Philosophy — to philosophise — is not about finding the right answers; it’s about asking the right questions, often unanswerable, where each question alone carries enough wisdom and insight to make any possible answer to it redundant.
You can argue objective mathematical logic and undeniable syllogisms all you want, but regardless of your self-assurance in your grasp of objective logic and your capacity for infallible reasoning, you’d still have to have faith in your sanity and your ability to reason correctly; if you even know what “correctly” looks like. Even your most objective epistemological reasoning is still founded on subjective belief systems and your leap of faith in your own mental efficacies.
You have to unquestionably trust in yourself that you are not insane in your reasoning or hallucinating in your sensory perception… or being mentally hacked by a Neuralink-esque piece of brain-intrusive tech.
And you must have faith that the words you are reading right now have for you the same meaning as the writer intended to convey — or that even someone wrote these words, instead of them being just another one of your dream-like generative illusions.
How would you know truth from illusion? Even if the world around you seems to validate your theories and beliefs about reality, how could you know that what you’re perceiving is real and not just a schizophrenic episode meant to rationalise the irrationality of our existence?
However, there is one thing you can know — truly know. Socrates was wrong — that the only thing he could know was that he knew nothing. Descartes, too, for his “cogito ergo sum” assertion. You think, therefore you exist? How do “you” know it’s you that’s doing all the thinking? How do you know you’re a distinct entity and not just a fork, a branch of a greater one, and ultimately, an expendable, worthless, and bereft-of-individual-sovereignty piece of dead skin to be shed and discarded without a second thought?
I digress…
The one thing you can know is the tragicomical nature of your lived experience.
Your existential experience is undeniably tragicomical, whether you’re a brain in a jar, an NPC in a simulation, or part of a cruel deity’s science project, in which you’re the lab rat: an object made solely for data generation and entertainment, a purpose that is not for you but for someone else.
Some will call me a subjectivist, as if a characterisation were ever a meaningful argument. So, I call them absolutist self-assured objectivists and pompously pontificating moralists. Dogma is the opposite of philosophy. Or is it?
Cry and laugh at yourself for crying. And then cry from laughing at your tragedy. This existence is peak tragic comedy. If the only constant is our ability to laugh and cry at the same time and our own small sorrows and little joys, then this tragicomedy is the only thing we can know.
👏👏👏 Most insightful take.
Consciousness is not a thing. It is an action.
Perhaps that holds a clue to us.