For this week, Blogger Sara wrote about and questioned our existence. She examines “How we know we are who we say we are.” She reminds us all to question everything and to always be skeptical. — Editor-in-Chief Roman Rickwood
By Sara Habibipour, Philosophy Editor
This may seem like a pretty obvious question. “Of course I exist,” you may think; “I breathe. I eat. I sleep. I laugh. I love.” Your senses are what help you perceive the world. After all, you’re using your sight to read this article right now. Your senses don’t deceive you…except for when they do. You’re walking downtown, and you think you see a friend, but, in fact, you don’t know the person. Or, you shoot a basketball, thinking that you have the perfect angle to make that 3-pointer, and you shoot the ball so far from the net that it’s embarrassing.
In this moment, you know you’re reading. You know the electronic device you’re holding is real. You know the place where you’re reading is real. When you’re awake and active, you know you’re existing. But, when you aren’t, say, when you’re dreaming, you don’t know whether or not you’re existing. How can you prove you’re not dreaming?
Can you even prove that you exist? Where would you begin? If reality doesn’t exist, then you can’t possibly exist. And, can you prove reality? Maybe all of reality, time, color, numbers, and shapes are false. Renée Descartes would go as far to ask you if you can even disprove the idea that an evil genius has tricked you into believing reality is real. This makes me ask… “Could this ‘evil genius’ be God?”
But, you can’t be nothing if you think you’re something. Hmmm… maybe. Thinking you’re something has to count, right? Ever heard, “I think therefore I am?” Descartes would say that simply believing you exist counts.
So, let’s say we do exist. That begs the question, “Are we minds with bodies, or bodies with minds?”
There’s a thing called the “Rubber Hand Illusion.” There was an experiment done where a dummy hand was placed in front of participants, and their real hand was hidden behind a screen. Both are simultaneously stroked with a paintbrush. Yet, when asked what hand they felt the paintbrush stroking, the participants pointed in the direction of the dummy hand. What this experiment proved was that our minds have a lot more control over our bodies than we think.
So what does it even mean to be a body with a mind and vice versa? A body with a mind would be a physical body that only experiences thoughts and emotions as a result of biochemical interactions in the brain. A mind without a body would have some non-physical presence, a soul maybe, that could live outside of your physical body, directing your actions.
Well, that in itself brings up the question of whether the body and the mind are separate entities. Looking back to what Descartes said, even if all of our physical sensations were just a Matrix-like hallucinatory dream, our mind and thoughts would still be there. This, for Descartes, was enough to prove our existence; the conscious mind is something separate from the material body, and the mind is what forms our identity. Initially thinking about this, that would make sense. If I was simply a physical body with no thoughts, feelings, or emotion, would I even be Sara? I don’t think so. I have a personality which makes me distinctly me. But, then that makes me ask why that even is. How am I able to have a personality?
Well, science can help with answering that. Decades of neuroscience research suggests that our bodies and our physical senses are deeply integrated within the activity in our brains. All of the biochemical processes and reactions that occur in our brains form our consciousness.
With all that said, I think I’m with science on this one. The Rubber Hand Illusion experiment just shows us how easily our senses can deceive us. But, just because we can’t always rely on our senses, I don’t think that means our mind is a separate entity from our body. If our mind was in total control over our body, then couldn’t that just mean that we could imagine our existence away? Perhaps our bodies and minds aren’t separate. Perhaps they together form our existence.
Third Editor-in-Chief: Roman Rickwood
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