Let's get started.
At some point I came to. I referenced this in a video I did, called "
Stars," in which I remembered stars because they were the first thing I remember. On a bottle of soda. (Prime wit Pinback suggested they were six-pointed Star of David on a bottle of "Mountain Jew".) At some point my mind integrated the sense impressions and understood the sounds to be language, and I learned to mimic sounds. I had acquired the power of speech.
This is the point where it was no longer "all in my head," I was now able to communicate with other people.
Now, from this, I realized I exist, because I experienced my senses, although I would not have the understanding of this at that time. Now, I know you're going to object and argue that's all in my head. There's more to this story.
Let's consider what I believe is proven
res ipso loquitor (the thing speaks for itself) First, I exist. This is
probatum est supra quaestione omnino (proven absolutely beyond question). If I did not exist, this conversation could not take place. Now, maybe you want to argue I'm a figment of your imagination. Nice try, but since I don't think the same way you do, then clearly, I exist as something separate from your consciousness.
Or maybe you want to argue the opposite, that
you're a figment of
my imagination. Well then, in order for you to be something I'm imagining, that can only happen because I exist.
Second, going beyond myself, there is a world outside of myself with other people in it. Third, that world is real, and it is as it appears. I know that my senses are imperfect and they might be mistaken, but it is all I have to deal with the world.
Now, maybe you want to argue the "Brain in a vat" or "body in a pod" theory, made popular by
The Matrix. Okay, but where are the sense impressions coming from? Someone else is doing this? Aha, you've just conceded my existence. And, it also proves the other point, there is something outside of me that is (or appears to be) the real world. Even if it's being simulated, someone else is doing that (If I was a "brain in a vat" I couldn't both be experiencing things and at the same time be causing them.)
Or maybe you think I could. Perhaps everything is being simulated by my brain. Well, there is a concept called "point of diminishing returns" in which further and further effort get less and less results. Well, I want to argue the opposite, which I might call "the point of excessive returns."
Let's go back to what I call "The start of my existence." Consider me a point, or a part of something that thinks he exists, but does not. And it creates a reality around itself.
From where does it get the ideas? A person can paint things based on what they've seen before, or even invent new things. But they do this based on what they have seen before. A blank consciousness, or thought process, or whatever it might be, could not create from nothing, with no knowledge of anything, a whole world around it. The concepts and ideas aren't there.
Now, once I gained not just the ability to listen, and to talk, I gained the ability to move, and with that, the ability to manipulate objects. And that becomes the point my existence is proven conclusively. That I have the capacity to alter the fabric of the space-time continuum, by manipulating objects within it.
Okay, so maybe you go back to the "brain in a vat" hypothesis, that the world around me is a simulation. If so, then I have manipulated that simulation, and therefore must exist. It also wold have to be an
enormous simulation to keep all the things that appear in the world in their places. From Ants Marching (cue
the song by the Dave Matthews Band), to every vehicle on the street, and every object down to pieces of paper, and millions of other people. They would also have to build dirt, and rock layers, and all the other aspects of the world. Plus randomness. And every object with component parts.
The keyboard I am using right now, consists of over 80 pieces, each key which performs a different action. All these things are being done, by me, and they change the universe; sometimes in medium ways (when I post something here) and in minor ways (when I edit a document on disc.) But these things are happening, I'm causing them to happen, and the necessary capacity to simuolate everything is far too large to be economically viable.
We all know of other people, and pets, that crossed our lives, and now they are no longer with us. Are we to presume they don't exist (never existed) or are simulations? I think that goes a little too far out because the required capacity would be expensive, and the question becomes, for what purpose?
But, I can quote someone else who was much more eloquent on the point.
“Existence exists—and the act of grasping that statement implies two corollary axioms: that something exists which one perceives and that one exists possessing consciousness, consciousness being the faculty of perceiving that which exists.
“If nothing exists, there can be no consciousness: a consciousness with nothing to be conscious of is a contradiction in terms. A consciousness conscious of nothing but itself is a contradiction in terms: before it could identify itself as consciousness, it had to be conscious of something. If that which you claim to perceive does not exist, what you possess is not consciousness.
“When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence—when he declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.
“When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.
“An axiom is a statement that identifies the base of knowledge and of any further statement pertaining to that knowledge, a statement necessarily contained in all others, whether any particular speaker chooses to identify it or not. An axiom is a proposition that defeats its opponents by the fact that they have to accept it and use it in the process of any attempt to deny it."
I wish I could have said it that well.