• Ephrium
    8
    What reason or justification is there for us to know we will still continue existing for the next day, if any

    For instance, how do I know I will still exist tomorrow?

    This fundamental question which seems seldom raised should affect many of our decisions. If there is reason to believe I will not be existing tomorrow I may give up doing anything and just sleep instead of, say, going to work to get more money. Based on what do we know we will still continue to exist
  • Rich
    3.2k
    The justification is memory of the past which gives one a sense that it will continue, with obvious provisos.
  • _db
    3.6k
    To ask such a question seems to presuppose not only that we have an adequate understanding of what personal identity is, but also that personal identity is concrete enough to be something that can be gained or lost.
  • BC
    13.5k
    What reason or justification is there for us to know we will still continue existing for the next day, if anyEphrium

    We have nothing to go on but the past (morning after morning we woke up and continued to exist that day). You might hope that you will continue to exist, you might fear that you will continue to exist, and you might not care all that much one way or the other whether you continue to exist.

    There is, of course, only one guarantee, which is that one day you won't continue to exist. You might know that that fated day will be soon, or you might not -- but the final day will come.
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    What reason or justification is there for us to know we will still continue existing for the next day, if any

    For instance, how do I know I will still exist tomorrow?
    Ephrium

    Well, given that we've continued to exist in the past, one is in good health, and there's no strong evidence to believe the contrary, it is likely that we will exist tomorrow.

    This fundamental question which seems seldom raised should affect many of our decisions. If there is reason to believe I will not be existing tomorrow I may give up doing anything and just sleep instead of, say, going to work to get more money. Based on what do we know we will still continue to existEphrium

    We may not need such an immediate threat of nonexistence to behave in ways you suggest (''I may give up doing anything and just sleep instead of, say, going to work to get more money.''). The certainty of death and the meaninglessness of life (the two may be related) are, to many, sufficient to warrant such a ''giving up''.
  • Ephrium
    8
    You see a big hurdle I am facing is to see myself as purely an object. If I am able to see myself as fully an object then yes, given this object is in good health it will still continue to exist for the near future.

    However most people fully or partly see themselves as a soul or thinking thing just like Descartes. From this very natural viewpoint then is there any reason to suppose I will continue to exist?

    If you use something so alien and unnatural like just treat "you" as a mere body to explain there wont be many branches of philosophy such as philosophy of mind or phenomenology.

    And to the response of because we exist in the past we are likely to still exist I can use the standard objections against the induction of science what logic is there to say something which has been always true in the past will still be true in the future
  • TheMadFool
    13.8k
    You see a big hurdle I am facing is to see myself as purely an object. If I am able to see myself as fully an object then yes, given this object is in good health it will still continue to exist for the near future.

    However most people fully or partly see themselves as a soul or thinking thing just like Descartes. From this very natural viewpoint then is there any reason to suppose I will continue to exist?
    Ephrium

    Oh ok. The soul. The general conception of this term seems to be that
    1. It is eternal
    2. It is the real you
    Doesn't 1 answer your question for you or do you have another definition of soul?

    If you use something so alien and unnatural like just treat "you" as a mere body to explain there wont be many branches of philosophy such as philosophy of mind or phenomenologyEphrium

    You're right it does seem odd to equate person with just the body. But that's because of religion - it has influenced us so much for so long, to say nothing of the fact that it plays on our fears and insecurities. Personally I do think there's some element of truth in believing that ALL is not physical.
  • Ephrium
    8
    You are wrong with saying equating "you" with a soul is due to religion.

    I am an atheist, in Mensa and am completing undergraduate degree in philosophy and nother in physics. Part of the reason I am here. Back to the topic When you do physics, or comtemplate epistemology you think do you not? When you move around you do think also, together with having sensations and memory and so on. Hence it very naturally appears that you are at least partly a concious, rational thinking object. I can do away with the soul.

    My point is if you were to answer my question by saying because your body is still healthy it seems very unsatisfactory to me and most people due to most people's idendification with themselves as partly a concious thinking entity and it is natural, nothing to do with religion.
  • OglopTo
    122
    And to the response of because we exist in the past we are likely to still exist I can use the standard objections against the induction of science what logic is there to say something which has been always true in the past will still be true in the futureEphrium

    If we are just talking about possibilities, then there are a lot of different possible scenarios, known and unknown. However, some scenarios are more probable of happening than others. Based on experience, you will continue to exist tomorrow, unless something out of the ordinary happens.

    So I guess the bottomline is that experience gives us some sort of assurance that we'll continue to exist the following day. It's just how the way things have worked so far. And like most of science, we just happen to observe that this is how things work; we don't really know why existence "chose" to work the way we observe it.

