What Is Real?
Have you ever heard someone say they only believe what their five senses tells them? Such statements are often made in the context of discussions about religion or science. I would bet that if you randomly asked people on the street if they only could know what their five senses told them, you would get a lot of "yeses."
But wait a minute. Which of your five senses tells you that you can only know what your five senses tells you? Is it your sense of taste? Touch? Smell? Hearing maybe? Sight?
No to all of the above. In fact, if you say that you can only know (or only believe) what your five senses tell you, you are contradicting yourself because you are saying that you know something that none of your senses can tell you.
So then how do you know that you really know anything? Stop and think about this question. Don't try to think of the answer, just focus on the question.
How do you know...
that you know...
anything?
The question itself assumes that you can know something. If you were argumentative, you could say that it's impossible to know anything. But again, you'd be contradicting yourself because you'd be saying that you know that you can't know anything. The only other alternative is to accept that you can know something.
The important question then becomes: how do you know what your five senses do not tell you? We've actually already answered this question in a very subtle way. Above, I explained that it is contradictory to say that you can only know what your five senses tell you. In my explanation I assumed that something that is illogical cannot be true. And it goes without saying that if it's not true, then it must be false. Logic is one way we can know whether something is true.
(Now again, if you were argumentative, you could say that my assumption is false, but if you made that assertion, you would be making the same assumption: that something cannot be both true and false at the same time. We could throw logic out the window entirely, but then we would necessarily throw the concept of knowledge out the window, too, because the idea of knowledge is that you either know something or you don't, but you cannot both know x and not know x simultaneously. So it's clearly silly to try to discuss the idea of knowledge without the foundation of logic.)
Logic can help us uncover knowledge, but logic can never be the starting point because it requires premises, or things we already know to be true. Logic cannot tell us what those premises are, but it can only help us glean knowledge from them. So where does knowledge begin?
Certainly most of our knowledge comes from sensory input. We read books and letters, listen to others on the phone, feel the change in temperature when we step outside, and smell food as it cooks on the stove. But how do we know our senses aren't false? People who suffer traumatic brain injury often experience synesthesia, a condition where people "hear" colors or "taste" words. These people may not be able to trust their senses. The same goes for someone who is inebriated or mentally ill. It's easy to say that you can trust your senses because none of those problems apply to you, but again, how do you know? You're still trusting your five senses to tell you that you're sober, sane, and coherent. You cannot trust your five senses alone as a starting point for knowledge. How then can you know what is true?
Consider this simple diagram of a chicken's lifecycle:
How To Know What Is Real
Suppose there is an alien who knows nothing about chickens or life on Earth. He tries to decipher where the lifecycle begins. First he thinks it begins with the chicken. But where did the chicken come from? It must have started out as a chick. But then he realizes the chick can't be the starting point, because the chick hatched from an egg. Finally, just as he is about to hop into his spaceship and travel back to his home galaxy to tell his fellow aliens all about chickens, he realizes that the eggs had to have come from somewhere. He looks at the diagram again and realizes they came from the chicken. But now he's gone full circle and hasn't figured out anything. So he gets in his spaceship and goes home. When he gets there, he tells his alien friends about the diagram. After he explains it, one of his alien buddies posits, "Maybe the chicken, chick, and the eggs all were created at the same time."
This silly story illustrates our tendency to always start at a singular point and serially traverse a path to its end or beginning, often ignoring the context or "big picture". It also demonstrates the two main ways we attempt to attain knowledge: We can try to glean knowledge from discrete sources (senses, logic, intuition), picking and choosing some as we see fit while discarding others. Or we can step back and process all the information available, reconciling the inconsistencies and contradictions and gradually uncovering knowledge as we do. The story also demonstrates an example of insight learning, where knowledge can be derived from existing but as yet unverified knowledge.
There is a certain duality that exists with knowledge. On the one hand, new knowledge can be discovered using existing knowledge (e.g. via logic and senses). On the other hand, knowledge for us has to originate somewhere. It is not possible for us to take our present knowledge and "backtrack" it all the way to the beginning of all knowledge to attempt to verify its accuracy. We have to start in the present, taking input from our senses, logic, conscience, and intuition, and process all of this information to determine what knowledge is true.
Knowledge has the feature of self-verification. If you believe something that is false, it will create a cascading effect in your life that will result in more false knowledge. Eventually, you will be faced with a glaring contradiction in your own beliefs. This is a warning sign that something you consider true is actually not. Thankfully it is possible to "reverse engineer" your beliefs and uncover the one that is false. You simply have to take the contradictory beliefs and evaluate them in light of everything else you know. If your beliefs are true, you will find them to be internally consistent and non-contradictory.
The beauty of this self-verification is that it based on the law of averages. Even if you are mistaken in your evaluation about your own beliefs (for example, you fail to realize that two of your beliefs contradict each other), you will eventually be faced with another set of contradictory beliefs and will correctly evaluate them as contradictory.
If you are reading this, you have the capacity to understand and determine what is true and what is false. You will not always be right, but you will always be given the opportunity to know when you're not. God has given us a conscience, an intuition, and senses, and He has wired in us a logical mind to evaluate inputs from all three and accurately determine, more often than not, what is true. If you think logically about it, knowledge is an infinite loop that could only have had its beginning in the Creator Who has no beginning and no end. The quest for what is true inevitably leads back to Him because He is the source of all truth.
