I don't exist
by Bob on October 8, 2007
I feel I don't exist. It's not pathological. It's an existential question and discontentment.
All the way over here to the university, walking, I still had "I'm a Believer" by The Monkees playing in my head, and also reading in my head, pages from Descartes and his "Mediations on First Philosophy". He started out with nothing. He tried to prove he existed or anything outside him or part of him existed. He got into trouble when he couldn't easily prove his right hand was his own. He almost fell into Solopsism, but invoked Deity. He slipped out of the trap. Even if he could envision a chiliagon (okay, it's a thousand-sided geometrical figure) in his Sixth Meditation entitled, "On the Existence of Material Things, and of the Real Distinction Between the Mind and Body of Man".
So Descartes got to the famous "Cogito ergo sum", translated from the Latin as "I think therefore I am" or the French as "Je pense donc je suis".
That's a very heavy meditation. He was fighting off Solipsism. He needed God to do it. To some, it was akin to the ancient Greek theatre technique of introducing a "deus ex machina" to save the day.
Then we get to Bishop George Berkeley, and he left Deity out of the equation, seemingly, and got "immaterialism" or to me, neo-Solipsism. We can read and analyse Berkeley's 1713 treatise "Three Dialogues Between Hylas and Philonous".
It was cause for pause.
My old professor of Philosophy at university, as I got deeper into it all, even reading the original sources in Greek, Latin, etc., and started questioning everything I knew as a scientist and engineer, said to me "Bob, Philosophy is like a drug. You can get hopelessly hooked on it, and there is no way out. Be careful !". Well he had gotten into it early and lectured in it all his university life. So I took his point. But I still got deep into it. And the deeper I got, the more my head was intellectually spinning. I would read for hours and days in the university library, alone, the Organon of Aristotle, and play with Syllogisms in his "Prior Analytics" and "Posterior Analytics", or dissect Wittgenstein's more modern "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus", premise by premise, even from the first premise, premise 1: "The world is all that is the case".
My classmates in Science and Engineering told me it would get me nowhere, despite my reciting "Principia Mathematica" by Whitehead and Russell to them as a possible foundation to all Mathematics.
Of course I knew that Logic can only get you so far, as evidenced by Eugene Ionesco's brilliant 1959 play "Rhinoceros" wherein a logician flawlessly proves by syllogisms and enthymemes that a cat has five paws.
Theatre of the absurd, indeed. Or not, depending on which judge's chair you are sitting on in the tennis court of life.
So with all this amazingly engrossing reading and knowledge, I ask myself, and have doubt if I really exist.
Why ? For a garden variety of reasons. I feel I don't in a philosophical sense. Also, the internet, and e-interactions have thrown what we call reality into a new twist and spin. I think of Dr. Alan Turing's "Turing Test" from 1950 and wonder if anyone out there in cyberspace really exists or is a computer program running mimicking a human being. It's a real serious question. Can you tell a human being apart from a computer program mimicking a human being ? Hardly.
They are even making robots in Japan that for all intents and purposes are like real human beings. And it's no marketing mistake that the first ones the professors made were attractive Japanese lady robots also called actroids. They are like the animatronic figures at Disneyland, except more advanced. Professor Hiroshi Ishiguro from Osaka University in Japan has created a very lady-like robot or humanoid or actroid or android, named not terribly romantically "Repliee Q1Expo". She has 42 actuators in her. Dr. Ishiguro claims that soon we won't be able to tell the difference between the android and the human.
Well, Dr. Ishiguro's actroids might obviate the need for MySpace or Facebook e-friends. Maybe not, thinking again hard about it. Hopefully they won't take away human friends, although Dr. Ishiguro thinks it's somewhat possible.
Echoes indeed of Dr. Turing's "Turing Test". It's all very unsettling. Unless one is into plastic as predicted by Ben's father's friend, Mr. McGuire, in the 1967 film "The Graduate". Or remember the Jefferson Airplane's 1967 song, ironically the "B" side to "Somebody to Love", called "Plastic Fantastic Lover". Good song. I think Marty wrote it about his new hifi music system, that was the rumour, but one never knows with tongue-in-cheek song titles and lyrics. And it was from their album "Surrealistic Pillow".
We also have Gary Numan and his Tubeway Army band with the 1979 hit "Are Friends 'Electric'" from the album "Replicas", posing a similar question. So go figure. But we digress.
And it's worth remembering that the actual word "robot" comes to us from the play "R.U.R." ("Rossum's Universal Robots") by Karel Capek in 1920 and the mechanical people therein. The word in Czech ("robotiti") meant something like a worker slave or drudge.
Films have been made about this and TV series, too. Robots take over. We can no longer tell in these visions, who is a robot and who is a human being. It's right in there in the deepest of philosophical questions. What makes us human ? Do we have souls ? Does an animal have a soul ?
E-relationships are in that category of question. We don't know who we are talking with, in plain truth. And "talking" is a misnomer. We are not talking. We are colliding electrons against themselves in cyberspace. Little do we know what lurks in those shadows, indeed.
Even email can be spoofed so we can't be totally sure that just because the sender's email address is exact, whether it was our friend or colleague who really sent it.
So I am consterned about it all. Or shall we make a noun of it and say I run into a state of consternation about it all. Consternation, a state of paralysing dismay. A sudden, alarming amazement or dread that results in utter confusion.
Do I exist ? Do you exist ? Do we exist together ? Does anything exist ? Well, that would be far too profound a question to answer.
But on the internet, despite Dr. Sherry Turkle and her work at MIT on internet social interaction models and e-villages, it's all a mess to me.
Someone recently, when I posed this question to her, answered that she didn't care if it was a man, woman, or even a dog who could type at a computer keyboard on the other side -- as long as it was fun and gave her pleasure.
That set me back.
I think we should all turn off the computers and head out for the park and play some soccer, or baseball, or cricket. Or go dance some Square Dancing, which some believe is an antidote to modern man's alienation from society and himself.
We might not be able to prove, according to Bishop Berkeley that the people in the square dance were really there, or that our partners were really there. But we'd have a really good time interpersonally.
Other than that, I can't prove I exist. Or can't feel anymore that I do. Only the thin illusion or hallucination of love will assuage that condition, in a practical sense, answering no deep philosophical questions. It's not meant to. Love levels the playing field.
Back to work.