Existence cannot be proved (and therefore God cannot be proved). All your sensory perceptions could be lies. Buddhism considers "thought" or the perception of thought to be essentially another one of the "senses". Honestly you can't even prove that YOU are really thinking what you think you're thinking, (most computer AI though pretending to be sentient is not. your brain could be another example of this). Descartes should be corrected "I think therefore I BELIEVE I am".
To work backwards: Proving god exists requires belief that the universe exists. Proving the universe exists requires belief that our sensory perceptions aren't lies. Proving our sensory perceptions aren't lies requires belief that our mind isn't being tricked or manipulated. Proving that our mind isn't being manipulated is impossible (see the Matrix).
But to go one step farther, even the thoughts in your head could be placed there by some other entity. Therefore you can't even prove YOU are real on any level. At most you could say the fact that you think you feel things MIGHT prove that something exists in order to cause these feelings. However the extent of this being is immeasurable and undetectable given that you do not perceive it.
12 comments:
You are on to something here...as you can see by my name i am extremely interested in all things Philosophy. If you keep writing articles like this im gonna feature you on my blog. Good Quality post man.
i've never thought about existence like this
Great post, even though my head is hurting now, or is it?
Nah your head doesn't hurt because it's all in your head..... ?
Because I think, I do exist on some form of level. Even if I'm in something like the matrix and everything is just a bunch of 0s and 1s, I still exist in those 0s and 1s. Even basic computer thought programming is existant.
Haha. I began reading, thinking "oh ok, Descartes". And then I reached the bottom of the first paragraph, and there was his most famous quote!
Being a philosophy major, I find a lot of interest in Descarte. I'm still very new to philosophy and all its facets, so I'll be checking out your blog often.
Existentialism... /sigh
Just read Waiting for Godot and Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead! then you'll get it.
Wow,very interesting.
this is awesome
A good example of senses lying is a cat seeing its own reflection in a mirror. The cat's senses say "another cat!" when in 'reality' there is no other cat. This is easy to take one step further, since every sensory perception can be reduced to electrical impulses, are all perceptions lies? Fun things to ponder. :]
The sensory stance is a very Hume-esque stance. To add further food for thought, lets say a child is born devoid of all senses and is fed intravenously for all of his early life. In other words, there is no way for the child to receive sensations from the outside world. When he is 18 does he have a thought in his head? If so, where does it come from? How does he get it? If you answer no than you side with Hume and you are an empiricist.
Also to take another direction in your sensory argument, I quote the text of author Robert Pirsig. If all our knowledge comes from sensory data, what exactly is this substance which is supposed to give off the sensory data itself? Since all knowledge comes from sensory impressions and since there's no sensory impression of substance itself, it follows logically that there is no knowledge of substance. It's just something we imagined and entirely within our own minds. The idea that there's something out there giving off the properties we receive is just another "common-sense" notion similar to the ones children have that the earth is flat and parallel lines never meet....
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