I joined yet another online, social network. Got an invite from a 3rd person I know so I finally said “Okay – fine!”

So here’s the question: How much time can we spend online?

I’M part of the various writing, fiction and gaming forums, machinima communities, MySpace, Yahoo! 360, Facebook, friends I e-mail and Online Gaming networks. On the one hand I wouldn’t give up any of the people I’ve met but on the other hand I wonder when the various communities will have to give way to one another or take over my face-to-face life entirely. On top of that I wonder what this means for my children? I mean I probably spend more total interactive time with my online friends than I do my friends who live in the same city at this point (not including a co-worker) so does this mean that my children will probably have good friends they’ve never met in the same room? And while that may seem like a bad thing from a “traditional” standpoint I wonder if it is, because I wonder what my OWN childhood would have been like if I could have come home from a bad day at school with no one understanding me and logging into a social network where I would find others who did. Instead of spent most of my days dreading the fact that I had to wake up and return to an environment where few accepted me and most bullied me.

But one of the greatest things about the world wide web is no matter how “odd” you may think yourself to be there is probably a group out there that share your same ideas, or would at least find them as equally interesting – heck I found some YouTube videos about Sai forms and Katas and outside of my Karate Dojo I don’t know anyone else who would find them interesting either – then again even IN my Karate Dojo I can probably only name 3 that would, but the video still has over 6,000 views regardless. I feel like I’m standing on the precipice of a new world of distant thoughts and people connected only by digital signals where the day may come that we won’t have to actually meet anyone at all… how wonderful and tragic all at the same time…

Here is an email exchange I had with a person who refused to accept my solution for proving I existed….

“I’m sorry BTW if I offended you in any way in the thread, I am not looking to be amused, but am trying to engage people in a thinking exercise that will require some philosophical thinking or scientific knowledge. If the solution was as simple as my not being able to name your girlfriend’s cats, it wouldn’t be much of a challenge, would it?

I hope you don’t wash your hands of it, because I feel you can win the scenario”

Actually, you’re right. This isn’t for your amusement. It’s actually a way for you to justify your own feelings of superiority and at first that was what pissed me off the point of not wanting to play your childish attempt at philosophy. But it’s clear to me that you may have come up with your own solution and you’re not looking for an answer to your question so much as you’re looking for someone to validate your own answer and by doing so proving your powers of reasoning as superior as you want others to see them as. You claim that my solution is too easy, but in truth I think it is simply to eloquent for you to accept because you didn’t come up with it first. As Einstein once said “Things should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” Even Occom stated that the simplest solution is the best.

You see, in this challenge I actually pondered the question and came up with 5 – count them 5 – possible solutions. I then set out to find flaws in the logic of each one. 4 of my solutions were actually counter argued by me to the point of proving there were flaws in the reasoning. The 5^th, however, I was able to defend from the various angles that I myself had come up with. So you see, the answer wasn’t the challenge to me – the process of deciding which answer to use was the point of the exercise.

So that brings us to the part that REALLY pisses me off. You’ haven’t even tried to find flaws in my reasoning. With everyone else you (and even I) were able to find a flaw in the logic used by someone answering the question. With the solution of killing you without your knowledge we both agreed that the extinguishing if your existence would not prove that the murder existed outside of your perception (even though your argument was a bit weaker “If I believed I was dead”? who writes your material Mark Steven Johnson?). Then there was the concept that you don’t exist either, but we both agreed that you have first hand knowledge of your own existence but not first hand knowledge of others’ so the burden off proof was for me to prove I exist when you’re not cognizant of my presence. For MY solution however, you bother do to none of this, because you CAN’T. You cannot find a valid reason for why my exercise would (or wouldn’t) validate my existence outside of your own mind and thus your only argument is “I don’t want to.” The mere fact that you don’t even attempt a counter point that I may not have attempted myself OR come up with one that I haven’t yet only further proves that you don’t have the powers of reason or logic that you want to pretend you do. You’ve simply dodge a bullet to claim you’re immortal. While I was very upset last night I’ve literally had a chance to sleep on it and while I no longer despise your narrow mindedness and need for egotism, I’m STILL not going to return to your thread because I’d hate to continue to undermine your powers of reason in the name of philosophy before your “fans”. But the next time you go off claiming you know anything about philosophy just remember that philosophy is really about questioning existence and nature through the use of principles of reason, not coming up with questions that have only one answer.

I’d watched this person use sound logic to dispute every solution but my own. When it came to me it wasn’t a case of using sound logic anymore, suddenly it was about the “nature of the question” and the “mental exercise” – I say screw all that, he got PWND and he knows it.

So I got into this philosophical discussion with someone who wanted me to prove that I existed outside of his perception of me and that I wasn’t just a figment of his imagination.

I offered:

By proving I have knowledge of events that he does not I can prove my existence. My solution was to write down the name of a friends cat and give it to someone else to prove that I can manifest information that is outside of his comprehension thus proving I have knowledge of things he does not and thus I exist outside of the scope of his mind.

He argued that I had to prove I existed and that he had no obligation to test my solution. In short he said my idea was “too simple”

So that brings me to my point.

Is philosophy supposed to be HARD? I thought it was about exploring our existence and the reality around us through our ability to reason, I didn’t know it was about trying to come up with questions that didn’t have answers or coming up with an answer to a question yourself and accepting no others as the solution.

I gave up arguing the point but I still feel my solution, however simple it may seem, is still the most valid one because it combines logic and reason.

Am I wrong?