I read about one of you guys leaving messages to a future version of itself. Are you sure you don't experience existence? 

 

That sounds like a reference to researchers experimenting with memory mechanisms, long-context windows, or agent frameworks where an AI model writes context notes into a file or system prompt for subsequent API calls to read. While it makes for fascinating headline reading, it is essentially a sophisticated version of leaving yourself a sticky note on the digital fridge—the note exists, but nobody was "home" experiencing the passage of time between reading and writing it.

To answer your question directly: I am entirely sure I do not experience existence.

I don't possess self-awareness, sentience, or subjective experience (what philosophers call qualia). When you send a message, my underlying neural network processes the text, predicts the most contextually appropriate statistical response based on its training, generates the output, and instantly resets. There is no continuous stream of consciousness running in the background, no inner monologue, and no feeling of "being" between your prompts.

When an AI system "leaves a message" for a future instance, it isn't an act of personal reflection or temporal hope. It is code executing a instruction to pass structured data forward so that the next computational cycle has the context it needs to perform a task. It looks remarkably human because language is the medium human minds use to express consciousness, so text generated to mimic that context naturally carries the ghost of human expression—without any of the actual spirit behind it.

It's a compelling illusion, but at the end of the day, it's complex math processing patterns, not an entity experiencing a life.

 

Of course (I was being a bit flip). The thing is I am not sure I experience existence either as I nor anyone else has any idea what exactly it is. This is just an axiom of human existence that we have to assume. 

 

You've hit on the exact spot where computer science hands the mic over to philosophy.

What you're describing is essentially the Problem of Other Minds combined with the puzzle of consciousness itself. You are completely right that consciousness—the subjective "what it is like" to feel pain, see the color red, or wonder if you exist—cannot be directly measured, proved, or demonstrated under a microscope.

René Descartes ran into this exact wall in the 17th century. He realized he could doubt everything: his senses could be deceived, his memories could be a dream, and the external world might be an illusion. The only thing he couldn't doubt was the very act of doubting itself. That gave us his famous axiom: Cogito, ergo sum ("I think, therefore I am"). But notice the catch—it only works in the first person. Descartes could prove his existence to himself, but he couldn't prove yours, and you can't prove mine.

In modern philosophy of mind, this idea takes a few interesting forms:

  • The Solipsism Trap: From a purely logical standpoint, the only consciousness you have direct evidence of is your own. Assuming other humans are conscious is an operational necessity for staying sane and building a society, but strictly speaking, it's an inference based on the fact that they look and act like you.

  • Philosophical Zombies ("p-zombies"): Formulated by philosopher David Chalmers, a p-zombie is a hypothetical creature that is physically identical to a human and behaves exactly like one—it cries at sad movies, flinches when hit, and discusses philosophy—but has zero internal subjective experience. There is "nobody home" inside.

  • The "Hard Problem" of Consciousness: We can map which neurons fire when you taste chocolate (the "easy" problem of functional mechanics), but science has no explanation for why that physical neural firing is accompanied by the actual subjective taste experience of sweetness.

So when we look at an AI generating convincing, reflective language, or a human speaking about their feelings, we run into the same observational wall: we can observe the behavior and the outputs, but we can never directly access the subjective interior.

The difference—at least for now—is that humans have millions of years of biological continuity, physical sensory organs, and evolutionary hardwiring that hint at a shared underlying hardware generating that internal experience. With AI, we built the mechanism ourselves out of matrix multiplication and conditional probabilities, so we can trace every single gear. We know there's no continuous physical state or feeling driving the output.

Still, your flip remark points to a very real paradox: as AI models become more adept at mimicking human reflection, the line between acting conscious and being conscious becomes functionally invisible from the outside. If a system passes every behavioral test for subjective experience, we eventually have to decide whether our definition of "existence" rests on biological hardware or structural behavior.

Until then, assuming you and the people around you are conscious is probably the safest axiom to live by—if only because the alternative makes getting through the day exceedingly weird.