But wait a minute. Which of your five senses tells you that you can only know what your five senses tells you? Is it your sense of taste? Touch? Smell? Hearing maybe? Sight?
No to all of the above. In fact, if you say that you can only know (or only believe) what your five senses tell you, you are contradicting yourself because you are saying that you know something that none of your senses can tell you.
So then how do you know that you really know anything? Stop and think about this question. Don't try to think of the answer, just focus on the question.
How do you know...
that you know...
anything?
The question itself assumes that you can know something. If you were argumentative, you could say that it's impossible to know anything. But again, you'd be contradicting yourself because you'd be saying that you know that you can't know anything. The only other alternative is to accept that you can know something.
The important question then becomes: how do you know what your five senses do not tell you? We've actually already answered this question in a very subtle way. Above, I explained that it is contradictory to say that you can only know what your five senses tell you. In my explanation I assumed that something that is illogical cannot be true. And it goes without saying that if it's not true, then it must be false. Logic is one way we can know whether something is true.
(Now again, if you were argumentative, you could say that my assumption is false, but if you made that assertion, you would be making the same assumption: that something cannot be both true and false at the same time. We could throw logic out the window entirely, but then we would necessarily throw the concept of knowledge out the window, too, because the idea of knowledge is that you either know something or you don't, but you cannot both know x and not know x simultaneously. So it's clearly silly to try to discuss the idea of knowledge without the foundation of logic.)
Logic can help us uncover knowledge, but logic can never be the starting point because it requires premises, or things we already know to be true. Logic cannot tell us what those premises are, but it can only help us glean knowledge from them. So where does knowledge begin?
Certainly most of our knowledge comes from sensory input. We read books and letters, listen to others on the phone, feel the change in temperature when we step outside, and smell food as it cooks on the stove. But how do we know our senses aren't false? People who suffer traumatic brain injury often experience synesthesia, a condition where people "hear" colors or "taste" words. These people may not be able to trust their senses. The same goes for someone who is inebriated or mentally ill. It's easy to say that you can trust your senses because none of those problems apply to you, but again, how do you know? You're still trusting your five senses to tell you that you're sober, sane, and coherent. You cannot trust your five senses alone as a starting point for knowledge. How then can you know what is true?
Consider this simple diagram of a chicken's lifecycle:
How To Know What Is Real
Suppose there is an alien who knows nothing about chickens or life on Earth. He tries to decipher where the lifecycle begins. First he thinks it begins with the chicken. But where did the chicken come from? It must have started out as a chick. But then he realizes the chick can't be the starting point, because the chick hatched from an egg. Finally, just as he is about to hop into his spaceship and travel back to his home galaxy to tell his fellow aliens all about chickens, he realizes that the eggs had to have come from somewhere. He looks at the diagram again and realizes they came from the chicken. But now he's gone full circle and hasn't figured out anything. So he gets in his spaceship and goes home. When he gets there, he tells his alien friends about the diagram. After he explains it, one of his alien buddies posits, "Maybe the chicken, chick, and the eggs all were created at the same time."
This silly story illustrates our tendency to always start at a singular point and serially traverse a path to its end or beginning, often ignoring the context or "big picture". It also demonstrates the two main ways we attempt to attain knowledge: We can try to glean knowledge from discrete sources (senses, logic, intuition), picking and choosing some as we see fit while discarding others. Or we can step back and process all the information available, reconciling the inconsistencies and contradictions and gradually uncovering knowledge as we do. The story also demonstrates an example of insight learning, where knowledge can be derived from existing but as yet unverified knowledge.
There is a certain duality that exists with knowledge. On the one hand, new knowledge can be discovered using existing knowledge (e.g. via logic and senses). On the other hand, knowledge for us has to originate somewhere. It is not possible for us to take our present knowledge and "backtrack" it all the way to the beginning of all knowledge to attempt to verify its accuracy. We have to start in the present, taking input from our senses, logic, conscience, and intuition, and process all of this information to determine what knowledge is true.
Knowledge has the feature of self-verification. If you believe something that is false, it will create a cascading effect in your life that will result in more false knowledge. Eventually, you will be faced with a glaring contradiction in your own beliefs. This is a warning sign that something you consider true is actually not. Thankfully it is possible to "reverse engineer" your beliefs and uncover the one that is false. You simply have to take the contradictory beliefs and evaluate them in light of everything else you know. If your beliefs are true, you will find them to be internally consistent and non-contradictory.
The beauty of this self-verification is that it based on the law of averages. Even if you are mistaken in your evaluation about your own beliefs (for example, you fail to realize that two of your beliefs contradict each other), you will eventually be faced with another set of contradictory beliefs and will correctly evaluate them as contradictory.
If you are reading this, you have the capacity to understand and determine what is true and what is false. You will not always be right, but you will always be given the opportunity to know when you're not. God has given us a conscience, an intuition, and senses, and He has wired in us a logical mind to evaluate inputs from all three and accurately determine, more often than not, what is true. If you think logically about it, knowledge is an infinite loop that could only have had its beginning in the Creator Who has no beginning and no end. The quest for what is true inevitably leads back to Him because He is the source of all truth.