Tome of Wisdom

When I first started learning about skepticism, I began to realize that I was a skeptic myself. This became especially evident when I went to the first discussion section for the class. The T.A. asked an interesting question: what are you certain of? I responded that I did not know. When asked if I was certain of that, I responded that I did not know. Later, I thought a lot more about this, and tried to figure out what I really did and did not know for certain. These essays were the result.

Originally written April 4, 2002

I know nothing for absolutely certain. I’m not even certain that I nothing for absolutely certain. If I do know something for certain - and this would be the only thing I know for certain - it is this: that I don’t know everything for absolutely certain. Thus, I can only *assume* that anything I think I know is true. I cannot know for certain that it’s true: I can only assume, for the purposes of living, that rational, logical arguments tell the truth. And what else can I do under the circumstances? If everything I think I know is a lie, then I am doing the best I can: assuming that ideas that describe the world I live in are true. For what criteria are there for truth, other than this: that it helps me to understand the world I live in? If the world I live in is an illusion, and there is no way to break out of or see beyond this illusion, or even to prove that the illusion exists, what better understanding can I achieve other than knowledge that describes the behavior of the illusion? Truth, as men perceive it, is a construct of the natural world.

Originally written April 29, 2002

In man’s rawest form, there is only man, and the natural world. Perceiving the natural world with his senses, he forms a conception of “himself” and “outside himself.” From thence, he forms concepts in his mind that describe what he sees. These forms exist deep within the sub-conscious, and manifest themselves in his conscious thoughts as any combination of images, sounds, etc. Man might also associate a certain emotion with the form, and feel that emotion as he recalls the form, in this way remembering both the form and the emotion.

Continuing in this vein, Man can form images, sounds, or symbols that, on the surface, appear nothing like the object they are supposed to represent. Yet these second-hand projections help Man remember his forms. As man accumulates more forms, he invents more second-hand projections to keep track of his experiences, and to communicate his experiences with others. These second-level projections appear as sounds that Man speaks, or symbols that he writes.

In this way, Man is able to communicate the forms with other Men. Some forms have no words to describe them, and the Man keeps them that way (either because of laziness, or because there is simply no way to represent the form adequately to others).

Further, in this way Man can tell other Men about things these Men have never for themselves perceived. Each of these Men take the second-level projections given to them, visualize them into sensory images, and by collecting a sufficient amount of these sensory projections, drives a form into his subconscious. When he wants to recall what was told him, he recalls the form, bringing up some of the sensory projections he invented, and then communicates the idea with second-level projections (words, gestures, anything that other Men can understand).

Since Man accumulates knowledge only in this way, every form that Man has in his subconscious has its root in the natural world. Even abstract thoughts, concepts, and words have their root in the natural world. Man observes the world through his sensory apparata, and may come to wish to predict the order of the world, that he may order his own life better. First he must collect a solid, comprehensive body of sensory projections (which are associated with a certain form, which is taken from the natural world). Pondering upon these sensory projections, he may invent a system of second-level projections that describes to others, in no uncertain terms, exactly what he thinks the natural order is. In this way he invents mathematics to describe the natural order.

Even logic has its root in the natural order of the Man’s world. Because man perceives “himself” and “outside” himself, he perceives entities as existing independently of himself. He then might mimic, in his own mind, what he sees around him. He may suppose that something exists. If he then supposes that something ELSE exists, then he can form logical relations between them. If the existence of one implies the existence of the other, then we have logical implication. If we have the one, and having the one always implies the existence of the other in the artificial world the Man has constructed, then, in that constructed world, the other must always be supposed to exist, just by definition. By inventing a world of his own that describes, as far as he can see, his own world, Man has constructed logic from the structure of nature, and has used his own system of logic in an attempt to describe what the nature around him does.

