Justification for Foundational Belief

[Perhaps]

Fair enough, you would like an in depth description of my understanding of my claims. Here we go...

I'll first dispense with the "existence exists" claim, which will in some way mirror my reply to the other. What one means by "exists" is pivotal, and imo, damning. Take for example the notion of a local reality, that underneath the observations of quantum mechanical experiments, there is an underlying reality that is "causing" these events. (I'm being sloppy to avoid research, but I can fully support my point here.) However, we know from experiments concerning Bell's inequalities, that this view is likely false. So if this notion of an "underlying reality" is what one means by "exists," then not only are they possibly wrong, but there is good objective evidence that they likely are wrong.

What I mean by exists is the purest form of the concept and nothing more. To exist is to be. You may make assumptive leaps from this statement such as the need for a location to 'be' in, or a time in which to 'be'. But I simply mean to be.

Moreover, if we are mere ideas in the mind of God, to suggest that we are still "existing" in some sense would have to be viewed as rank equivocation of the meaning of the term "exists". More than that, I would argue that our notions of necessity are all based on our beliefs about the nature of our experience; if that experience is not what it seems, all notions of necessity and entailment based on them are essentially invalid. This guts the core of your claim. If what we are claiming is that, "existence exists, which I know because of what I know about existence," your claim has become circular and vacuous.

Usually when I speak, I mean what I say. Thus, if I made the claim that the self-evident truth is objective it would then follow that it requires no subjective experience to bring it to be or to validate itself. Existence exists not because I know it does, but simply because there is something. You've made the mistake earlier of using a horrible analogy ("the opposite of zero is not infinity"); the opposite of zero (although that is very awkwardly worded) is simply non-zero or the absence of zero. Similarly, the opposite of nothing isn't infinity or 'everything', but rather it is merely non-nothing (usually referred to as something).

The second, regarding consciousness, and a "conscious thought existing", again, is a devil in the details problem. I would say that, "perhaps" consciousness and conscious thought exists, but only certain kinds of processes which we loosely refer to by the term consciousness exist, and, ceterus paribus, the properties those processes have form an overlapping but not proper subset of those properties which many — and most who argue as you do — claim that the thing known as consciousness possesses. In sum, what you mean by "consciousness" and what I, as an eliminative materialist, term consciousness, are likely two entirely different creatures; yours, I suspect, possessing magical, supernatural properties which I would doubt, if not outright deny. Recently in a discussion of free will, when asked by one of the participants with which I was at odds, asked me if I denied the existence of consciousness, and upon starting my explanation of my view, he disingenuously paraphrased me as denying that consciousness exists. I don't know from this rather brief exchange what your meaning is, but judging on the odds of prior experience, I likely suspect that, while consciousness exists, that thing which you think consciousness is does not itself exist. So dependent on what you mean by "consciousness exists"(*) in the particular, your statement could range from true, but unremarkable, to wildly and unsupportably false. It all depends on specifically what you think "consciousness" is.

By conscious I meant simply something ascribed as a property of thought. More specifically, Dubito, ergo cogito, ergo sum. I cannot assert the existence of an 'I', merely the existence of a doubt (categorized earlier as a conscious thought).