Can you really prove your existence?

Hand me a mirror, will you? Yep. That's me! I exist!

I can prove to you my existence, but I cannot make your doubts disappear.

Either you accept I exist, or you believe, without any sound proof, that I don't exist.

I will phone my friends today and make certain it was me they visited on
Friday night or not.....

I apologise for the sarcasm but this is rather an odd question...Im sure that if I made myself up I would have made sure I had been a bit more wealthier and live a bit longer and without ageing perhaps?

No! (Who said that?)

not the responses i was looking forward to. I was expecting soemthing more thorough and something that gives relation to the social sciences,like what i have seen in other posts. I wanted a cool explanation...

When you say cool don't you mean something pathetic like loads and loads of theory, thesis and discourse? If you asked do we exist and if I answered in one word and proved I do, that should be sufficient dude!

yes i was looking for loads of theory, since that is what usually all i see in this forum. I also wanted to see such posts because i want to learn of some theories that relate to this. Everyone on this forum seems soo knowledgeable that i thought that i could learn from you guys and benefit from this.

Maybe if i posed the question like this:

Each individual on earth is a single strand of thread and if these threads were laid out on the floor in a straight line without either of them touching eachother, it would mean that each thread exists by itself and every other thread around it is inexistent. When the thread crosses over with another one it symbolizes interaction. So if these threads never cross with eachother, then each are inexistent to the other. With regards to humans, every individual is inexistent to one another unless they choose to interact with eachother basically you only exist to the people you interact with, and to everyone else you dont exist. My question is, if you only exist to the people you interact with , can that not also mean you are a figment of their imagination which is why you only exist to them and no one else? How do you absolutely prove you exist to everyoen else and not just the people you interact with?

this question is like trying to prove that outer space is not 'infinite'
no one can answer this......and here I am replying to you yet again, so there for I must exist

Re: Can you really prove your existence?

Such a proof can only be made through deduction. Descartes tried to prove his own existence deductively: he arrived at his famous cogito, ergo sum, but he arrived at it only through a combination of deduction and induction. No proof of one's own existence so far has been able to dispense entirely with induction, so every proof is, as Hume pointed out, not provable.

Do I exist because I am typing this post right now? How would I know that? Through my senses. Are my senses infallible? Well, I can't say that, although they have been pretty reliable in the past. But past reliability is no guarantee of future reliability. Just because the sun rose in the east this morning is no guarantee that it will do so tomorrow.

I am, nevertheless, confident that I do exist, and all the usual indicia of truth that I normally rely upon confirm that conclusion. Can I convince you that I exist? That depends on what kinds of proof you would be willing to accept.

cogito ergo sum.

This one is fairly much axiomatic and is one of the few problems of philosophy that has actually been solved.

THANK YOU JOE FOR SUCH AN INSIGHTFUL RESPONSE THAT IS EXACTLY WHAT I WAS LOOKING FOR Must broaden my horizens through learning and with a response such as i this, I am able to do say.

Thanks I learned alot from your post, i think i may just read up on descartes. He sounds interesting

Doktor: How has this been solved? Could you please expand on this?

cogito ergo sum

I think, therefore I am.

Because the 'I' can question it's existance means the questioner must exist. It is implausible that a question can exist without a questioner.

René Descartes , man. The only french philosopher worth anything.

Solipsism is alive and well.

And The Matrix did an excellent job of showing that "reality" is just a shared illusion.

Descartes can rightly be considered the first modern philosopher. He's not important because he had all the right answers (most of them turned out to be wrong), but because he asked all the right questions. Philosophers are still trying to answer them.

And how did Descartes know that there was an "I" to begin with?

the other day upon the stair
i met a man who wasn't there
he wasn't there again today
oh how i wish he'd go away

To prove you exist you would have to step out of reality and see if your body and your mind were whole once you left, But if you were to step out of your reality you would either have to kill yourself or attain buddhahood.

How do enter the hood of buddah? If I could I would, reality is just too harsh of a place

Buddhahood has only been attained by hmmm... one person i think. It takes years of meditation and realizing the beauty of life. If you wanna learn about Siddharta Gautama look him up on the internet or read about him in a book.