Alright, so I think it's time to continue that series I was working on (if not finish it... maybe not. this isn't an easy topic to elaborate on). I'm actually [insert excuse here] so I'm very tired and I might go to bed soon.

Give me a few minutes -- I'm gonna read up on my prior posts related to this, so I know where we left off. It's been a while.

...

Oh btw -- I really miss seasons.

Ok. It looks like I got stopped on point 3 of my outline on June 2, 2014. To save you some time, here are the bullets:

1. Elaborate on previous post
2. Establish existence of truth
3. Establish my own ability to observe reality
4. Examine truths which are substantially evidenced by observation alone
5. Finalize foundation for worldview; draft and summarize.

I think that I established that "something" is true. And the truth I established was basically just that "something". That's it. "Something" is all there is that we can know to be true at the bottom. I didn't say it in those words, but that was the idea I was trying to lead you to. I'll clarify this a little bit more later.

I then left off with the question, how do we know that 1+1=2 and not 1+1=[arbitrary]?

I took a long break for [excuse], but during the break I read some Cicero. In Cicero's letter to his son, he talked about one of his favorite philosophers, whose name I forget, who wrote a great series and posed some great questions, and claimed to be laying out [I think it was 3] points, but never actually wrote the [3rd] point. Cicero spent a lot of time talking about why that 3rd point was omitted, and it made me realize that I really ought to finish this before I die.

Ok. So at the very bottom, where we just know that things are happening, but we have no idea how to interpret it, we run into a paradox. I proposed that something ought to have intrinsic value, and that perhaps we should just "pick" something, but the more I thought about this, the more I realized it was a bad idea. Even if you choose "human life", you run into gray areas, such as if a person is suffering, or has inferior genes etc.. and ultimately, if you're a philosophical purist, you have disappointingly left unanswered the question, "Why choose that?".

But then even more basic than that is the issue, "why do we trust our senses enough to know that we are even interpreting logic correctly?", and the first answer that comes to mind is "Because they're all we have.". This is a frustrating and lazy answer, really. I propose that we can do better. The issue with that, though, is that any answer we come up with operates on this fundamental assumption: that is that we are coherent enough to have generated an answer at all -- one that even addresses the question, or anything, if it even is an answer and not something else. That is the paradox, how can you know anything? Well, you don't know, and if you did, then how would you know that that knowledge was something you can know? You need an answer that can justify itself. The answer must be circular.

I'm here, trying to figure this out, aren't I? Or am I? You might say, well, we know that the truth is "something", and so that must give us some kind of foundation to build on, right? Well, it would, except that it's just "something", and it really isn't "anything".

So I was at a dead end, and I re-looked at my process. Perhaps I was approaching this wrong. Perhaps I was doing this out of order.... And long story short I came to what I think is a viable explanation of existence, not from a "scientific" perspective, since science is nothing if we cannot reliably observe that we exist and will continue to exist, and that our memories of past existence are legitimate; the explanation must be philosophical.

Step 3 is impossible. Step 4 relies on steps 2 and 3. Therefore, we have to skip to step 5. I cannot establish my own ability to observe reality, so I have to look for something else to establish it for me. First, I attempt to interpret my physical senses, and I find that nothing is self evident except that "something."

"Something"....

The answer is that I need a reliable source. If I am just brief explosion of vibrating energy, then my perceptions are invalid. I have to start with a presupposition. However, giving something "intrinsic value" does not answer the question of "why know that I exist?". It only answers, "what do I do about it?".

So then, I must formulate a presupposition which is firm enough to provide a basis for observable self-evidence. That is the "why?" for whichever model of presupposition is developed here; my goal is not to choose from among the presuppositions presented me by the world around me, but to generate one on my own -- which is arguably impossible to do without some bias towards a certain perspective, but I think that I have reason to believe that what I've invented is not only true, but may have invented me before I invented it.

Should I choose to simply say that my observations are reliable, and use that as my presupposition, then I run into an issue: Should I choose to believe that only the material exists, then I am only a material, and my senses are not only decidedly unreliable, but also bear an extremely high likelihood of having been completely misinterpreted by me. My senses must be completely false. The universe is huge and complex; given an infinite number of possibilities, the likelihood of my "consciousness" being capable of understanding its surroundings, coexisting in near time and near space with a similar consciousness, and also interpreting those things correctly, is extremely small. It is staggeringly more likely that I am imagining the existence of other consciousnesses, and that I am one of several odd arrangements of energy densities in a cloud, each occurring multiple infinities of time apart from one another. I'll disappear like I appeared, and there might never be, or have been, another consciousness apart from me. Back to earth, the implication of this is that I have no responsibilities (moral or otherwise), or that if I say that I have responsibilities, then I'm just playing along with my imagination world (the one where I imagine that I have responsibilities), and I really much more likely don't have responsibilities.

Should I choose, however, to believe that something immaterial exists -- logic (here it comes: "Logos"), outside of the dimension and time-space wherein this energy swishes and collides with itself, (if "energy" is even adequate to describe it,) then that Logos must at least know what's going on here.

