What can we be certain of? Not even our thoughts? Causing me anxiety.
I have come to the conclusion that we can be certain of nothing.
It appears that I'm posting on this forum.
I may not be and cannot be certain that I am.
Other would argue that I have 'good reason' to believe that I am (e.g. it appears that I am on this forum).
However, this reasoning may also be false, can never be confirmed .
Logic and Reasoning are surely as dismissive as they are supportive of what we 'believe' to be our existence?
This causes me anxiety. How can I live my life (if I even exist) doubting that every thought that enters my mind as being real and true.
It appears that I'm posting on this forum.
I may not be and cannot be certain that I am.
Other would argue that I have 'good reason' to believe that I am (e.g. it appears that I am on this forum).
However, this reasoning may also be false, can never be confirmed .
Logic and Reasoning are surely as dismissive as they are supportive of what we 'believe' to be our existence?
This causes me anxiety. How can I live my life (if I even exist) doubting that every thought that enters my mind as being real and true.
Comments (55)
I want you to envision that you are holding a steel hammer in your right hand, with your left hand resting on a table in front of you, palm down. Now imagine violently crushing the bones in your hand with said hammer...
How confident or un-confident are you that you can actually break your finger bones with a hammer?
How confident are you that having broken finger bones is a reliably painful or undesirable thing?
Do you feel the need to question the subjective value you retain by not harming yourself in such a way?
You may doubt the external "realness" of pain and pleasure, but you cannot deny the intrinsic value of pursuing one and avoiding the other.
The trick in philosophy with regards to an absence of absolute certainty is that we must instead compare premises and conclusions on a spectrum of weak to strong (some arguments and conclusions are much stronger and more reliable than others). If you break three fingers and a thumb on your left hand, how compelled would you be to smash the remaining finger for the sake of increasing certainty?
But how can conclusions be stronger or weaker when we cannot know the strengths or weaknesses of the arguments?
Strengths and weaknesses would also be uncertain?
You seem to be confident enough that you feel anxious. So... it would appear that some things are not in doubt after all.
Quoting Kranky
This is a game you are playing with yourself. You can go round and round with this nonsense and spin yourself into a tizzy.
So how is it best to stop?
We can test the strength of arguments through experimentation and empirical/observable evidence.
If I say that smashing your last finger with a hammer won't cause you harm, what could you use to cast doubt on the strength/truthiness of that claim?
Repeatable experiences reveal consistent relationships, and they're consistent enough that we can say the sun will rise (even though it might not) without a reasonable fret.
Quoting Kranky
Think about something else! Read a good book. Clean up the kitchen. Try to fix the broken alarm clock. Binge watch a series. Rake up the leaves. Go for a run. Do some yoga. Really, almost anything. There are a million things more productive than worrying about not being certain of anything.
There are actually many, many things you may be quite certain of, however you are probably too afraid to experiment scientifically and find out.
For example, if you step in front of a semi truck moving at 60 miles per hour you will most certainly be struck and killed. So what is it about the next life that you are so afraid of such that you are too afraid to put your skepticism to the acid test ?!
On a less sinister note, you can perform any action and be quite certain that you were the performer of that act. Descartes uses thinking for example. Cogito ergo sum. I think (an action) therefore I am (exist).
Descartes nailed the final nail (his action) into the coffin of extremist Skepticism.
You should review and refresh your readings (an act) about Descartes.
This is yet another proof that pain ultimately teaches us that we are actually alive.
@Bitter-Crank you have nicely articulated a corollary to Descartes.
You are the winner.
Aristotle would be proud. Ok now I want to know who is your own favorite philosopher?
So far @Bitter-Crank is the winner of this debate on purely philosophical grounds.
Suppose everything is uncertain, why would it cause you anxiety? Anxiety would mean you have interpreted something as certain within all the uncertainty that your life is. Why?
Reason suggests that, if everything is uncertain then what you've been learning about and interacting with throughout your life so far is that very uncertainty. So the only certainty you have is that you know this uncertainty. And if you know it, why be anxious?
Thank you, but winning a debate on philosophical grounds and 50¢ won't get me a cup of coffee.
What you experience is real to you, and that's what matters. Logic cannot tell you what is going to happen next with absolute certainty, all it does is relate some of your experiences with some others. But why is it that you long for absolute certainty? You say this causes you anxiety, and indeed do you not long for absolute certainty precisely because you fear death? Because you do not feel in control of your life, because you need to regain control, and logic and reason have helped you in the past but you see that they do not help you all the way.
