You don’t really exist, do you?

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While I don't think there's much new ground that can be covered on the topic just I found a lot of quality thoughts linked below; not just from the poster (Massimo Pigliucci) but the comments are also a goldmine.

I suppose I agree with him on everything except free-will, which to me at least seems like a place where perception can be easily overthrown. I like his analogy of the car with the split-brain studies and I think I'd also offer my own analogy between consciousness and fire; ie. you can split a camp fire into as many piles of embers as you want - there's no quantity you can end up with where wood is no longer becoming ash.

http://rationallyspeaking.blogspot.com/ ... o-you.html

That was interesting.

There's a few things guaranteed to have me draw my breath over my teeth in a disapproving manner. Declaring something an 'illusion' is one of them.

A table is quite as real as a quark.

It seems a bit less boneheaded when they actually qualify their statements further - ie. the unitary 'I' experience as being an illusion vs consciousness itself being an illusion. I'm still not so sure about the divisibility of consciousness making it an illusion, as much as one campfire is an illusion if it's filled with hundreds of embers. To go that far, if one's willing to walk it out, would suggest that anything that exists as an aggregate of building blocks is an illusion.

Nope I dont exist, I am make believe which is why i have millions of religious followers following a book of fairytales.

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Chou, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, a veritable butterfly, enjoying itself to the full of its bent, and not knowing it was Chuang Chou. Suddenly I awoke, and came to myself, the veritable Chuang Chou. Now I do not know whether it was then I dreamt I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man. Between me and the butterfly there must be a difference. This is an instance of transformation

As translated by James Legge, and quoted in The Three Religions of China: Lectures Delivered at Oxford (1913) by William Edward Soothill, p. 75

Zhuangzi lived from 369 BC to 286 BC

Correct.

I am just a fig newton of your imagination!

I might need to clarify for those who didn't browse the link - Massimo and most of the posters were contesting the notion that consciousness is an illusion, not supporting it.

I exist. I feel myself viscerally. I feel pain. I feel Desire.

I think....therefore I am!

Hee Hee....

Clearly, none of his peers who claim consciousness is an illusion have studied neuropathology or evolutionary neuroscience. Both fields show very nicely in very concrete ways that consciousness exists as a spectrum (or number of spectra depending on the attributes being examined), and is a function of physical structures that must exist and function correctly for any given level of consciousness to exist. In light of the knowledge in those fields consciousness then becomes something almost akin to a feedback loop or supervisor layer, organization-wise. As part of a whole, it cannot be illusionary.

Just pinch yourself to make sure.

I think therefore I am.... Kraftie quoting famous philisopher René Descartes is great.

I agree.

You do exist, but feeling, or perspective is subjective. A sound wave, can be heard differently through the eyes of different people/animals/living beings for that matter. Same for color, being a spectrum of waves too, who knows if the computer I am typing on is blue. My dog might see it in black. Same situations can envoke different feelings and reactions from two different people.

Indeed, *all* sensory perception is unique to the person; therefore perceived reality is subjective to some degree. However, somewhere along the way we learned how to measure the various forms of energy (mechanical, electrical, light, heat, etc) that trigger perception in our nervous systems. In that respect we very much can ascertain that there is a baseline from which each person deviates in terms of accuracy. And that's not even layering on the higher level functions of association or filtering involved in conscious perception!

Interestingly, once the computer age began philosophers began to examine the idea of consciousness in a slightly different light, as if it could exist independent of the nervous system, similar to computer code. While this may have application for examining specific problems, I think it will be seen as a mistake some years in the future as we are so tightly tied to our bodies. Yet, some features are hardwired and develop independent of the body, while others develop in reaction to it, and still others at the very highest levels of processing are entirely dynamic. Consciousness appears to span all three layers.

So is consciousness an illusion created by the self?

Or is the self an illusion created by consciousness?

You all have gotten me confused!

Meh, I exist and so do you all whether you read this or not. If a tree falls in a forest on a planet with an atmosphere, it still makes the air vibrations we call sound regardless of whether humans or angels or animals or aliens or any other classification of creature with some form of brain and ability to hear the sound or not. This is intuitive. You can't pretend not to exist or think about existence unless you exist. Regardless of my inability to put this into proper formats or playing definition games, of course you exist. However, I really wish this were just a nightmare and I could wake up to Jackie cuddling me and we could go out to eat and play board games.

I have no evidence that i exist. Only others can know it, if they exist.
It is also possible i exist /or not in other dimensions or parallel worlds.

I find the question funny. For me, the important is that i like my existence (or my non-existence) .

That came compliments of Massimo.