Tuesday, July 15

A Journey On Knowledge... Or the Lack of It


There is nothing that I know of certainly, except perhaps that I am conscious, and this even, I got from Descartes and not derived from my own thinking. But that even, is limited. Yes, I am a conscious being, a thinker. I do not know though, for certain, if I even truly have a physical body, and so I proclaim that there are many things I do not know.

For the past few weeks I have been bugged and bothered by many a thoughts. The crime-bearer? INTFILO. And so to confuse you just as I was - well, am - I write a tale of my journey - forking paths and all - and the thoughts I have garnered along the way.



Pit Stop 1: Common Sense

Many times we were asked to define words deemed common. Surprisingly though, I never had a harder time thinking about definitions because one way or another, when we gave our definition of one word, we ended up being rebutted and questioned further on our definition. At first it felt intimidating; the questioning almost seemed circular, and the ending would always be confusion. But moving further, it made me realize how unsure we were of what we knew, and how little prodding and effort we actually gave these things. In the end, I would always feel stupid and stupefied - mouth agape and brain hurting.

One of our first definition challenges was of the word common sense. We were thrown many questions and were challenged to provide loophole-free definitions. First of these involved the following questions: What is common sense? Is it something indeed common? Is common sense something that everyone has, i.e. is it universal? Does it involve rationality, or is it instinctive? Does everybody have common sense?

I gave this some thought, and settled with my own definition of common sense. [Disclaimer: I am yet to put my definition on further questioning.] One premise I had is that common sense should be universal. This, however, is a very difficult qualifier, because to claim universality meant that all thinking beings should agree upon what is common sense. Nevertheless, there was no compromising in my premise, because to compromise it meant that the definition was also compromised.

Common sense, in laymen belief, is a set or a collection of knowledge that provide us - the thinkers - a vast source of information for use in daily life. Common sense is what we usually tap when we need immediate answers to questions we can barely give time to think about. In short, common sense are our highly-valuable shortcut knowledge that aid us in our survival. However, common sense differ from people to people, yet in my premise I explicitly mentioned that for something to be common sense, it must be universal. 


With these at hand, I have thought about common sense as being composed of several layers: a core - which is universal to all - and several layers encircling the core, which may vary from people to people. The core common sense is the sense of survival. I say this because the notion of survival is universal to all men - I have not encountered anyone who wishes himself dead. Life seems to be inculcated in each one of us, that we cannot discount this as our basic sense. With this core common sense we then build upon auxiliary senses, senses that, in their very core, are aimed towards our survival or well-being. However, due to differences in upbringing, culture, education and other societal differences, these auxiliary circles vary from people to people. This is the reason why a common sense knowledge to one is not common sense to another.

With these, new questions are born: Is common sense considered as knowledge? What is knowledge? What is belief?

Pit Stop 2: Knowledge and Belief

I have only heard of Descartes a few times, mostly in our Math discussions and occasionally from my classmates who would swear to him because of the difficulty Cartesian Plane is causing to our supposedly humble College Algebra. When I heard he was a philosopher... Does he really have to do both Math and Philosophy? This is killing me! Kidding aside though, I am awestruck by Descartes' manner of writing and thinking. The Meditations presented well his position on certain things through the use of definite examples. And with this I want to utilize his ideas with regards to knowledge.

But before that let me pose these questions: What is belief? What is knowledge? Can you believe without knowing, and vice versa?


In our discussions, I have ended up learning about a difficult fact: Belief needs no certainty, only acceptance, whereas with knowledge comes certainty, the absence of doubt. In relation to this, I would like to cite two things that can be derived from Descartes' Meditations that both made a mark and mar in my head: (1) As previously mentioned, to know means to be certain; there is no room for doubt and (2) with this at hand, we are only certain about our conscious existence, not knowing for a certain if our consciousness is one with our body.

I will not deny that these were difficult to accept, not because I cannot live with the fact that I am nothing but a conscious being - perhaps only a spirit flailing in the wind - but because I had given too much trust to myself and to my society that I have settled to believing all that was fed to me without bothering if it were true or not, whether it was certain or doubt-able. Indeed ignorance is bliss, and many of us are satisfied with our ignorance. We are blinded by the material things that we subdue our thoughts on life and preoccupy ourselves towards reaching what to us appears necessary. We awake and continue with our life, unquestioning, unyearning.

Pit Stop 3: Dream or Real Life

Did I just mention awake?

In this journey of knowledge, I have been bothered most by Descartes' Dream Argument. In my attempt to give myself consolation from this bothersome theory, I decided to watch Inception, hoping it would give me answers and give a clear-cut line between what is a dream and what is real life. However, re-watching the movie was actually not stimulating nor tickling my brain anymore, nor did it give me comfort; it only brought feelings of fear and uncertainty.

True enough, can we tell if we are dreaming or not? Our dreams are as vivid as our reality can be; there is no telling which is which. And so our reality cannot be considered as knowledge, because even that is something we are not certain of, something we can doubt.

Amongst the many questions, propositions and arguments posed to us, this seems to be my end, the one I can give no answer to. Yes, I can choose to believe that I am living in reality and yes, I can perhaps convince you to believe my side but I cannot, as of the moment, fathom whether this is definitely reality. 

Road Block: Wh-s and Hows


Before I finally put a dot to my journey, I would like to raise a few more questions.

What if we are thinking in the wrong way? What effect does that have in our beliefs and common sense?
How do we know if we are indeed thinking in the right way? How do we challenge our own consciousness?

Now, it's time for some coffee, cozy couches and calming music, I guess. 

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