Absolute certainty is the absence of change. But you can see change as the absolute root of existence, since the absence of change is the absence of existence. So in looking for absolute certainty you are looking for death. But you don't want death. So stop looking for absolute certainty.
Deep down it's not the lack of absolute certainty that makes you anxious, there is something else that makes you anxious, and you looked for a solution in absolute certainty, but you haven't found it, so you blame it on the lack of absolute certainty, but the root cause is something else.
There are a few things you can be certain of.
1. You can be certain that it appears to you that you are posting here; and since it could not appear to you that you are if you did not exist, because there would be no-one for it to appear to, you can be certain that you exist.
2. Since it appears to you that you live in a world that is stable and obeys fixed rules (e.g. the law of gravity, the fact that objects stay in their places and don't suddenly vanish or change into other objects), you can be certain that there is something real that is causing that appearance of stability.
3. You can be certain that whatever is real and is causing the appearance of stability is not you, because if it was you, you would know (this is why solipsism is false). So you can be certain that there is something real and external to you that causes your world to appear stable.
4. You cannot be certain what this external real thing is: a realist would say it was the objects around you, Kant would say it was noumena, Berkeley would say it was God. This is all interesting speculation, but it doesn't actually matter to you which of them is right, because you do not live among these underlying real objects, you live among the appearances. Since the appearances are always stable, it follows that whatever is real and is causing them must also be stable; so you can be certain that there is something real and stable underlying the appearances, even though you can't be certain what it is.
One more thing: if philosophy makes you unhappy, give it up and find something that makes you happy. A lot of philosophy gets done, but hardly any of it is of any importance to anyone but other philosophers; mostly it's just a game, the thinking person's Sudoku. If it makes you depressed or worried, give it up and find something that doesn't.
You can assume other people are real which helps.
Starting with 'I think therefore I am', if you treat self as just the conscious train of thought of your mind, you can say 'You think, therefore you are' as when you are in a conversation, it is clear that the other 'voice' is a separate train of thought and thus a separate individual by the definition I used. So on this basis I think you can dismiss solipsism.
[quote=Chuang Tzu]During our dreams we do not know we are dreaming. We may even dream of interpreting a dream. Only on waking do we know it was a dream. Only after the great awakening will we realize that this is the great dream. And yet fools think they are awake, presuming to know that they are rulers or herdsmen. How dense! You and Confucius are both dreaming, and I who say you are a dream am also a dream. Such is my tale. It will probably be called preposterous, but after ten thousand generations there may be a great sage who will be able to explain it, a trivial interval equivalent to the passage from morning to night.
________________________________________
To the most trivial actions, attach the devotion and mindfulness of a hundred monks. To matters of life and death, attach a sense of humor.[/quote]
One cannot, it seems, awaken oneself by indulging in anxiety, because that too is part of the dream. There is nothing for it but to take the dream as real in the meantime; feed the seeming body, care for the seeming friends, and worry about real reality when one awakens to it.
[quote= traditional]Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream,
Merrily merrily, merrily, merrily
Life is but a dream.[/quote]
My question:
If a car was heading towards me at great speed, I would, perhaps, conclude that this would kill me
This conclusion could be built upon the premis of me believing fast cars kill if hitting a pedestrian.
However even my reasoning for this (fast car = death) would not be certain. I could, in theory, be standing in front of the car believing there is no danger and a clever demon making it seem otherwise.
Is this possible?
Hopefully, something smarter than the speculator in you will take over command at that moment.
Or if your prefer the thought from a dead French guy:
"Philosophy triumphs easily over past evils and future evils; but present evils triumph over it.”
? François de La Rochefoucauld, Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
You think 'a fast car could kill if it hits you' is less real than a demon?
You should be afraid. Be very afraid.
Yes it's possible but it's not probable. It's massively unlikely.
You should be more afraid of speeding cars than you are worried about deceptive demons.
Where did it come from?
Quoting creativesoul
Big question, probably requiring more than one discipline to address.
It can be observed that solipsism, the Cartesian thinker, etcetera, all start with the experience of oneself as the beginning of knowledge because that experience is what is given to oneself by default. They equate the immediacy of that necessity with a datum as used in the context of their understanding of the world. The idea being that, if there is a map and a territory, this immediacy is the one location that can be declared impossible to get wrong.
The isolation being imagined is only possible becaue they transpose a use of language that can only arise in the intercourse of life into a conversation where it has no referent.
The absence becomes a pin in the map.
So... the idea itself comes from thinking about one's own thought/belief?
The possibility comes from our experience with ourselves as what cannot be gotten away from. We keep showing up in every movie. I am trying get some space between that experience and any particular "thought" or "belief" that refers to it.
