life, the universe, and everything pt1
At some point, every person should take a moment to step back and ask themself, "What do I believe in?"
By this, I don't mean a religion or a political party or anything like that. I mean it literally. We all know our senses can be fooled. We've all had dreams which could be mistaken for reality. Anyone thoughtful enough or sufficiently educated has encountered this issue. Descartes made a good start with his cogito ergo sum but then proceeded down a fallacious argument to "prove" the existence of things outside himself.
(An an example of invalidity, let us take his "innate idea" about God, saying he has a conception of "infinity". Who has a firm grasp on the concept of infinity? Infinity cannot be seen, felt, heard, smelt, or tasted (not we could trust such senses, of course). Infinity, unmixed with the spiritual can only be understood via symbols. It can be vaguely grasped via extension of our experience (a.k.a. walk in a straight line and keep going. Go even farther and then farther still. Do this for the rest of time and you're still not there. Which brings up the idea of infinite time of course, which is just imagine the day after the day after the day after and you keep saying "the day after" forever ... oops wait, that's circular!), but it is far from "innate".)
Thus all one can truly know is their own existence. Afterward, one must make pragmatic conjectures. One may choose to ignore small issues and jump to a larger contextual area. "Do I accept the evidence of my senses or do I reject them?" This is the origin of my disdain for many ancient anti-empirical philosophers. To reject senses and the world they reveal is all good, but what then? To construct a system based on ideas and concepts already rejected as false (because they could hardly have any other source for concepts) is absurd. I sometimes suspect much of the following of such systems were based on admiration for clever analogies and other word play. I claim the only rational foundation of belief is that of the world revealed by our senses. Yes our senses may not be true, but we don't have anything else, and while we don't know if that world is how we sense it, we do know that we receive sensory impulses. That is, whether the screen I see in front of me exists or not, I am seeing it. While my evidence is not conclusive, it is the only evidence I have.
-End pt1
By the way, I am absolutely sure nothing I've said here is original, however I've never heard or read anyone else's arguments in this direction. I would appreciate it if anyone who has read this (assuming you exist, but even if you don't) could direct me to writing along this line from a reputable source. Thank you.