But is Man really justified in thinking that the world in which he exists behaves the same exact way as the artificial world which he has himself constructed? His artificial world may work the same way in all cases, but how is Man to know whether the world he lives in follows the same principles he has lined out? The only thing that Man can do is observe the natural world, and see if, in fact, the natural world is both (1) self-consistent, i.e. behaving the same way in all cases for all time, and (2) consistent with Man’s artificial world in all cases for all time.

Unfortunately, Man is a limited creature. He cannot see every single case in all times, since he can’t live long enough to see even a small portion of the total history of his world. He can observe general patterns from nature, putting forms into his subconscious, and collect visual projections to help him recall these forms. He can invent worlds of his own that behave, in every and all cases, like the general patterns he has observed in his own world. His knowledge is therefore influenced by the general patterns that nature feed him. He takes these patterns, and uses them to try to predict nature.

But Man can never know whether the patterns that were fed to him really describe reality, as it exists independently of himself, unambiguously in every and all cases for all time. Man can know for certain that his imaginary world always behaves the same way: after all, he designed it that way. But whether his own world and his fantasy world actually COINCIDE in every case or not, he can never know with 100% certainty.

Aside: Assuming and Knowing

In its most ideal form, “knowing” means that you believe something so absolutely, so purely, that nothing can dissuade you. No argument, no sight, no sound, no event, not even any transcendental experience could ever dissuade you from your belief: because, you KNOW that your belief is true. The knowledge is like a permanent fixture in your mind. Nothing will ever etch it away. There is no uncertainty, no nervous unconscious twitch in the back of your mind that tells you, “I am only 99.99% sure.” No, you are absolutely, 100% sure.

Assuming, on the other hand, means that you are not absolutely sure that you are right. You have invented ideas that appear to describe the world in every single case you know. But you haven’t seen every case, and never will, so you can never absolutely know for certain.

So Man is faced with a dilemna. He wishes to know whether what he thinks he knows, is really true. Most people think that they know things for absolutely certain, when in fact they do not. In fact, nobody knows anything about the REAL NATURAL WORLD for certain. The only things that Man knows for absolutely certain are these: that his imaginary worlds, which he has designed to be internally consistent, are, in fact, consistent in all cases. Mental ideas are not subject to the same unfortunate situation as the natural world is. Mental ideas do not change with time: once they are formulated, they simply exist as they are. The natural world, on the other hand, is subject to time. Time flows, and if something changes millennia after a Man’s lifetime, he will never know about it.

The conclusion, then, is this: about the natural world which surrounds him, and envelops him, and encloses him, Man Knows absolutely nothing. Man can only Know that those ideas that he designed to be consistent, will always be consistent in any case for all time. Man may wish to use his consistent, immutable ideas to describe the world around him, but there is no guarantee that the natural world will always conform to his ideas in all cases. If it does, in fact, conform in all cases, there is no way of knowing it.

Given this conclusion, how does man live? Man still wishes to order his life, and to predict the behavior of the world around him. Several options are open to him, depending on the quality of his ideas. If things appear to conform to a certain set of ideas very closely, in nearly all or in all cases that most men know about, then the best thing Man can do is: Assume that these ideas are True. Granted, there is no way to know for certain that these ideas are, in all cases, true. But the ideas are so close to the truth, that they might as well describe the truth for our intents and purposes. This is the route science and logic have taken. These two disciplines can be reduced to very unambiguous and self-consistent systems of thought, and, insofar as they describe the natural world, they can safely be assumed to be True.