Ok, so there was that leap I was talking about before, from atheism to agnosticism. We finished step 5 -- the next, most reasonable step must be 3... right?

I thought about this with a silly amount of depth during highschool. I really didn't come up with a satisfactory articulation of it until relatively recently, but now I think that in highschool I really did take the Descartes rout, and I held onto enough of my "assumed" worldview to allow myself to be busy in the physical world without breaking too many customs.

Looks like I'm not finishing today after all.

"Now I'm just a candle trying to stay lit in this windy night"

Alright guys. Here's a story I wrote. I'm gonna fine tune it later, but I don't want to forget my initial perspective on a particular topic. When I learn more about it, I might lean one way or another, but this story has some back story that I don't really want to write outright atm. I would prefer to just put it down as an analogy or a parable, sortof, to get my thoughts in writing.


OK. So there's this baker, named Yoshi. He's a dark-skinned guy from the Mediterranean, he's an excellent cook, and he runs a successful business. So successful, in fact, that he has lots of time and resources to personally promote his business.

Yoshi's specialty product is a delicious muffin. It's the most satisfying muffin there is. In fact, it's so good, that many people who have tried it say that it is the only muffin that has ever satisfied them at all. They just didn't know what it felt like to be satisfied prior to eating this muffin.

Yoshi has spent most of his time giving away this muffin for free, and everyone who ate it got to know Yoshi and was invited to come in and have more of his delicious produce. He would walk around town with a cart full of free muffins, and many people were coming to know and love his muffins. Often people would take multiple muffins with them, and hand the muffins out to anyone who would take them, because the muffins were delicious. Yoshi's regular customers firmly believed that nobody should ever live their whole life without trying Yoshi's muffins.

There was a running debate among his regular constituents as to whether he was the Yoshi who gives muffins to you, or the Yoshi who you take muffins from. Some people who didn't know Yoshi well, or who had not met him in person but had still tasted the muffin, would occasionally argue about whether Yoshi was calling people to eat his muffins, or if people were going to get them. In some cases, the debate became so deeply founded that people began to wonder if Yoshi's customers were talking about two different Yoshis. Some of the people who had not met Yoshi, but had tasted his muffins, thought that Yoshi was only the Yoshi who gives, and everyone else was talking about the wrong Yoshi. Others thought that Yoshi was only the Yoshi who you take from, and everyone else was talking about the wrong Yoshi. It didn't help that occasionally someone would come along and claim to be the true Yoshi, sometimes with some success, but most often without, as only Yoshi's muffins were truly satisfying.

However, among these people who had tried Yoshi's muffins and argued about his character, they were ultimately talking about the same Yoshi, just from different perspectives. They would not even know how to have the debate if they had not first tried his muffins anyway.

Eventually, there came a small and ambitious group of people who took some of Yoshi's muffins and did not eat them. They hadn't tasted the muffins, but knew by the smell that these muffins were too good to be free. So, instead, they took the muffins down the road and around the block to another part of town, where they set up a small stand with the muffins on display. They called people over saying, "why trust some guy giving muffins away for free on the side of the road?! These muffins are legitimate -- just look at the price tag and see for yourself. They are more legitimate and more delicious than Yoshi's free produce" The muffins were so exorbitantly priced that nobody on earth could afford them. Nobody in the history or the future of humanity would ever be able to afford them.

When people came and asked, "how can I get one of those delicious looking muffins? The price tag seems so steep!" They would respond, "The price tag is not as bad as it seems. You can come work for us, and in addition to your pay you will earn muffin credits. Eventually, if you earn enough muffin credits, you can cash them in for one of these delicious muffins. If you work very hard, we will teach you the secret recipe, so that you can make them yourself. However, if you ever stop working, you will lose all your muffin credits and have to start over."

The people came and worked hard to earn muffin credits. Eventually, however, their bodies would fail them and they would stop working, and in that moment they would lose all their muffin credits. They continued working, however, more diligently and with more strength all the time, but nobody ever gained enough muffin credits to get a muffin. Eventually, the untasted muffins on display began to get moldy. At first, the con artists would cut the mold off, but after a while the muffins became so disfigured that they were unrecognizable and completely unappealing, so that the cons hid the muffins from sight.

The people who worked for those muffins wanted the secret recipe badly, and they were decieved into thinking that Yoshi's muffins were not satisfactory. So they worked and worked until they had no energy to even reach for Yoshi's muffins. All this deeply troubled Yoshi, but Yoshi's business was still successful, and he did not deviate from his business model, because it worked. Occasionally, someone from the false muffin stand would collapse and be completely unable to work, and Yoshi would rescue them and give them a taste of the good muffins. Many people who were tricked into thinking Yoshi's muffins were not satisfactory would refuse to taste his muffins at all, saying that they were working for a better muffin. Often, people would die without ever tasting Yoshi's delicious muffins.


It's not a perfect metaphor, obviously, but it touches on several issues that I'm handling right now. I'm gonna go have a muffin.

"We're praying for you."