How do we know we really exist?

Answer 1

I think, therefor I am.

Answer 2

We are merely the planet's dream. Some say that we know we exist because we perceive the world with our 5 senses. But then again, a dream often seems as real as the real life, even though it isn't. If reality is nothing more than what's in our mind, then what;s the difference between existence and not. And therefore, I think we will never know.

Answer 3

I don't know whether or not anything exists. All I do know is that my senses feed me with regular signals that I choose to acknowledge. The meanings I assign to these (possibly random) signals are the "reality " I am contained by. If this is existence then fair enough. If not, I am having a wonderful conversation with my own mind.

Answer 4

Did you look in the mirror this morning and see someone looking back at you? Is your heart beating? Put your hand on your chest and feel if it thumps there or place it on your wrist and see if you feel a pulse. If you do, then low and behold, you are alive. If not, then you are still alive only the body is motionless because your spirit has left it and your soul goes with your spirit when it does. You are a spirit. You have a soul which composed of your mind, will and emotions and you live in a body. When it is time for you to leave the body, you do and head off to either heaven or hell, but 'YOU' are still alive in whichever one of those places you end up all depending on how you lived your life on this earth while you were in the body.

Answer 5

u can dream---u can fantasize--imagine what u will. U have the mind to do it. reality hits when u realize for any reason at all that u cant have it ur way---that feeling u get, the frustrations...that u cant escape lets u know u exist. So do urself a favor and limit urself to only those imaginatioons and fantasies that wont carry u too far

Answer 6

You know by the fact that you get up in to morning, you eat, you drink, you speak and have emotions. You feel. That is how you know you exist. Or are you going for whether we are all part of something's dream or imagination and are only that?

Answer 7

Because we dont have the brains required to only imagine the world around us. If we did, we would be gods. And gods are aware of their existence. Ergo, we exist

Answer 8

One person cannot know everything. There is far too much information in the Tree of Knowledge to keep in our own brains, and there are far too many things we just don't know. We therefore have to trust other people. and make working assumptions about the world we see around us.

In the Church of Reality faith is earned, not blind. We question everything. We embrace doubt in both the giving of doubt and the receiving of doubt. By embracing doubt and scrutiny we work to earn trust, to be credible, to be accountable, to have a process that has integrity, and to be responsible for what we believe in. For us to be trusted we have to earn that trust.

Why do I believe in Evolution? After all, I'm not billions of years old. I haven't examined any fossils. I haven't compared any DNA. In fact - I personally don't know that DNA really exists. I am relying on the word of others, people who I trust, people who I have faith in, people who have earned my faith. I believe in evolution because it comes from a trusted source.

But what if evolution is wrong? What if space aliens constructed this planet yesterday and created us with false memories of the past and fake fossil evidence to make us believe that we have a historical past? What if the Earth really is only 24 hours old? Or that this reality is just a giant computer simulation in a higher level of reality. Those are possibilities that we can't prove are not so. After all, if we're just characters in some great video game, we would never know it.

Most everything we know comes from other people who we trust. We just don't have the resources to test everything ourselves.

Is reality really real? Is this a simulation? Am I the only person in the universe that is real and this is all my personal dream? I don't know. So what am I to do? I suppose that I am going to just have to pick one and go with it. So I'm going to put my faith in reality. And if we are a computer generated simulation then it is still the correct decision because the programmers want us to believe in the artificial reality. So one might say that Realists have chosen to put their faith in reality.

What is knowledge and where does it come from? How do we know what we know? There are things we know directly, from our own experiences, and things we know based on trust. Even what we know directly is suspect because we know it through our flawed senses and we understand it with our flawed brains. And everything that we do know is relative or related to everything else that we know.

Imagine what it must be like to be a new born baby. You open your eyes and begin to see things for the first time. But what do you see? You see walls, lights, chairs, bed, people, mommy, but these are just images. The information goes in but it doesn't mean anything because a newborn's brain doesn't have very much knowledge to relate this information to. Everything is new. Reality itself is new. Learning begins a little at a time and builds up by relating new information to everything else you know. Over time you learn language and associate objects and concept with words and phrases and talking increases the ability to communicate and get information from others so that the young mind becomes connected to the Tree of Knowledge. Most everything we know is something that we learned from other people and what they know comes from common knowledge that is trusted to be true.

Of course the problem is that not everything that you are taught is true. We all know that we were filled with a certain amount of misinformation and now we have to go back and reexamine what we were taught to see if it's really true. But we can't reexamine everything. We are stuck with having to know things based on trust. We can only hope that what we trust is correct.

Answer 9

Because we dream. If we did not exist, we would not have lucid moments while sleeping. We simply would cease to be during those down times.

Answer 10

I don't want to exist.

Answer 11

this is a little..

deep.

i know i exist because i have a rich, full life and i can FEEL love and heartache and my son is proof that i was here for a reason and all of that is good enough for me.