just woke up from a bad dream so here’s a little thing about epistemology i wrote yesterday when i couldn’t sleep. im sorry if it doesn’t make too much sense. any enquiries or attacks against it PLEASE let me know!! it’s inspired by my recent reading of hume’s enquiry concerning understanding, which has driven me to extend my view of ‘knowledge’ into a sort of two-tier system, with one sort being deduced and the other being induced. Ok anyway i haven’t edited it or even reread it .,, but here it is ! 🙂going back to sleep now
there is no proof that there is an external world that matches our sensory perceptions. we know only what we believe. we can, however, treat the external world as a sort of useful fiction, a guess, or model. my senses may be totally inaccurate, they may even be non-existent, but from past experience (which, assumedly, does exist, for if we deny chronology, what else is there?), reasoning from them tends to produce results similar to what is expected. while i do not know the hob is real, and if it is, i do not know that it is hot, and if it is, i do not know that it will damage me; i know that, through induction, placing my hand on it will bring me a displeasurable sensation. whether there is a material world is unfalsifiable. i tend then towards rejecting it. this seems silly to me, though, so i really hesitate to!! my point is that the actual makeup of the world does not matter, what matters is the sensation provided to us.
so the seeming ‘material’ world can be treated as a model of sorts for what sensations can be expected to follow from another. we know what is real in this world only by inducing it from what we already know to be real. fallacious? yes… but it works! of course, as a person of science, i will mention that some beliefs are seemingly innate – pleasure is good, heights are scary, fruit is yummy. these beliefs are not necessary, however they do develop not from induction, but rather from the process of evolution – or, they at least seem to. i have been able to pick up such a belief through the use of inductive reasoning, however! the progress of evolutionary biology has led to the belief that there are innate ideas being common. these guys have done a hell of a lot more induction than i, so i just have to accept it!!
what about the afterlife? it is often said to be unknowable, and so many take an agnostic stance (even though they might lean one way or another). in fact, i’ll hear atheists claim one can never know. i disagree with that quite firmly. we know (with a lowercase k) that brain activity is associated with consciousness. we know this through repeated examination. one argument against this may be that consciousness MAY continue in the body, but any form of expression of that consciousness is simply unable to be performed. i disagree with this argument. the only reason i know that there is consciousness in others is through the actions they perform. consciousness seems necessarily linked to the performance of these actions which, inarguably, are downstream of neural activity. a cessation of brain activity therefore cuts off all proof (with a lowercase p) we have of consciousness. to presume continued consciousness is then an act of faith, as is to be agnostic on the matter. am i agnostic on the temperature of my water if the glass it is in is cold, because the heat might just be in some sort of metaphysical state still in the water? no! i know the temperature of the water is cold because of the temperature of the glass. while the glass’ temperature is not necessarily the water’s temperature, it is as close as we can get (assume that the top of the glass is covered or something for this metaphor to work accurately). we cannot stick our finger into consciousness, we can only measure how the body acts and then assume consciousness from that.
we are totally and wholly unable to know anything of what is material. we are only able to experience effects. those effects do lead us to closed know what is material (e.g. we know that matter is made up of atoms, atoms protons and neutrons, protons and neutrons quarks and hadrons and bosons), but it will be an infinite journey to find whatever is the ‘simple’. even if we do know what makes everything up, we reach infinity, we cannot really know the exact ‘simples’ configuration of any given scene – the human brain just simply doesn’t have the capacity. so, we can only observe the objects interacting with one another to produce effects. we can only know what any object is by the effect it produces upon us. and so what is consciousness? it is an object we prescribe to other humans, and some non-human animals, who display behaviours that match ‘knowing’. if that is what consciousness is, then how can we even entertain the idea that it continues when these displays utterly cease? does rawness continue within a vegetable after is roasted? does seed-ness continue within a tree after it is grown? and one might argue that these are qualities rather than objects, which i have described consciousness to be, but then i ask what is the difference between the two? a quality is simply a measure of similarity to an object, it is just that – with objects – we typically think of them as being ‘more complex’. really, though, chair-ness is certainly a quality i can imagine! just as that is a measure of similarity to an object, all qualities are just measures of similarity to – usually simpler – objects: the colour red, perceived distance, the sensation of bitter. and so consciousness is both an object and a quality. the object of consciousness is just ascribed to a thing when the quality of ‘consciousness-ness’ exceeds a certain threshold.
hope u enjoyed leave a comment if u have anything to say and im actuallyvgoing to sleep now. you may think ‘wow what a long break’ but in actuality all that text was just pasted in and really im mere seconds after that first claim of impending sleep. Ok!!! goodnight:)
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