Does everything I create exist?

[Diethylamide]

?

[ydoaPs]

Hmm...could you elaborate a bit?

[Diethylamide]

I take a pencil and I locate a point on a piece of paper. Does the point exist? Have I created it to exist?

 

What is the definition for the term "exist"?

 

Furthermore, the need to grasp stars and it's colonies becomes totally irrelevant now that I know - that I don't need "proof" for aliens to "exist", I can just draw it, to create an existence for the alien in my head which funny enough, simultaneously connects to the space around me. The alien in my head, still has the same relative definition to an alien in outer-space. If anything, you have more of a chance of finding an alien in the outer reaches of space, than you do in the deepest reaches.. of my head.

 

So if that's the case, and I know none of you will agree with me when I say that the pointless adventure to the beyond, is simply pointless due to the fact that we can create.. then would the meaning of exist and create be non-existent? Or does it actually REALLY exist?

Edited June 21, 2010 by Diethylamide
Consecutive posts merged.

[ajb]

You are thinking about the natural world, your mind and the mathematical world?

[John Cuthber]

Draw a million dollars and try to spend it.

You will soon find out that it's not real.

[padren]

I think you've taken "I think, therefore I am" towards "I think it, therefore it is" and while true in one sense it is not true in the sense you mean it.

 

To be precise, when you draw a point on a piece of paper what actually exists is:

 

1) A graphite smudge or ink blob on a sheet of paper

2) A mental model in your mind associating that smudge with a conceptualized "point"

 

 

It's sort of like asking if a picture of a bunny exists when it resides in a file on a CD disk on your table. It may be in there in a pattern of 1s and 0s but is it a picture of a bunny? When you open the CD and load it on your computer screen, is it a picture of a bunny?

 

It's really about the definition of "picture" and that definition is somewhat subjective. If an array of photons streaming from an LCD display is a "picture" to you then it is "real" but it is still not a "hold it in your hand" picture.

 

As such, you haven't made something exist, you've just changed how you think about something. It's also worth noting no matter how tightly you associate the idea of the image file on the CD, the photons streaming out of an LCD screen, color pigments on a sheet of paper in a pattern consistent with the image of a bunny you had as a kid named "Mr. Peppers" that each are objectively different.

 

They may all represent the same thing within a model in your mind (yet another medium distinct from the others) but that is just a pattern you recognize. To view aliens or points in your mind and on paper or outer space is also just pattern recognition.

[Diethylamide]

So nothing I create really exists? It's just an illusion made possible by pattern recognition.

[vordhosbn]

Perhaps we can view it as adaptation of our pattern recognition.

[padren]

So nothing I create really exists? It's just an illusion made possible by pattern recognition.

 

In the sense that you see one thing that is actually something else. You also have to understand what it is to "create" anything anyway - when we create, we really just rearrange stuff that already exists in some manner that "creates" a pattern that makes sense to us.

 

We can shape clay, and "create" a cup, which has distinct properties, such as the ability to be used to scoop and hold liquid. If you break a cup, you "create" a 3D jigsaw puzzle. So the first thing you have to remember is that the word "create" is based on our own idea of patterns.

 

The term illusion is usually reserved for when something tricks us into thinking that it is one thing when it is another - if you see a fire in a fireplace and then realize it's a TV in there - not a fire, that is an illusion. Of course, the TV is real, the fireplace is real, but the illusion of there being an actual fire there is an illusion, which exists only in your mind.

When you use something to represent something else without trying to "trick" your mind into believing anything that is not there is not an illusion.

 

For instance, a map may represent a town on a piece of paper and display it's distance to a river, but it's not an illusion and it's not meant to trick you into thinking you are looking at the actual town.

A map displaying locations in a fictional story may relate information about a hypothetical town but it's not trying to describe a real place, so it's not a trick.

That fictional town exists, just not as a real town. It exists as a bunch of descriptions conveyed in the course of a story and accompanied by the imagery you create for it in your head, which will be different for each person that reads the story.

 

It's real, (because, it is something - it's thoughts in your mind and words on a page) but it is not real if you think it is an actual town.

 

In that way, it's all about the pattern you associate with what you observe. It's "real" when you correctly describe it, it's "not real" when you describe it as something it is not.

[Mr Skeptic]

Everything you make exists. What exactly it is, may not be what you think it is. As John Cuthber said, I can easily draw a million dollars, and will have a nice painting of a million dollars. It won't, however, be a million dollars. On the other hand, if I make a sandwich, then the sandwich I made exists and is a sandwich.

[Marat]

An interesting aspect to this question is how things cross the boundary from subjective to objective. I can sit here and think of a three-headed cat on Mars who can read minds, but this almost fails to register at all (or would, if I had not just typed it here) in the world of intersubjective reality. But if eighty million Germans in the 1930s start thinking that racial purity is important, the creation of these subjective images and ideas in their heads connects with the objective world quite powerfully in the form of World War II. So causal power, one of the chief characteristics of objective as opposed to subjective reality, can have its ultimate root in subjectivity.