“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.