Do I need to think to know I exist?

[Philosophy Explorer]

I can use my senses to gather sensory information about my surroundings. But do I need to translate these experiences to know I exist? Does this mean that Helen Keller has less existence because she couldn't see nor hear?

What do you think?

PhilX

[Ginkgo]

I can use my senses to gather sensory information about my surroundings. But do I need to translate these experiences to know I exist? Does this mean that Helen Keller has less existence because she couldn't see nor hear?

What do you think?

PhilX

Helen Keller knew she existed. It just meant that her potential for experiencing the world was greatly limited. Descartes said we can doubt everything we experience in the physical world, but in the end we cannot doubt there must be someone or something actually doing all of the doubting.

[Philosophy Explorer]

To add a further thought, if one were not conscious, then would that person still have existence. Do we lose existence for about 1/3 of our lives when we go to sleep?

PhilX

[thedoc]

I believe we can say there is a difference between being aware of our existence, and not being aware of our existence.

[Ginkgo]

Being aware of our existence is an important part of consciousness. If we had no experience then we would be a philosophical zombie. Philosophical zombies are not aware of their own existence. As Chalmers says, philosophical zombies just talk the talk and walk the walk with everything being dark inside.

[Melchior]

I can use my senses to gather sensory information about my surroundings. But do I need to translate these experiences to know I exist? Does this mean that Helen Keller has less existence because she couldn't see nor hear?

What do you think?

PhilX

Who?

[Philosophy Explorer]

I can use my senses to gather sensory information about my surroundings. But do I need to translate these experiences to know I exist? Does this mean that Helen Keller has less existence because she couldn't see nor hear?

What do you think?

PhilX

Who?

If you mean Helen Keller, do you mean to say you've never heard of her?

PhilX

[jackles]

You dont need to think the experience of existing as identity.you are born you.yous are indistinguishable at root identity from each other.

[vegetariantaxidermy]

We only exist in the minds of others. If the last person on earth has a dog, does he exist?

[jackles]

Nothing personal mate. but the dog is you.as consciouness is the exact same thing in all animals.nothing dies its all you and you dont die.you are the feeling you where as a kid.and I dont mean a goat.ha.well on second thoughts a goat and us as human are the same as regs neutral consciousness.if you stop thinkin that is.

[Blaggard]

To add a further thought, if one were not conscious, then would that person still have existence. Do we lose existence for about 1/3 of our lives when we go to sleep?

PhilX

We are no more or less conscious when we are asleep than we are when we are awake, the brain is still on the move, the only thing that changes is its motion. There's no such area of thought really as subconscious, there's no area of the brain where it resides or any definition of conscious or unconscious one would find it. We are always something like conscious, the sub conscious is just a process which is contingent on the conscious mind. You're only subconscious when you are dead. I don't even think a scientist would have much of a problem with such an assertion, subconscious is a grey area, and one that really does not exist in any defined scientific field.

[hammock]

I can use my senses to gather sensory information about my surroundings. But do I need to translate these experiences to know I exist?

Not sure what you mean here -- you ask if "I exist" but then make references to the external environment / world as if instead inquiring if it exists. [I.e., there are also introspective exhibitions of your own thoughts, memories, body states, etc, that specifically have to do with you and evidence of your being.]

If by "translate" you mean cognize, understand / speculate about those extrospective appearances, then sure [but in the context of the rationlist's version of "true/real existence"]: It's reason that concludes that indirect realism is going on. Which then involves conceiving that there is some psychological-independent type of existence that is more "real / true" than the outer world exhibited in experience (at least in materialism or any anti-panpsychism stance). But intellect, as a part of the mind category, would be missing from such an alternative brand of being as much as the phenomenal manifestations of the senses. So any reason-dependent evidence for such a metaphysical existence is circularly confined to psychological affairs, too. [That is, if a system of "proper thinking" has a special hotline to its inferred, non-immediate reality or straddles both it and the immediate reality of perception / feeling, then that's not only intellect blowing its own horn but conflicting with the very definition of a totally "mind-free" version of the experienced, external world.]

Minus the product of intellect above, one would instinctively be a commonsense realist who took the original source for the concept of existence to indeed be real existence -- the latter just is the spatial and temporal affairs of the outer senses; end of story. If that ultimately had to slide into some panpsychic form of monism in order to hold together, then so be it. The material or physical appearance of experienced existence (corporeal objects residing in space, etc) was accordingly what the latter was, or conformed to, before "physical" was likewise posited as abstract, metaphysical, etc (the physical ironically treated as beyond physical). That is, it's not like a panpsychic monism would be jettisoning the manifested "physical world" that has phenomenal / non-reasoned evidence for itself.

[WanderingLands]

I can use my senses to gather sensory information about my surroundings. But do I need to translate these experiences to know I exist? Does this mean that Helen Keller has less existence because she couldn't see nor hear?

What do you think?

PhilX

We all experience reality to varying degrees; thinking and sensing are just two faculties that are part of the whole. Helen Keller is no different from all of us and/or all things, for she was appeared to be an object of a human being and still had a mind despite being deaf and blind. It is what it is.

[WanderingLands]

To add a further thought, if one were not conscious, then would that person still have existence. Do we lose existence for about 1/3 of our lives when we go to sleep?

PhilX

Not if you include lucid dreaming, astral projection, and the idea of a 'collective unconscious' into the picture. So that means that we are still alive, and always probably will be alive to add a metaphysical emphasis.