Wait you guys, you are both right, I figured it out because after you die, there is no more matter, therefore it never existed in the first place. If this is true then it also must be true that existance doesn't matter either.
Why do you assume there is no matter in death? Energy is a form of matter (or matter a form of energy) and what if our existence is energy? Then matter does exist. We don't even know what death is... Nothing matters, but since we have the ability to be subjective, something can matter to us, so if you value existence, than it can matter. Even if there was a God to provide a meaning to life, you then have to ask why does It's meaning mean something? Which means we can do whatever the heck we want! YAY!
The only thing that matters is the present and the future. I guess memories matter too of course, but thats the thing. After you pass it will be exactly like nothing ever mattered. Because your life will have not have ever happened. No memories, no proof, nothing. The only thing that proves you did something, is memory. If you don't have memory, it is impossible to know if you were alive before.
Very true. Perhaps without memory there would not be a 'you' or knowledge: so it wouldn't matter. It's pretty absurd...
No problem: I've been quite obsessed with memory recently and the influence of its presence - glad to see others thinking about it too!
I'm not "assuming" that particles come from the air and replace particles of rock. But all matter is made up of processes of change; while it may look the same (though it doesn't), it is not the same. The current state of it does not give us access to any past states; the current state is all that is. The timeline is an abstract way of understanding the changes taking place.
What does the fact that after we're dead our memory's gone proof about matter being not existant when there's stuff like written memories from former generations? Those people have past away just like that but their memories live on 'cause of the existance of matter which we use to see what has happened in this reality before. So, perhaps the main difference when matter wouldn't exist is that we wouldn't have a sense of time (yes, or it wouldn't just be there).
Thinking and Being are one. If matter exists it does so only to the experience of appearance, the Experience which has placed limits upon Itself, contingently from God above or the devil below. Truly personal experience exists alongside it's... <inexpressible will>...immersed self-consciousness, independently of matter. If matter never existed, scientists could reverse God below for the Devil above. However, that is reasonable (except to Nietzsche, who believes in the will to Power) though for the Alpha-Omega theory of "god from God; Light form light". Chardin might have reasonably been an Existentialist that way for the mentally duplicating Matter of the Mind. Mind of ordering instinct from Instinct.
Its not that there is for surely no existence because of this, but that it doens't really matter if there is or not, because the only thing that holds significance to mattering is our memory.
IF matter never existed our Consciousness would have to be conditioned conditionally on our constant emotional state. You now ask from where do we have that emotional state from? That was examples we came across in the World; that World we ARE of, not IN. Seriously, existentialism for example is always a problem of interacting with a material world. Therefore, if this world of Man we are in is capricious enough to lose it's identity for past Materialism, our emotions would just as well not be and the present would only exist for ourselves if we were God, each one of us (?); how...
Is being thinking then. Is frog being, thinking frog, in order to be? This statement does not appear correct to me. Why must matter only exist for appearances? Personal experience cannot be shown to exist independently of matter.
Hi, QUOTE: "Personal experience cannot be shown to exist independently of matter." unless you express yourself as an Existentialist. That way the truth is expressed rather than sophistry.
Agreed. It doesn't necessarily mean that thought/experience cannot exist independently of matter, but we could never show this without reference to experience. Descartes tried, and people even thought he succeeded; now we spend our time picking him apart.
I have not been a student of "philosophers". I couldn't tell you if a system came from Descartes or bugs bunny.
I agree with thedope. Categorization and names are used only to help group together similar ideas, not as a guideline for those ideas.
There are many solid theories that dictate that the external world does not exist. Check out some George Berkeley, the first dialogue of his Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous is pretty good. It explains pretty well how there is no reason to suggest that anything outside of the mind exists anywhere else other then the mind. To be honest though, no theory of the lack of an external world changes anything about our perception of the world that we work and live in. So as interesting as it sounds and as cool as it is to talk about, the topic of an external world or not changes nothing, because you still have to live and operate in the world your given. PS This is really not an existentialist question, for an existentialist, whether matter exists or not is irrelevant, or at least, its usually presupposed.