Let me express my observation in a different way. If the skeptic is to question if they know what they are in the habit of thinking as known, why accept the proposition that their experience of themselves as a conscious person is information about their existence that is more "real" than something else? How did we learn to compare things? Is that also "given" in that primary experience of being stuck with ourselves?
Not that I can tell. Your results may vary.
In talking with others we can be certain we are speaking to separate logical entities but still cannot deduce anything about the environment and our location in relation to them.
What you have to explore is why you care about certainty to that extent. A psychologist or psychiatrist may be able to help you figure that out.
We can explore the immediate causes of your thoughts (see: research into neural networks and contemporary models of human cognition for more information)...
The problem is that won't satisfy you. It's not enough, for you, to know the immediate causes of your thoughts, you want to know the "why" of every cause, which leads back to the big bang (which cannot be explained from a causal/"why" perspective).
It seems like you're actually asking for a general justification for life rather than evidence or reasons for immediate thoughts and beliefs...
I just struggle with the concept that my thoughts may not be my thoughts. Not in the sense that they belong to someone else, but that what I appear to think, I'm in fact not.
Play some music in your computer.
Enable the voices you hear from computer with thoughts in your head.
Are you familiar with determinism?
Try to accept it as a worst case scenario, that your thoughts are pre-determined by ultimately external causes, but also try to realize that from our limited perspective (lacking access to ultimate truth as a starting point) our thoughts appear to be enough our own that we must still put effort into pursuing reason or evidence, lest we be coerced to our disadvantage. (We still want to have accurate beliefs, and that still requires ground-work).
It can be very useful to question the validity, strength, and origin of our own beliefs, but once they have been reinforced and made accurate enough, the utility of questioning them declines further and further.
So what appears to be my thoughts right now, are indeed my thoughts? No chance that a Demon making me interpret them wrong or misunderstand?
What if reason and evidence is mistook and false also? "
Wrong! But don't despair - Raymond Smullyan's experimental epistemologist will sort you out.
That's confusing haha! What's the moral of the story?
Just because we can conceive of alternative(s) for X does not make the alternative(s) true. E.g. That the Earth is pyramidal in shape, though this is an alternative to the Earth being roughly spherical, is not true on account of having been conceived.
Just because alternatives for X are conceivable does not then imply that there is reason to doubt X. E.g., the quantity of alternatives to “Earth’s shape is roughly spherical” is, I believe, on par with the quantity of geometric shapes conceivable. But since all of our experience is most consistently explained (i.e., explained in manners devoid of contradiction) by the Earth being spherical, it then is irrational to doubt that Earth is spherical because someone says “Hey, maybe it’s an octahedron … or may a donut.”
Otherwise, to doubt Earth’s shape via each and every alternative to its being spherical would—to be consistent in how one thinks—also require one’s doubting each and every conceivable alternative in turn ad infinitum. At which point some would say, “man, to hell with all this ad infinitum doubting; just suspend judgment as regards absolute certainty and just go with what is most evident and justified, always free to change one’s mind if the evidence ever changes.”
Quoting Kranky
Be that as it may, can you justify any alternative to the highlighted quote? If not, then your awareness of the thoughts you are aware of is not possible to rationally doubt … because you can’t justify any conceivable alternative by which to doubt it ... because you'd have to be aware of the alternative in order to use for the purpose of doubting, thereby proving the alternative wrong (again, because you hold presence as an awareness aware of this alternative).
Are you or are you not aware of thoughts?
And if one’s own awareness is not possible to rationally doubt when one is aware of anything (such as of one’s own thoughts), then there might be other such forms of not yet absolute certainty* that is nevertheless not possible to doubt in practice.
*It can’t be absolute certainty because you can’t prove that you or someone else will never find justifiable alternatives that facilitate the possibility—but not the necessity!—to doubt the reality that you hold presence as an awareness while in any way aware of anything. This even though I’m guessing the given verdict of your presence as, minimally, an awareness is not possible to rationally doubt in practice.
But again, try to read up on those who would argue that one should suspend judgment on matters such as that of what is of absolute certainty. They used to go by the name of Skeptics.
Quoting Kranky
Let's look more closely at this use of possession as exemplified in "my thoughts." The property of ownership is bound up with other people recognizing your claims. If you are sure that you have a right to something and nobody around agrees, that really sucks. The whole world is literally against you on that score. On the other hand, if all the ways you claimed other peoples' space was met with only nods of the head, you would have good reason to believe you are the king of everything. There are a number of ways one can see ourselves reflected in various ranges of isolation and communication. As a matter of everyday experience, we do better in one situation and worse in others
That is why it is hard for me to understand what you want when the act of reaching out to others disproves your premise. Not from anything that is said in response but from you, asking for stuff.