But not everything is so friendly to the mind’s power of invention. Some things are so complicated that they simply refuse to conform to one argument. This is due to man’s ignorance, not to non-existence of Truth. If man cannot see the Truth clearly, he will form a number of opinions, some of which may be equally likely to describe what the Man sees, if not equally likely to describe the actual Truth. If two (or more) ideas are all equally likely to describe one aspect of the natural order (at least those aspects that Man perceives), and only one idea can be true at a time, how are we to proceed? Man must do as the skeptics do: suspend judgment. Judgment, in this case, is defined as Assuming that one specific, self-consistent idea describes an aspect of the natural world. If Man does not, or cannot, know ENOUGH to form one idea only, than he must not assume any truth at all. He cannot assume that one idea really describes reality, if in fact another idea is equally strong. Both ideas, since they are incompatible, must be describing something less than a Truth. For a perfect description of a Truth, there must exist only one way to describe it. (There can exist different ways of stating the description, but if they are equivalent then they are really only the same description. The word choice or order of derivation are not what is important: the important thing is the underlying form that is being conveyed.) If there are two ways to describe a supposed truth, and the two ways are not consistent with each other, than both descriptions are describing only a lesser version of the real Truth. So man suspends judgment - but only temporarily. If he can find out more and more about the Truth, he can come up with better and better descriptions, until finally only one description remains.

I keep referring to Truths as though they really existed. Isn’t this a self-contradiction? How can I claim to know that Truths exist, if I keep saying that Man can know nothing outside his own ideas for certain? Recall that I am arguing using a self-consistent, man-made system. This system (which is, in essence, logic or reason) is by definition self-consistent and unambiguous, so I can claim to Know anything that I derive using this system. But if I know something, I have already established the existence of a Truth. The assumption of Truth (i.e. things that we Know) is the basis of this system. It is therefore impossible, within this artificially constructed system, to deny the existence of Truth: for doing so is a self-contradiction. You would be claiming to know for certain the Truth that there are no Truths, which is absurd. The system you just made to make that statement starts out with the a priori assumption that Truth is a valid concept. Supposing that something exists is the first statement of Truth in this system. And so it is with any system we invent: depending on our definitions, certain things can be defined as True, and others False. Without first supposing that something exists (and thus making a Truth statement), there can be no system.

So what has this to do with me? I have not claimed that I know Truths to actually exist in the natural world we inhabit. That I can never know for certain. But I can define Truths to exist within a world of my own devising. A Man can invent a world, in his own mind, that is exactly like our world, but with one difference: the behavior of this world exactly conforms to certain ideas the man has invented. The man can look at this world from without, and say truly that he Knows this world to conform to certain rules. Why? Because the man invented the world, and he defined the rules by which it is governed.

So a man may claim that he is trying to describe higher Truths about the natural world. However, there is no way for him to Know that these higher Truths actually exist. What he is really doing is comparing his ideas to ANOTHER imaginary world, one in which he CAN assume higher truths to exist. When the skeptic says that two arguments are equally strong, he is not saying that they describe an imperfect version of a Real Truth. The skeptic, and all men, cannot know for certain whether these supposed Real Truths do, in fact, exist. What everybody CAN know, however, is that Truths do exist in an imaginary world of one’s own devising. One may not know what the Truths of this imaginary world are, but he can at least KNOW that these Truths actually exist. The imaginary world was based in Truthhood, in Knowing. If a man defines Truth as existing within his own world, then of course Truth will in fact exist in this world.

What men may not realize is this: they often equate the natural world they live in with the world they invented, in which Truths exist. What men REALLY do is assume that the real, natural world behaves exactly the same way that their imaginary world does. There is no way to really know this for certain, but this is what men assume. And this is, in fact, all men can do. Since they are not independent of the world they live in, and did not create it, Men have know way of knowing for certain what principles their world was founded on. Perhaps the world was founded on Truthhood, and things really are the way we think they are. Perhaps the world was founded on Falsehood, and everything is an illusion, and we only think we are describing things as they really are.

But for the purposes of ordering our lives and describing the behavior of our world, all we can do is Assume that Truth exists. Truth does, in fact, appear to exist much of the time, but there is really no way to Know this for certain. If we think we have proven the existence of Truth, we are deceived: in order to prove Truth, we have used a system of thought that implicitly assumes that Truth exists. We are only proving that Truth exists in a world we have invented in our own minds, a world in which, by its very definition, Truth exists! It matters not that the natural world seems to conform to our mental view of it. We cannot see all cases, and therefore can never Know for certain that our arguments describe both our imaginary world and the real, natural world.