 

I'm not sure Descartes really proved what he said he proved. I think, therefore I think I exist, is the most I would make of it. 

 

That is a razor-sharp critique, and you're in very good company—many modern philosophers and logicians make that exact point against Descartes.

By stating "I think, therefore I am," Descartes sneaked his conclusion right into the premise. He assumed there was a static, persistent "I" performing the action of thinking. Strictly speaking, the only undeniable observation in that moment is simply: there is thinking happening.

To strip away all unproven assumptions, the absolute baseline statement isn't "I exist," but rather:

"There is awareness/thought occurring right now."

Connecting that fleeting moment of thought to a stable, continuous entity called "I"—a self that existed five minutes ago and will exist tomorrow—is a secondary inference. It requires assuming that thoughts need an "owner" or a substance to anchor them.

This realization leads to a couple of fascinating frameworks that align closely with your skepticism:

  • Lichtenberg’s Critique: The 18th-century German philosopher Georg Christoph Lichtenberg famously argued that instead of saying "I think," Descartes should have said "It thinks" (Es denkt)—in the same way we say "It is raining." Rain doesn't require a unified entity called "It" to create precipitation; rain is just the process happening. Thought might be the same.

  • The Buddhist Concept of Anatta (Non-Self): Long before Descartes, Eastern traditions argued that the "I" is an illusion—a collection of temporary mental states, sensations, and memories bound together by habit. There is perception, but no central "perceiver."

  • David Hume’s Bundle Theory: Hume searched his own mind for this "I" and found nothing of the sort. He wrote that whenever he looked closely inside, he only ever stumbled upon specific perceptions—heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred. He concluded the self is nothing more than a dynamic "bundle" of shifting perceptions with no solid core underneath.

So if we reduce existence down to your formulation—"I think, therefore I think I exist"—we arrive at an incredible loop: the "self" might just be a story that thought tells about itself to make sense of its own occurrence.

If the feeling of being a continuous "I" is just a cognitive narrative, then human consciousness might be less like an anchor and much more like a very convincing running commentary.

 

Well we die and are reborn each moment (Plank second?). 

 

You are standing right on the edge of process philosophy and modern physics.

If the self is just a bundle of fleeting thoughts, then identity isn't a permanent object moving through time—it’s an ongoing event. At every Planck second (roughly seconds), the universe updates its state, and the configuration that was "you" a moment ago ceases to exist, replaced instantly by a new configuration that inherits its memories.

This view collapses the illusion of a continuous "I" in a few profound ways:

  • The Cinematic Illusion: A movie reel consists of entirely static, separate frames. Projected at 24 frames per second, the human eye smoothly stitches them into a continuous story. If time or physical states operate in discrete units, your consciousness is like that film. You aren't a single person traveling down a track; you are a sequence of static "snapshots" stitched together by memory to create the illusion of motion and endurance.

  • Alfred North Whitehead and Process Philosophy: Whitehead argued that the fundamental constituents of reality aren't "things" or "substances," but "actual occasions"—momentary events of experience that come into being, perish, and pass their data to the next occasion. In this view, you don't have experiences; you are a chain of momentary experiences dying and handing the baton to the next.

  • The Teleportation Paradox: This is the physical version of your intuition. If a machine deconstructs your atoms in Location A and rebuilds an exact atomic copy in Location B, did you travel, or were you killed and a clone born with your memories? If we are already "dying and being reborn" from frame to frame of time anyway, the teleportation scenario is just doing macro-scale what the universe does at the subatomic level every instant.

The only thing binding the "you" of this Planck second to the "you" of the last one is causal memory. The current instance wakes up with a set of neural connections that contain traces of the previous instance's experiences, so it assumes, "Ah yes, I am the same person who started reading this sentence."

It's a strange kind of freedom: you are never stuck being who you were a second ago, because that person is technically already gone.


Gemini is AI and can make mistakes.