Does anyone have true proof of your own existence?

Question

I am serious, can anyone truly prove the reality of existence?

How do we prove that we exist? Maybe we dont exist...
-Vivi Ornitier

I thank the first three responders for your educated and intellectual answers, I can only hope that we can get a few more intelligent answers among the not so intelligent ones.

For all of you who say I am alive so I exist, I am not talking about being alive or dead, I am thinking on a much higher level, thank you, all of you who understand that, and please stop posting all of you who don't.

Answer 1

I often asked myself the same question. how do we know that this reality is really reality?

for example I can remember when I was a little kid I often thought that what if the life I was living is just a dream, and this other me in a different reality is dreaming it? if the other me wakes up does that mean this reality ceases to exist?

true I didn't think of it as complex as I do now.

but well I think we cannot know. maybe we do live in a world like the matrix (2 different realities in that movie as well)

but you cannot know if you really exist. we live yes. but do we exist.

maybe we're all fictional characters in someone's over imaginative brain...

btw good question

Answer 2

I kind of think that they haven't proved but that I exist - Decarte. Even if everything else is just in my mind, it exists there. What I see as outside of me follows different rules from that inside me so I take it it is different from my awareness and mind. If you're in my mind then I must have created you, but I don't remember doing so so I trust that I didn't. Everything is expainable with that model so like most I assume everything exists, deal that way and it works. It tests out by working when I try to work the world. It acts independent of my will unless it's subconscious. Some things are thoughts are directing subconsciously but not to that extent. You can bring them up into consciousness. There's no evidence of anything radically different from what we see, except that the conscious mind is more like a calculator, while the subconcsious or actually the right bain seems to have all we conscider human. We are using the wrong hemispere to conscentrate on and have the sense of being in it. It's a choice. Society is beginning to change over to the right side which is the right side, it seems. It's where we should do most of our thinking, the positive side.

Answer 3

The only thing you can be sure of is your own existence. Without it, nothing else would be possible--no matter how diluted or distorted it is. You cannot fake your own existence, because there would have to be something to fake in the first place, in addition to something to do the faking.

As for proving beyond a doubt that something else exists, it is impossible. Either there is a higher power controlling the different parameters that we use to "see", "hear", etc. what we believe to be something, or there are all of the objects out there, and none of them have been faked--they all exist exactly how we experience them.

Answer 4

well if you start messing with definitions anything is possible.
But as I understand it everything that we can experience exists (meaning everything from myself, to rocks on Mars, to love).

Plato would disagree. Reality to Plato is the highest form of whatever it is. For example, there is, somewhere in the realm of ideals, a perfect table. Everything that we call a table partakes of that ideal, but at a deficiency, so nothing is actually a table. It can be more or less table depending on how much it partakes of that perfect table.

Answer 5

No matter how many things you say, the bottom line is, no one can really prove existence. It's an intriguing question though, and a fun one to talk about with (intelligent) friends so you can bounce ideas off each other.

Answer 6

I think therefore I am!
This is still the answer to that question no matter how many times someone asks it on this site. Here's a better question how many retards does it take to screw in a light bulb? The answer is probably none, because they are to busy trying to figure out if they actually exist.

Answer 7

Descartes - I think, therefore I am

He used the proof that whether he believes he does exist or doubts he exists, either action is proof that he exists, because some substance has to exist to do the believing or the doubting. This was only proof that his thinking mind existed, however, and not his physical body.

Answer 8

Descartes set up a system of methodical doubt in order to find one true thing that couldn't be doubted for a foundation of understanding. Through this method, he found the statement, "I exist as a thinking thing," to be this foundation.

Answer 9

We all know that we exist. The feeling of 'I' is within everybody. All that we have to do is find out the real 'I' which is not the body and the mind.

Hope this link will help you. It is the teachings of Ramana Maharshi, a saint in south India whose teachings have guided millions to know their true self and the purpose of one's existence

Answer 10

Solipsism is a bankrupt concept. The main reason that it makes no sense is that we can see things happening that are outside of our control. That proves that they exist and therefore if we observe them we must exist.