“You cannot prove that you exist or that you’re conscious,” they chatter,
blanking out the fact that proof presupposes existence, consciousness and a
complex chain of knowledge: the existence of something to know, of a
consciousness able to know it, and of a knowledge that has learned to
distinguish between such concepts as the proved and the unproved.
When a savage who has not learned to speak declares that existence must be
proved, he is asking you to prove it by means of non-existence—when he
declares that your consciousness must be proved, he is asking you to prove it
by means of unconsciousness—he is asking you to step into a void outside of
existence and consciousness to give him proof of both—he is asking you to
become a zero gaining knowledge about a zero.
When he declares that an axiom is a matter of arbitrary choice and he doesn’t
choose to accept the axiom that he exists, he blanks out the fact that he has
accepted it by uttering that sentence, that the only way to reject it is to
shut one’s mouth, expound no theories and die.