This entire argument, itself, only describes what would be true in a world any of us can invent in our heads. Whether this argument holds in the world we all live in, we can never know for certain. But, if we pretend that the world we invent in our heads and the world we live in are one and the same, then this whole argument, and any rational argument, works just fine.

The second conclusion, then, is this: If we assume that the self-consistent, rational world we have built in our minds actually describes the natural world we live in, then we can take derivations from the imaginary world and use them in our world. This is how we can order our lives and describe the natural world: by inventing a self-consistent world, and then using derivations from it in order to live out our lives in the real world. We can never know whether our assumptions are entirely accurate or not. But if we behave as though they are, then these assumptions can lead us to an understanding (in some sense) of our world.

On that note, it might be useful to speculate about the nature of reality. There are two cases: either the world is rational and self-consistent, as the world we invent in our heads is; or, it is not. If it is, then any assumptions we have made concerning it are correct, and we have succeeded in our goal of understanding the universe. (Unfortunately, we can never know whether we succeeded or not.) If the universe, in fact, is NOT self-consistent, then we are living in an illusion. If this is the case, we have failed to understand the universe. The universe may, in fact, be impossible for us to understand, if it is all an illusion. However, we can take comfort in the fact that we have done the best we could, under the circumstances. Men are compelled, by seeing the (relatively) repeatable, self-consistent nature of their sense perceptions, to believe that the universe itself is repeatable and self-consistent. If we can invent a world that is repeatable and self-consistent, and it appears to describe the little that we know about the universe, then we have done the best we could do. If everything, in fact, is really an illusion, there is really no way for us to know about it (since we can’t really Know anything about the universe, anyway). If we are living within the illusion, and cannot see beyond the illusion, then speculating about the existence of an illusion is futile, and won’t help us.

But suppose that the universe really is an illusion. How can we know that our ideas are self-consistent, if we ourselves are constructed of stuff that isn’t? After all, my whole argument is based on the truthhood and self-consistency of ideas Men create. If the universe is not self-consistent, wouldn’t that mean that our ideas are not self-consistent? Could the inconsistency of the universe be, in fact, changing our supposedly immutable, timeless, perfect ideas in ways we don’t know about? If such a thing really happens, we certainly have no way of detecting it. As far as we can tell, when we access the forms in our heads, they are the same as when we last left them. When we examine our thoughts, one plus one is still one plus one, and it still equals two. Our ideas of logic and reason appear to be exactly the same as we have always perceived them. If our ideas were tampered with, then the entire universe must have been tampered with also: for, we find that the natural world still appears to conform to our ideas. If a correlation exists both before and after, then either (1) nothing changed, or (2) both things changed in the exact same way.

So, whether the world is self-consistent or an illusion, it is still valid to assume that our ideas will be helpful and useful ones. We can assume that the world is self-consistent, and exploit the results of this assumption, whether the world is in fact self-consistent or not.

On a side note, it perhaps may be possible, theoretically, to find out whether Truths really exist or not, outside of our ideas. If we can put ourselves in the same relation to the world we currently inhabit, as we have to the worlds we invent in our heads, we would know for certain that Truths really exist. But, in fact, we can never do this, since we are composed of matter ourselves. Our very existence is dependant on the universe we live in. We have no way of making ourselves independent of the universe, to sort of “look at it from a distance.” But if entities exist independently of our universe, they perhaps could pull us out of this universe and show us the reality (or unreality) of it. If the universe is Real, and is based on Truth, then there is only one entity that could conceivably do this, if he in fact exists: God. God would have created the universe, just like we create worlds in our head. If God doesn’t exist, then there is nobody that can pull us out of this world to give us a better look. If the world is an illusion, then only the perpetrators of the illusion could pull us out of it and show us the unreality of what we had been living in.