Danoff
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Cogito Ergo Sum (I think therefore I exist)
Descartes postulated this phrase as he asked some very fundamental metaphysical questions about the nature of knowledge and reality.
What do you know about your existence? You know that you get up every morning and go to work/school. You know that youre sitting in front of a computer reading this. You might consider this to be truth absolute knowledge. But lets get a little more fundamental. All of your perceptions are in your head. The light signals gathered by your eyes are passed into your brain which reconstructs what it thinks the image should look like but it all occurs in your brain. When you bump into something you feel it only because electrical impulses are sent to your brain which interprets them. When you taste something it isnt necessarily that the thing tastes a certain way its that your brain interprets signals a certain way.
Lets say for example that what you think is blue, is actually what everyone else calls red. How would you not know that this is what is happening right now? You dont call it red, because nobody else calls it red they call that color blue but the color you think of in your head as blue isnt necessarily the color they think of as blue. It amounts to your brain interpreting light frequency and you experience the same light frequency as someone else but your brain may interpret it differently than theirs does.
Why does this matter? Why does it make a difference that your perception of the entire world occurs in your mind? Because your mind can be tricked.
Lets say you eat some special mushrooms that cause your brain to function a little differently. All of the sudden you see things where nobody else sees them. You would have sworn that you saw Martha Stewarts head on a horse, but nobody else saw it. A simple mushroom can totally alter your perception of reality.
When you sleep, you encounter a dream reality that doesnt exist anywhere but in your head. What if the world you think of as real isnt any more real than a dream? Im starting to sound like the movie The Matrix and its because that movie tackles the very same metaphysical question Im posing. How do you know what is real and what is not? If you believe in God, or the Devil, how do you know that what you think is reality isnt just some vision that either of these entities is making you see? How do you know it isnt the machines tricking you into believing that a virtual reality is real?
So what do you know?
If you cant trust your senses, you have to accept that the entire world could be in your mind. You have to accept that you may not be human. You may not have arms and legs, you may be an artificially intelligent computer program or (to borrow a classical example) a brain in a vat of liquid hooked up to a computer that feeds you the reality you think of as real.
So not only do you know nothing of your environment, you know nothing of your own existence. Perhaps you dont exist at all! Perhaps youre a figment of someone elses imagination, ready to blink of our existence as soon as they think of something else. Well come back to that.
So weve thrown out the senses, those are easy to trick. Can we trust science? No. How can we trust science? We dont even know if atoms exist, let alone how they behave. We dont know anything of the reality external to our existence, so we cant trust that science is real. Can we trust mathematics? No. What if in the reality that we exist in (but cannot perceive) 1+1=3. Anytime anyone adds two things together a third one appears. Thats hard to imagine but we dont know that is isnt the case because we dont know if we can even perceive reality. Can we trust logic? If A therefore B, A, therefore B? Nope. We can toss logic out with mathematics. Logic could be flipped on its ear and we wouldnt even know it.
So what do we know? Nothing?
We know something. We know that we think. Something creates my thoughts I may not understand how they are created or even my own nature, but something creates them. Whatever that thing is that creates my thoughts, I can define it to be me and so I exist. I know that I exist as the creator of my thoughts.
I know something else too. I know what my thoughts are what things I have experienced. Even if it was all in my head, I know that I perceived these things. I cant take much from that except the fact that nothing in my perception has led me to believe that the world is imaginary. I have no reason to question reality other than that it is logically possible for everything I have experienced to be false.
Without any evidence to believe that reality is false, why should think that it is so? I can think that it is possible without thinking that it is so. That allows me to go back to accepting logic and mathematics. Until I have some reason to think that those are incorrect, I will go on assuming that they are even though I know it may not be so.
But science is something one step removed. With science, it may not even be so if I accept reality as it is presented to me. Something in reality would have to fundamentally change to invalidate mathematics or logic. But science could be proven wrong at any moment because it is based on flawed logical reasoning.
But accepting science is very much like choosing to accept the reality with which I am presented. Science is based on our evidence to date. Just like we choose to accept reality until we are presented with a reason not to, so can we accept science until we are presented with a reason not to. When coping with reality, we used our experiences and perceptions to date and decided to go with our best guess of what the truth was. The same happens with science. Scientists use all of the evidence and observations to date and go with their best guess of what the truth is.
But while we have no reason to think that reality, mathematics, or even accepted science is false because we have no evidence to support such a claim we cannot logically conclude that it is truth. The possibility always exists that we are a brain in a vat of goo, experiencing our world as presented to us by a masterful computer.
A religious person might read this and think that they have just as much reason to accept a god as to accept science because they have personal evidence that a god is real and no evidence to the contrary. I submit that that much is true. You have no evidence that some god is not real you can even view things science cannot explain (and your own personal experiences) as evidence that there is a god. So in absence of evidence to the contrary, you can logically accept that there is likely a god. But you cannot know that there is a god any more than I know that science is real because you cannot truly know anything about your environment or the nature of your experiences. You could be a brain in a vat.
