ENGLISH WEEK STUDY

HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU EXIST? – TED TALKS

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LmxlcJFTaYU

How do you know you're real? It's an obvious question until you try to answer
it, but let's take it seriously. How do you really know you exist?

In his "Meditations on First Philosophy," René Descartes tried to answer that

very question, demolishing all his preconceived notions and opinions to begin again
from the foundations. All his knowledge had come from his sensory perceptions of
the world. Same as you, right? You know you're watching this video with your eyes,
hearing it with your ears. Your senses show you the world as it is. They aren't
deceiving you, but sometimes they do. You might mistake a person far away for
someone else, or you're sure you're about to catch a flyball, and it hits the ground in
front of you. But come on, right here and now, you know what's right in front of you is
real.

Your eyes, your hands, your body: that's you. Only crazy people would deny
that, and you know you're not crazy. Anyone who'd doubt that must be dreaming. Oh
no, what if you're dreaming? Dreams feel real. You can believe you're swimming,
flying or fighting off monsters with your bare hands, when your real body is lying in
bed. No, no, no. When you're awake, you know you're awake. Ah! But when you
aren't, you don't know you aren't, so you can't prove you aren't dreaming. Maybe the
body you perceive yourself to have isn't really there. Maybe all of reality, even its
abstract concepts, like time, shape, color and number are false, all just deceptions
concocted by an evil genius! No, seriously.

Descartes asks if you can disprove the idea that an evil genius demon has
tricked you into believing reality is real. Perhaps this diabolical deceiver has duped
you. The world, your perceptions of it, your very body. You can't disprove that they're
all just made up, and how could you exist without them? You couldn't! So, you
don't. Life is but a dream, and I bet you aren't row, row, rowing the boat merrily at all,
are you? No, you're rowing it wearily like the duped, nonexistent doof you
are/aren't. Do you find that convincing? Are you persuaded? If you aren't, good; if
you are, even better, because by being persuaded, you would prove that you're a
persuaded being. You can't be nothing if you think you're something, even if you
think that something is nothing because no matter what you think, you're a thinking
thing, or as Descartes put it, "I think, therefore I am," and so are you, really. (Airplane
engine)