by Orestes J. Gonzalez

Created on: September 06, 2008   Last Updated: May 21, 2012

How Do We Know that We Exist?

An answer to the question 'How do we know that we exist?' is not easy to articulate. Existence is one of those truths which philosophers call self-evident truths, that is to say, a truth that one cannot demonstrate. In general, the most one can do about self-evident truths is to show that it is absurd not to accept them as true. One can provide explanations and argue for a self-evident truth but in the final analysis one either accepts it or not by way of choice.

When there are only two options from which one must choose, and it seems that human reasoning is unable to provide convincing proof for one or the other, the choice one has to make is both an exercise of free-will and an act of inference.

Fortunately, one rarely finds oneself stretched to such limits, but when one must define oneself as accepting or rejecting a self-evident truth - as for example choosing to affirm the existence of the external world as in the 'methodical realism' of the 'philosophy of being' or choosing to deny the existence of the external world as in the 'methodical doubt' of the 'Cartesian school of philosophy' - the intensity of the rational input on which the choice rests may be high, but does it reach the level of a convincing proof?

It is indeed true that the intervention of free-will is crucial for defining one's position, but this does not invalidate the fact that the act of free-will is best exercised when aided by well structured argumentation.

On the assumption that we accept the affirmative answer 'Yes, we exist,' one can argue that we know that we exist by stressing the reliability of sense-knowledge. By sense-knowledge I am referring to the knowledge that begins with the exercise of one or all or any combination of the five external senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, and touch. The external senses tell us that the world around us is real, and that we, as part of that world, are real existing beings as well.

The input from the external senses reaches the intellect where the content of the information received is transformed into a 'thought' and expressed in the language one is familiar with. When we interact with the external world through the senses, we experience the 'real' and attribute 'existence' to what actually exists in the external world.

But the intellection of conceptions such as 'This thing is real' or 'This thing exists' remains tacit most of the time. We do not usually reflect explicitly on whether a thing exists or not,

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