively supernatural, and since, as noted above, it necessarily implies a whole new level of reality nested outside of this seeming reality it is incredibly unparsimonious. Now, given that the question itself translates into a question about presumption, in that without proof of reality it is claimed that our insistence upon it, when we could just be a brain in a jar, is a presumption, the fact that it is a presumption an order of magnitude above this to claim that we are a brain in a jar is an obvious step in the wrong direction.

My apologies for the length of this post.

Maybe if I killed you and you no longer existed that would prove that I exist?
Of course, you would never know.

TheOneTrueZeke wrote:You begin by administering a regular course of antipsychotic medications.

Does it matter? If I do and say things independent of your will, then I am acting as if I did exist separate from you. If that doesn't convince you, your failure to acknowledge my existence would have little bearing on me anyway. So does it really matter?