But lets take this a step further. Lets assume that you have evidence to support the existence of a supreme being (which you may I do not). You have perceived certain things about this being perhaps that it seems to be benevolent. Perhaps that it is a comfort or guiding force. Perhaps it even speaks to you and says that it is God from the bible. In the absence of evidence to the contrary you could believe then that this God was the God of the bible right? If it did not tell you this last bit then you have no basis to assume that it is of the bible since there are likely countless religions that fit the description of your experience, and there exists the possibility that this is a god from a religion that man knows nothing of.
But lets say that this God did tell you that he was the God of the bible. Now youre in a tough spot. The bible, on its face, appears to have zero credibility. Theres the plot holes, the contradictions with science and scientific observations things like the planets orbiting the sun things like the earth not being round lack of any evidence of a worldwide flood and so-on. Theres the fact that the bible is written by man and sounds like an answer to all of mans questions which immediately makes it seem contrived.
So now, for the first time in this conversation, you have evidence to support one side and evidence to support another. This is a unique spot. Lets examine the evidence.
On the one hand you have humanitys scientists claiming one thing.
You have the bible shooting its credibility in the foot by claiming things to the contrary.
You have the bible being inconsistent with itself, people showing up out of nowhere.
You have the bibles contrivedness, answering all of the questions that man would naturally want answered.
And you have the voice in your head, which claims otherwise.
Now if there were no evidence that the bible was false, you could in accept the voice in your head as telling the truth (all the while knowing that you might not be hearing anything because you could be a brain in a vat). You could accept it because you have no evidence to the contrary. But in this case you have a substantial quantity of evidence to the contrary. The only logical conclusion then is that you cannot accept what the voice in your head tells you even if it tells you it God and the bible is correct. It could be lying, and you have evidence to support that possibility.
Regardless of all of this no one can claim that they know anything that is true other than that they exist. Everything beyond that is accepted because of lack of counter evidence.
Edit:
There are a few quetions I'm asking here:
1) Does anyone have any metaphysical arguments that go against what I've written?
2) For Religious people. Can you:
- Admit that you cannot be certain God exists because you could be a brain in a vat and all of your experiences could be deception?
- Admit that if your firsthand experiences with God do not include him telling you that he is the God of the bible, that you don't know who's God you worship?
- Admit that you must question the voices in your head, even if they say they are the God of the bible?
Descartes postulated this phrase as he asked some very fundamental metaphysical questions about the nature of knowledge and reality.
What do you know about your existence? You know that you get up every morning and go to work/school. You know that youre sitting in front of a computer reading this. You might consider this to be truth absolute knowledge. But lets get a little more fundamental. All of your perceptions are in your head. The light signals gathered by your eyes are passed into your brain which reconstructs what it thinks the image should look like but it all occurs in your brain. When you bump into something you feel it only because electrical impulses are sent to your brain which interprets them. When you taste something it isnt necessarily that the thing tastes a certain way its that your brain interprets signals a certain way.
Lets say for example that what you think is blue, is actually what everyone else calls red. How would you not know that this is what is happening right now? You dont call it red, because nobody else calls it red they call that color blue but the color you think of in your head as blue isnt necessarily the color they think of as blue. It amounts to your brain interpreting light frequency and you experience the same light frequency as someone else but your brain may interpret it differently than theirs does.
Why does this matter? Why does it make a difference that your perception of the entire world occurs in your mind? Because your mind can be tricked.
Lets say you eat some special mushrooms that cause your brain to function a little differently. All of the sudden you see things where nobody else sees them. You would have sworn that you saw Martha Stewarts head on a horse, but nobody else saw it. A simple mushroom can totally alter your perception of reality.
When you sleep, you encounter a dream reality that doesnt exist anywhere but in your head. What if the world you think of as real isnt any more real than a dream? Im starting to sound like the movie The Matrix and its because that movie tackles the very same metaphysical question Im posing. How do you know what is real and what is not? If you believe in God, or the Devil, how do you know that what you think is reality isnt just some vision that either of these entities is making you see? How do you know it isnt the machines tricking you into believing that a virtual reality is real?
So what do you know?
If you cant trust your senses, you have to accept that the entire world could be in your mind. You have to accept that you may not be human. You may not have arms and legs, you may be an artificially intelligent computer program or (to borrow a classical example) a brain in a vat of liquid hooked up to a computer that feeds you the reality you think of as real.
So not only do you know nothing of your environment, you know nothing of your own existence. Perhaps you dont exist at all! Perhaps youre a figment of someone elses imagination, ready to blink of our existence as soon as they think of something else. Well come back to that.
