Therefor I am."
How many times have you heard this simple saying?
One way to look at this statement is that it simply means a conscious body is existing as a being in the world.
But another way to look at it requires a look at the way we perceive everything.
Like the color red.
Yes. The color red. The color red has to do with the previous quote in more ways than you can imagine. The color red has a significance far superior to that of most concepts which come to my mind almost immediately.
Lets begin with a simple statement:
nothing is real.
yea, kind of like the matrix. Nothing is real, and everything is an illusion. How you ask? Simple. Your senses are lying to you. Think about it. You respond to the world in which your stimuli tell you you are in.
For instance: Your walking to bed, brushing your teeth. You feel the smooth bristles against your teeth, and the tingling sensation on your tongue. You stub your toe, and immediately reach down to grab the hurt appendage and hop around. Your nerves told your brain that you 1) hit your toe and 2) it hurt really bad. So you reacted in a manner fitting the perceived pain.
But take for instance when you go to bed. In your dreams, you respond to stimuli differently, but in a fundamentally similar way. People report being able to "feel" things in their dream, such as pain. A phenomenon which occurs when the senses literally lie to the brain to give a false reality its foundations.
What does any of this have to do with the color red or nothing is real?
It's simple.
Lets connect this concept with the next so that the latter will make sense.
Let us pretend that you are an infant, and I am one also. We have different mothers, but our teacher is showing us color flash cards. A flash card comes up, and below a color appears the text "r-e-d". You, seeing the color red, take this for granted and learn that the color you have just seen is called "red". At the same time, I am sitting next to you and also see the card. However, I see an entirely different color. I see the color you perceive as blue. Yet this is the same card you saw at the exact same time. I follow suit and assume that the color I have just seen is the color red, and every time I see that color, I would call it red.
So, every time we ride up to a stop sign, you see red but i see what you would see as blue. Yet we both would tell you that the stop sign is red.
In a sense, there is no guarantee that if I put your visual part of the brain in where mine was supposed to be and was somehow able to see, that I would see the same world I have always been used to. Everything could be different. Or maybe it would be the same.
Why would I even say all of this?
I think therefor I am.
The theory above, and your inability to prove me wrong and my inability to prove myself right, perpetuates the idea that we cannot KNOW anything other than:
"I think, therefor I am."
You KNOW alone that you are conscious, but that is all you can prove, because in the end, your senses could have been lying to you all the time.
4 comments:
stimulus'
its stimli
ty
i love the connection at the end.
this quote is from white noise (one of my summer readings)
an argument between a father and his 14 year old son from the father's perspective - he is driving him to school, and it is pouring down rain.
"It's going to rain tonight."
"It's raining now," I said.
"The radio said tonight."
"Look at the windshield," I said. "Is that rain or isn't it?"
"I'm only telling you what they said."
"Just because it's on the radio doesn't mean we have to suspend belief in the evidence of our senses."
"Our senses? Our senses are wrong a lot more often than they're right. This has been proved in the laboratory. Don't you know about all those theorems that say nothing is what it seems? There's no past, present or future outside of our own mind. The so-called laws of motion are a big hoax. Even sound can trick the mind. blahblahblah"
"Is it raining," I said, "or isn't it?"
"I wouldn't want to have to say."
"What if someone held a gun to your head?"
"Who, you?"
"Someone (blahblah) who wants the truth."
"What truth does he want? Does he want the truth of someone traveling at almost the speed of light in another galaxy? Does he want the truth of someone in orbit around a neutron star? Maybe if these people could see us through at telescope we might look like we were two fee two inches tall and it might be raining yesterday instead of today."
"He was holding the gun to your head. He wants your truth."
"What good is my truth? My truth means nothing. What if this guy with the gun comes from a planet in a whole different solar system? What we call rain he calls soap. What we call apples he calls rain. So what am i supposed to tell him?"
"His name is Frank J. Smalley and he comes from St. Louis."
"He wants to know if it's raining now, at this very minute?"
"Here and now. thats right."
"Is there such a thing as now? 'Now' comes and goes as soon as you say it. How can i say it's raining now if your so-called 'now' come 'then' as soon as I say it?"
"You said there was no past, present, or future."
"only in our verbs. thats the only place we find it."
"Rain is a noun. is there rain here, in this precise locality, at whatever time within the next two minutes that you choose to respond to the question?"
"if you want to talk about this precise locality while you're in a vehicle that's obviously moving, then i think that's the trouble with this discussion."
it goes on for like 2 more pages. its great.
i added your blogs to my favorites :D
i must have this book!
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