Do you want people to believe in you?
 

Do you want people to believe that you are there? That you exist? That your meaty, oozing, entrail-filled skin-sack is a material presence and houses (or comprises) an entity? Or, if you don't have one of those, that you exist anyway? (If that is the case, just rap once for yes, twice for no. Or interact with your surroundings in any way you can. If you can't, I'm afraid you'll just have to sit this one out.)

Or, and I'm aiming this question at you people out there who are made of moist, squishy material, do people believe in your body but not in you? Or perhaps they only believe in choice bits of you - for example, they might believe in your capacity to take out the trash, but not in your reliability?

If they don't believe in you, does it bother you? Do you think any entity which stands up and says, "I Am!" has the right to be treated as a being who exists?

:lol: Do i want people to believe in me and my existence?
Ha! If i care enough, maybe...
I don't know, i don't really care if they ... wait a minute...i don't think i get you :lol:

But well, whatever it is, whatever people chose to think about me or whatever, as long as it doesn't conflict with my interest, i have nothing against them ^^

To view humans as nothing but muscle and bone and organs with no feeling, thinking entity inside is probably a belief I would expect to find within... well, a serial killer. If a person doesn't have a concept that every human has a soul, then where's the guilt of killing them? It just a body. Who cares?

So, yes, I would very much like for people to believe that I exist, or they'd probably be about to stab me.

Forgive me, I realize that I may not have been clear. (This is something I find a little bit funny, as various scrapes and bruises have shown me that the components of my body are more or less clear, and the only part of me which is invisible - my mind, my soul, my anima, the little monkey in my skull which compells me to collect objects of increasing size and arrange them in spirals - is completely invisible. Yet my convergent self is quite opaque - mysterious, isn't it? The way a little cloudiness in a million clear components can converge into solidity.)

Allow me to re-emphasize: "That your meaty, oozing, entrail-filled skin-sack is a material presence and houses (or comprises) an entity?"

This is quite far from being nothing but an entrail-filled skin sack. It is, rather, a comment on the remarkable fact that you are something in an entrail-filled skin-sack! Kudos! Whoever designed you must be a creative genius with an extremely good sense of humor. Empathizing, communicating, philosophizing bags of bone and meat... I never would have thought of it! If anything, I would have made you out of silicon. It's much easier to clean.
It is, in fact, possible that I misinterpreted whether you had assigned this dismissive quality to me or to a being who is even more theoretical than I, but in any case, it is never a bad idea to be polite. Unless of course they're about to kill you straight away, in which case it's best not to waste time that could be used for running.



Well. So far, it has been the general consensus amoung this group of (intelligent, or so I judge) people that being believed in is an essential part of their interaction with others. However, what if it was more than one sociopath who failed to believe in your existence? What if an entire community - your community - did not recognize you as a being? Would you be angry - hurt? Might you even begin to doubt in yourself?

Well, if people outright denied my existence and refused to interact with me on the basis that I wasn't actually there, that wouldn't be very pleasant, would it? Sense evidence suggests that I am here, just as my sense evidence indicates others are here, and in the lack of any proof greater than the evidence of one's own faculties, you might as well proceed through life on the assumption that what around you is real and worth interacting with. Even if it IS all an illusion, sitting around declaiming its unreality won't get you anywhere. Unless, of course, you meet a man who offers you a red pill and a blue pill.

Let's say, then, that we lived in a world full of clones and robots who acted like people but were not.

Do you believe these clones and robots should be given rights?

Clones, yes. Robots, no. And I'm not sure why I feel this way, but that's what my gut is telling me. Clones would, in some way, be indefinitely more human that robots could ever be. And I guess that boils down again to whether or not something has a soul, which I don't believe robots ever could. Humans create robots, and humans can never create a soul.

Humans also create other humans, which, it can be argued, are meat machines. Recall that machines have been programmed with very convinging artificial intelligence and learning programs in the past... take Data, from star trek. If a machine was complex enough, something like him could be the result. If so programmed, machines can compose in the style of Bach and interact with their environments, and most importantly, learn.

If a robot asked you to consider it real, and you knew it had not been programmed to do so, what would you think?

Id like to be known by several people to be as someone special. Someone special who will help them out at anytime or be their best friend, thats my reason to exist, at least as far as I can tell xD

I dont really care for that though. The other questions of course. You are who you are, if you exist you exsist like everybody else, no need to get into it too much.

[ I probably missed something here, didnt I? Oh well ]