Exsistence

My view on rather or not we have conscious and/or a body.

Existence

This essay aims to answer two questions: How do I know I exist?; and How Do I know I have a body? I’ll be using Descartes' concepts in Meditations as explained in THINK (2013), Expand on the idea with, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1995), and bring it back to real world scenarios with the butterfly effect, named by Edward Lorenz in 1972.

 Descartes’ ‘I think therefore I am’ is proof of my existence. It argues that even if I can't trust my body, I can trust I’m having a thought. That doubt of my existence fundamentally proves I exist. The concept is fully explained in Meditations, a book he  originally wrote about his discoveries of the self. 

Unlike Descartes, I don’t think the mind and self is all that exists. I established in my last writing that I believe other humans having opinions is proof we exist. We exist in a collective consciousness, the same way a flock of birds, or a school of fish does. If I didn’t have a body, I wouldn’t be able to join in this collective consciousness. You need the body's sense of hearing in order to intake other opinions and the ability to speak in order to participate in voicing your own.

Reality and existence is explained by our consciousness and physical presence, but the line between the two are inseparable. I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream (1995) is a short story by Harlen Ellison that gives a layer of insight into this discussion. Its main villain is an AI built for wars, that eventually developed its own consciousness. It appropriately names itself AM after Descartes ‘I think therefore I am’. As mentioned in chapter 5 of Philosophy: The Basics (2013). It describes the idea that thinking is proof of being something. It is a reminder he gave himself. He didn’t truly exist until it started thinking for itself. Only, it did. It caused the deaths of millions and caused a war to last for centuries. So while AM didn’t exist mentally, he was real physically.

This story implies that to be real is to suffer. All the characters are living because AM wants them to make each other miserable. But AM wasn't suffering when he was a war machine, he didn’t feel anything. But his effect was felt, so he was real, without awareness of suffering. But he existed when he felt the suffering of everyone in the war.

All this points to feeling not affecting your reality but your existence. The existence of the victims in AMs new world is one of isolation, starvation, and insanity; yet its reality is only the experience of five people and an AI. Existence is a complex tapestry of consciousness that affects all of us. But reality is about our physical presence in the world, dictated by our personal realities as stated in the last writing. 

Through this essay I’ve explained existence as a person's consciousness and reality as the way we know our body's exist. For the characters in a story it's a very big effect. For our reality it might be about smaller actions. 

The butterfly effect is a concept about one small action; having big uncontrollable, unintended, consequences. If we apply that to our personal realities, something as simple as choosing the right fruit at the store becomes an in-manageable task: Who produced the fruit?; Did they do it willingly?; What effect on the world does this have? That’s why I believe we tend to ignore that concept. 

But doing that has caused global warming and climate change. You think “It’s just an object” as you toss a bottle on the floor. but a squirrel might later choke on the cap, and the making of the plastic destroyed the ozone layer. Being careful about how we shape our existence could shape our reality on earth. Though the butterfly effect seems daunting, it proves we have power in shaping our shared reality.