    But now that I consider it further, we don't really know the mechanism behind "continued existence", more so explain why we continue to experience such phenomenon.
  • Ciceronianus
    3k
    A "thought experiment":

    You're walking east on Adams St. in downtown Chicago, towards Russian Tea Time, consumed by a longing for the horseradish flavored vodka shots served there. Do you:

    A. Wonder whether there is any reason to know you will continue to exist long enough to drink a shot?
    B. Wonder why anyone would wonder whether there is any reason to know you will continue to exist long enough to drink a shot?
    C. Continue walking towards Russian Tea Time, consumed by a longing for the horseradish flavored vodka shots served there?

    If you choose C. you, like me, enjoy drinking horseradish flavored vodka while munching on black bread and pickles. But you would also, like me, think you should have a reason to think you would not exist long enough to drink a shot before thinking there is a need for you to determine whether there is reason to think you need a reason to think you will exist long enough to drink a shot.
  • Ephrium
    8
    Cicer,

    I get your point. The same point as we do not normally worry about being permanently blind if there is nothing wrong with our vision. However, this is philosophy. Philosophy is where such questions arise.

    Your point is a valid one and I appreciate it and and am thinking of every way I can phrase it to make it not sound like a looking down rebuff. So do not read my response as a dismissal but rather merely a response.

    Like a normal person who goes walking around the neighbourhood. He walks, and one day wonders by what or based on what does he know behind the shop is his house. He questions and hence epistemology begins. This is precisely what philosophy is about.
  • Ciceronianus
    3k
    Well, I'm not sure about that. As C.S. Peirce noted: "Let us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts." We doubt in life when we encounter circumstances which raise doubts, i.e. render us puzzled, unsettled in our beliefs and lead us to question them. We pretend to doubt in philosophy when we have no reason to doubt but purport to do so. Such faux doubt serves no purpose and is contrary to what we actually do when we think about real problems.

    We all have good reason to know that some day we'll die. Do we have good reason to know that we will die tomorrow? Unless we're scheduled for execution then, or are or will be in some grave danger, we have no reason to know that. Absent such circumstances, do we have good reason to doubt that we will be alive tomorrow? I would say no. If we have no reason to doubt that we'll be alive tomorrow, what could possibly prompt us to demand a reason not to doubt that we'll be alive tomorrow?
  • Ephrium
    8
    I do doubt and question. Here is why.

    Our identity at least partly and at least how it appears to a large extend as a mind, concious thinking thing appears so mysterious and magical that until this scientific age philosophers have no consensus in explaining conciousness. Given its mysteriousness and how it exist why cant it just disappear too? Which is the reason for this thread.

    In dealing with this mysterious phenomenon, concious thinking self, Plato wrote death, for better or worse, only god knows meaning naturally he assumes this self will exist and experience this thing called death.In dealing with this mysterious concious thinking self, millions of religious believers believe they will go somewhere after bodily death.

    So I am here questioning just as this mysterious concious thinking self can come into existence seemingly magically why cannot it equally disappear? What reasons is there to justify that this mysetrious concious thinking self will still exist
  • Ciceronianus
    3k
    So I am here questioning just as this mysterious concious thinking self can come into existence seemingly magically why cannot it equally disappear? What reasons is there to justify that this mysetrious concious thinking self will still existEphrium

    Now I'm uncertain what you're addressing. Are you asking whether there is any reason to know (believe?) that we will exist after we die? I think that's different from asking whether there is any reason to know we'll exist tomorrow.

    If you're asking whether there is any reason to know that we will exist after we die, I'm not aware of any such reason. I think there's good reason to believe that our bodies won't exist after we die, except perhaps as a kind of husk or decaying object, for a time, depending on what is done with them. I'm not sure what "we" would be without our bodies, but assuming there is a "we" in that case, I don't think it can be established it survives, though many believe it does.
  • Ephrium
    8
    My main point is this mysterious concious thinking self came into existence, what is there to justify this self or myself will still exist?

    Descartes, in meditations, says perhaps if thinking stops he will cease to exist.

    My point is that this self which most people identify with is a thinking concious self which appears so apart from the body just as descartes says. And what is there to say this self cannot just disappear or cease to exist.

    My point in bringing up Plato or religious people was to show they too identify with a thinking concious self, a soul perhaps, and it about death was just coincidental.
  • Ephrium
    8
    https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/qualia/

    Given there is as of now no explanation of how qualia arises, What is there to justify it will still exist
  • apokrisis
    7.3k
    You seem to be mixing two different familiar questions. One is about the nature of your existence - the riddle of consciousness. The other is about the nature of general persistence - the problem of induction.

    So a good answer on induction is indeed the existence of memory or history. If those exist, then there is every reason to think the future constrained to some definite degree. It becomes reasonable to expect you will wake up every morning. That propensity exists. And also reasonable to expect there is some smaller chance you won't wake up, as death also exists as a propensity of life.

