In philosophy, what does it mean to exist?

Question

Oh my God. Big words.

Answer 1

F C, your computer exists, but it is not self-aware. Cogito ergo sum is not 100% accurate. if one creates a thought, one does exist,

because nothing can create that does not exist.

and i would kind have to see gorgia's arguments before i try to refute them. but the concept of nothing requires knowledge of the concept of thing, and how could one grasp thing if thing never existed?

nothing is no-thing, literally. no ____, only absence of ____. but how can we recognize an absence if we never saw presence or evidence of presence?

if we were born without hunger and never experienced it, we would not recognize our state as unhungry, or without hunger, because an absence must be preceded by a presence, and "nothing" is an absence.

Answer 2

theres a book or two called 'what is your dangerous idea?'

it includes some philosophical ideas such as this.

and yeh, id say you exist.

although when someone dies they cease to exist really.

if that was any help whatsoever

Answer 3

Oh, wow.

If nothing exists, then neither do you. If you don't exist, what is the source of your sensory impressions--since you don't have them; and what is the source of your cognition, since you don't have cognition, either?

If the statement means that "nothingness" exists, then "nothingness" becomes an empirical existent. All empirical existents exist. That is what an "existent" is, even if it is only an existent of your mind, like an idea. An existent has existence, one way or the other, or it is not an existent.

It simply comes down to whether or not a "thing" is an empirical existent, or an existent of your imagination, like Edison's light bulb was before he built one.

"Nothingness" cannot be an existent; only "somethingness" can be existent. And if nothing exists, then neither did Gorgias--or his non-sensical statement.

Now let's say at one time God was the only existent--and nothing else. This means God did not create existence because God already existed. But if you believe in God, you can believe God created all OTHER existents.

As to "Cogito ergo sum:"

"Descartes began with the basic epistemological premise ([which] he shared explicitly with Augustine): “the prior certainty of consciousness,”

the belief that the existence of an external world is not self-evident, but must be proved by deduction from the contents of one’s consciousness —

which means: the concept of consciousness as some faculty other than the faculty of perception—

which means: the indiscriminate contents of one’s consciousness as the irreducible primary and absolute, to which reality has to conform.

What followed was the grotesquely tragic spectacle of philosophers struggling to prove the existence of an external world by staring, with [a] blind, inward stare, at the random twists of their conceptions—

then of perceptions—

then of sensations." Ayn Rand

Rand goes on to say that Descartes got the conclusion correct, but as she explained above, it was a grotesque example of bad epistemological premises that got him there. Skepticism is rarely a valid means of proving anything because it necessarily works backward.

All Descarte had to say was, "I perceive existents; therefore some things exist, of which I must be one, because I perform the act of perceiving existents which exist external to my perceptions." Or something to that effect.

"It is important to observe the interrelation of these three axioms [existence, consciousness, and identity]. Existence is the first axiom. The universe exists independent of consciousness. Man is able to adapt his background to his own requirements, but “Nature, to be commanded, must be obeyed” (Francis Bacon). There is no mental process that can change the laws of nature or erase facts. The function of consciousness is not to create reality, but to apprehend it. “Existence is Identity, Consciousness is Identification.”

Leonard Peikoff; "The Ominous Parallels"

Answer 4

To exist is to have some level, no matter how small, of consciousness, which is the ability to be aware of and interact with the reality of space and time