So weve thrown out the senses, those are easy to trick. Can we trust science? No. How can we trust science? We dont even know if atoms exist, let alone how they behave. We dont know anything of the reality external to our existence, so we cant trust that science is real. Can we trust mathematics? No. What if in the reality that we exist in (but cannot perceive) 1+1=3. Anytime anyone adds two things together a third one appears. Thats hard to imagine but we dont know that is isnt the case because we dont know if we can even perceive reality. Can we trust logic? If A therefore B, A, therefore B? Nope. We can toss logic out with mathematics. Logic could be flipped on its ear and we wouldnt even know it.
So what do we know? Nothing?
We know something. We know that we think. Something creates my thoughts I may not understand how they are created or even my own nature, but something creates them. Whatever that thing is that creates my thoughts, I can define it to be me and so I exist. I know that I exist as the creator of my thoughts.
I know something else too. I know what my thoughts are what things I have experienced. Even if it was all in my head, I know that I perceived these things. I cant take much from that except the fact that nothing in my perception has led me to believe that the world is imaginary. I have no reason to question reality other than that it is logically possible for everything I have experienced to be false.
Without any evidence to believe that reality is false, why should think that it is so? I can think that it is possible without thinking that it is so. That allows me to go back to accepting logic and mathematics. Until I have some reason to think that those are incorrect, I will go on assuming that they are even though I know it may not be so.
But science is something one step removed. With science, it may not even be so if I accept reality as it is presented to me. Something in reality would have to fundamentally change to invalidate mathematics or logic. But science could be proven wrong at any moment because it is based on flawed logical reasoning.
But accepting science is very much like choosing to accept the reality with which I am presented. Science is based on our evidence to date. Just like we choose to accept reality until we are presented with a reason not to, so can we accept science until we are presented with a reason not to. When coping with reality, we used our experiences and perceptions to date and decided to go with our best guess of what the truth was. The same happens with science. Scientists use all of the evidence and observations to date and go with their best guess of what the truth is.
But while we have no reason to think that reality, mathematics, or even accepted science is false because we have no evidence to support such a claim we cannot logically conclude that it is truth. The possibility always exists that we are a brain in a vat of goo, experiencing our world as presented to us by a masterful computer.
A religious person might read this and think that they have just as much reason to accept a god as to accept science because they have personal evidence that a god is real and no evidence to the contrary. I submit that that much is true. You have no evidence that some god is not real you can even view things science cannot explain (and your own personal experiences) as evidence that there is a god. So in absence of evidence to the contrary, you can logically accept that there is likely a god. But you cannot know that there is a god any more than I know that science is real because you cannot truly know anything about your environment or the nature of your experiences. You could be a brain in a vat.
But lets take this a step further. Lets assume that you have evidence to support the existence of a supreme being (which you may I do not). You have perceived certain things about this being perhaps that it seems to be benevolent. Perhaps that it is a comfort or guiding force. Perhaps it even speaks to you and says that it is God from the bible. In the absence of evidence to the contrary you could believe then that this God was the God of the bible right? If it did not tell you this last bit then you have no basis to assume that it is of the bible since there are likely countless religions that fit the description of your experience, and there exists the possibility that this is a god from a religion that man knows nothing of.
But lets say that this God did tell you that he was the God of the bible. Now youre in a tough spot. The bible, on its face, appears to have zero credibility. Theres the plot holes, the contradictions with science and scientific observations things like the planets orbiting the sun things like the earth not being round lack of any evidence of a worldwide flood and so-on. Theres the fact that the bible is written by man and sounds like an answer to all of mans questions which immediately makes it seem contrived.
So now, for the first time in this conversation, you have evidence to support one side and evidence to support another. This is a unique spot. Lets examine the evidence.
On the one hand you have humanitys scientists claiming one thing.
You have the bible shooting its credibility in the foot by claiming things to the contrary.
You have the bible being inconsistent with itself, people showing up out of nowhere.
You have the bibles contrivedness, answering all of the questions that man would naturally want answered.
And you have the voice in your head, which claims otherwise.
Now if there were no evidence that the bible was false, you could in accept the voice in your head as telling the truth (all the while knowing that you might not be hearing anything because you could be a brain in a vat). You could accept it because you have no evidence to the contrary. But in this case you have a substantial quantity of evidence to the contrary. The only logical conclusion then is that you cannot accept what the voice in your head tells you even if it tells you it God and the bible is correct. It could be lying, and you have evidence to support that possibility.
Regardless of all of this no one can claim that they know anything that is true other than that they exist. Everything beyond that is accepted because of lack of counter evidence.
Edit:
There are a few quetions I'm asking here:
1) Does anyone have any metaphysical arguments that go against what I've written?
2) For Religious people. Can you:
- Admit that you cannot be certain God exists because you could be a brain in a vat and all of your experiences could be deception?
- Admit that if your firsthand experiences with God do not include him telling you that he is the God of the bible, that you don't know who's God you worship?
- Admit that you must question the voices in your head, even if they say they are the God of the bible?
Sorry, I was taking "Ergo" as "I" ignoring the "sum" part, this would make "ego" correct.