    Then the riddle of consciousness is a longer story. But one brief point is that there may not seem an answer as all our explanations of the world are based on telling the mechanical tale of states of affairs or sets of observables. We have got very skilled in describing reality in a way that pushes the notion of an observer out of the picture being described. And that way of thinking - observerless metaphysics - results in the kind of dualistic mysteriousness that seems so paradoxical. So the remedy is then to develop instead a metaphysics that incorporates observers along with observables, that is, a metaphysics of modelling relations.

    Anyway, whatever the answers, your OP seems to mix two foundational questions. So the first order of business is to separate them clearly.
  • BC
    13.5k
    You could take the slogan, "Today is the first day of the rest of your life" and turn it on it's head: "Today is the last day of your life, so far..." It could, after all, be your final day on earth.

    You could live each day as if it were your last (note the subjunctive tense). How would you live your last day?

    Here is a song for your possible last day by the great Bill Monroe (mandolin) titled "My Last Days on Earth". Listen and weep.

  • Wosret
    3.4k


    Damn, it's supposed to skip to the end, at like to 6:50 mark.
  • Ann
    14
    If there is reason to believe I will not be existing tomorrow I may give up doing anything and just sleep instead of, say, going to work to get more money. Based on what do we know we will still continue to existEphrium

    I think it's quite the opposite. I believe that a lot of people have this desire to continue existing forever. Everything done is to ensure that they last as long as possible, or even hope for an immortality because there seems to be a lot of importance placed on prolonging one's own life.

    Now, when someone thinks there really is no point in living, then would you call them selfless for not wanting to selfishly live life further, or the most selfish for thinking they have this reason to not do anything in life with the justification of 'there's no point to life or in life.' One must truly live for the sake of trying to find a purpose in life, to find the reason for living. And sitting idly, thinking that there is no reason to continue your existence - in my opinion - is pretty selfish.
  • Ephrium
    8
    Ann got it wrong. This topic is not about what makes it worth living but how can we be certain we will still exist the next moment, given we seem at least to pop into existence.

    As for memory being the answer, memory only says we popped into existence at some point and has continued to exist till now. It does not justify your existing the next moment
  • SamuelT
    1
    I believe there to be a distinction between physically existing and the representational existing we conceive of in thought.
    "For instance, how do I know I will still exist tomorrow?"
    Well, isn't it only within our humanly embedded predicament that this thought exists? It seems rather ambiguous, the worry of continual existence, considered from a nonhuman entity (obviously).
    It is a matter of representation from the physical unto the mental then, wherein this problem arises. I think it could be considered false, or of no meaning, that we may or may not exist tomorrow. I think it is a modified representation of reality that doesn't exist as a viable threat outside of our thought-oriented paradigm. Im aware this posits more questions than it answers, but I can't help but think of the question as meaningless.
  • Anthony
    197
    What reason or justification is there for us to know we will still continue existing for the next day, if any — Ephrium
    Whether one knows if he will continue to exist in the future via reason touches upon the manifold interpretations of causality, and whether he is 100% existent each moment. I was reading through my writings and saw that at one time I was certain causal relationships in the environment and my interactions with it, while obeying laws of lineal causality, were only possible to ascertain as they paralleled an acausal faculty from the generative order of all, which is also in oneself; in addition, causality, unless perhaps intuitively or in the realm of abstract thought, is only possible by a series of conscious observations. In other words, acausality is the background of causality in the same way unconsciousness is related to consciousness, and we can all be said to be more or less unconscious but still unconscious to some extent.

    One assumes he'll exist tomorrow because he doesn't realize often enough that, in a way, there is no continuity or causality or consciousness at the same time that a conscious observation is made and a constituent of existence excised and separated from the rest of the vacuum. When we aren't making observations and cutting up what exists, sequentially, what/where are we? At that point do we exist in a way that can be memorized one after another, attributed causality to, while being tricked into a need of anticipating more of the same unnecessary splicing of reality to itself by and by? Something of the whole man is always left behind or in the future or in some ineffable realm out of time and therefore inasmuch as we can say we aren't altogether here in a way that can be limned in the round, we won't be altogether here tomorrow either. So, whether you believe in the life review that comes with your head on the death pillow (perhaps in a hypna-gogic/pompic state of consciousness), if it does happen, it could oddly be said to be the only time while alive you really existed in a way the whole gestalt could be enveloped by a limited consciousness, and then it is gone soon thereafter. But since we are immersed in unconsciousness acausality (or universal mind or quantum vacuum or quintessence what have you, which we can't experience consciously) on all sides of the psyche in varying degrees from birth till the shade lifts and never fully conscious, we could never be said to be fully gone at some later time either.
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