Quote:
Originally posted by Barry the Sprout:
quote:
Originally posted by Yorick:
Great topic Wolfgir 
Neb, I think you're on the money.
Barry you're out of your tree [img]smile.gif[/img]
You're attacking Descartes wording, not the concepts meaning.
It could be said thus:
AWARENESS PROVES EXISTENCE.
Whether it is a identifyable individual self or not is irrelevent. Something is aware and experiencing this thought. Whatever that something is, I am at least part of it, or am it in totality. That is the proof.
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I never had a tree to begin with, you can't prove nuffin. [img]smile.gif[/img]
I'm not attacking the wording, I did try and explain myself a little bit more fully but originally I used his wording only to more easily explain where it falls apart. Descartes says that we are aware therfore we exist. But how does he prove that we are aware in the first place? He doesn't... thats my problem with him. What he is effectively saying is that we are aware because we exist, yet we can prove we exist because we are aware. Fine, I have no problem assuming that if we are aware we must exist, but I have a problem just assuming that I am aware. It seems that Descartes entire proof rests on its very flaw - that the concepts of existance and sentience are inseperable (as far as proof of existance goes). But in making them inseperable he finds no clear way to prove the existance of one or the other without first pre-supposing the existance of its counterpart. The idea of the Demon creates more problems than it solves I think.[/QUOTE]LOL! Simply being aware or having a thought proves itself. If one is thinking, that proves one is thinking.
If one is aware that proves one is aware. It's an inescapable reality. One cannot contemplate for even a microsecond without provig they are contemplating by the very act.
Thus by initiating a thought process - any at all - one proves one exists.
The counter - thinking that one doesn't exist and is not thinking - is an impossibility and a contradiction.
Nothing - no thing - is destroyed by a single thought, just as the smallest beam of light destroys absence of light.
Barry, if we continue this discussion any further we are in danger of being so far up our a***s that we'll come back out our mouths inside out.
[ 06-21-2002, 03:04 PM: Message edited by: Yorick ]