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"
Saturday, November 15, 2014
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