The problem is identified by the doctor at the end of Scene 5: "Besides, when one starts doubting one's own sense perceptions, the doubt spreads like an infection to higher and higher levels of abstraction until finally the whole belief system becomes one doubting mass of insecurity."
The moral is that while it is true that any judgment can be critically analyzed, it is better to trust one's considered judgments than to doubt everything.
That is a pragmatic consideration (since we have lives to live), not a guarantee that our considered judgments will be correct. But the point of epistemology is to provide tools to help test and identify mistakes in our thinking, not to produce mistake-proof conclusions. As Gilbert Ryle aptly put it:
We are taking shots in the dark on a regular basis at what we can possibly understand.
That's just something you have to accept, and then play along with like the rest of us. Are we trying to understand things with certainty? Yes. Can we/will we/do we? Maybe. Maybe not. Just accept it.
I could think of a thousand logical reasons why my thoughts are my own and are occurring. But what if this evidence is implanted, along with my false perception of thought?
Whether implanted or not, you do think what you think and feel what you feel and experience what you experience right? Whether implanted or not you do experience all of that, so if something has the power to make you experience these things that's quite amazing right? For what purpose would something trick you? If you are tricked it means that you exist in some way. But why would the thing that tricks you allow you to think at all about the fact that you may be tricked? If it is so powerful it could have made you not even think about that, then you might say maybe it's another trick to trick you. But why do you care so much about being tricked? What is it that you fear?
You have the power to control your life more than you think, you have the power to experience things that make your life worth living. And then when you experience that what does it matter whether you were tricked into experiencing that or if you are the one who made it happen? It's worth it either way. If you can be tricked to experience amazing things, then the trickster isn't such a bad guy. And then once you stop fearing the trickster maybe you will realize there was no trickster and it was you all along.
I still interpret my thoughts as potentially not even occuring.
What does it mean for you for something to "occur"? If something occurs it means you observe some change. The word occur would have no meaning to you if you didn't perceive change. But you see that you are thinking what you are thinking and not something else, so these thoughts that you are having are occurring, you are experiencing them. Whatever you might be tricked to experience, you are experiencing it.
I am reading your words here, they are real to me, you're real to me.
You're right that we can't be certain about anything, that includes our own existence and, a fortiori, any meaning that attaches to it. The reason for this uncertainty is because the universe at its essence is chaos. The human predicament boils down to the inevitably futile attempt to impose order on that chaos, whether in the form of religion, logic, science, language, social customs, law, or whatever. Your anxiety no doubt stems from an attachment to this hopeless project. In other words, there is a part of you that is clinging to the hope or to the ungrounded belief that somehow we will be able to make sense out of what I take to be innately senseless. Let it go. Embrace non-being and chaos, and "you" will be stronger. You will be stronger because you will achieve exactly what it is that you take to be the ideal of the failed human project: some kind of correspondence between your beliefs about the world and the way the world happens to be. The rejection of the structural project and the acceptance of the limitless chaotic nature of "your" own being will be identical to that-which-is(n't).
I realize, of course, the paradoxical nature of even making these claims, but rather than seeing that as problematic, I take their paradoxicality as a testimony to their truth. Also, while I additionally recognize the advice is reminiscent of the teaching of some eastern religions, that is not the point of view that motivates them. Rather, I think probably like yourself, it is from the repeated failure of trying to arrive at even a half-acceptable account of experience and coming to the conclusion that the reason why no such account is forthcoming is because none is possible.
To you, yes.
But hey, that’s the wacky nature of mind: it’s personal to the awareness involved.
If you are aware of your thoughts and your thoughts thereby influence your awareness—which they do just by you being aware of them—then they occur as thoughts.
If you are experiencing thoughts, then by definition of "thought" and by definition of "occur", your thoughts are occurring.
Then this too represents certainty?
It's why the solipsism bit is nonsensical. People will admit there's no way to know for sure that solipsism is false, but that is because any observation or perception is compatible with solipsism being the case. But that means there can't be any reason to accept solipsism because anything would count as evidence for it. It's trivial, no refutation because no justification uniquely supports it, even in principle. Its always less likely to be the case than not to be the case, so where's the worry?
Ditch certainty. Ones knowledge of anything is fallible, you could always be wrong. But what matters is what reason you have for thinking something to be true or not. Idle possibility suppositions are pretty impotent so... yeah. I'm not really good for therapy on the issue if it's really bugging you