My four-year-old daughter proudly decreed in the car tonight that she knows "almost everything." "Really?" "Yup," she replied confidently, "it's true." I envy her deeply, for alas I am not a very knowledgeable person; in fact I can think of only one thing that I know.
I know that I exist.
Everything else comes down to confidence and faith. I am confident that other people exist; I have faith that we share a common burden of doubts and aspirations. I am confident that scientific method delivers an improving set of principles with which to understand our reality; I have faith that there is a higher order to the Universe that that method will one day uncover. I am confident that my daughter will grow into a powerful young woman; I have faith that she will live that long.
The truth is, we know nothing. All we can ever do is evaluate what we observe and interpret that as best we can. Some things we will be reasonably sure of; these are the things in which we are confident. Others we must take at face value or with a level of uncertainty; these are the things in which we have faith. Overall our understanding and experience of the world is guided by what we have faith and confidence in, and they are in turn guided by what we understand and experience. And somewhere in there is that small kernel of inalienable truth: I think, therefore I am.
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Actually, strictly speaking, 'I think, therefore I am' is not unassailable.
ReplyDelete'Something is thinking, therefore something is' probably is.
The problem is this: Just because you have the sensation of something does not mean you have the thing. You 'thinking' contains certain qualia (sp?) which are the 'thinking' qualia. But it's by no means clear that 'you' are doing the thinking.
or something.
This is where it starts to get really messy, but I believe that you are right. We are inherently incapable of assessing the impact of an external influence beyond our ability to perceive it; hence we may simply be functioning as designed in "knowing" our own existence. By analogy, if I write a computer program and include the rule "You exist and I as your creator do not" then that is what the program will understand to be true. The program cannot see the underlying code as it performs its functions; neither can we.
ReplyDeleteBut within the subset of observations which are available to our internal processing systems, yes, we exist.