Mishmash of trying to find knowledge

[dark]

What is knowledge? How do we find it? How do we apply this knowledge?

I probably cannot answer these at all, but I will try.

Thinking is all fine, running through logic is nice, but it doesn't seem to mean anything or get us anywhere except within the logic itself. We as humans do not run on pure logic. Before we developed a mind that could reason, we were still able to discern a rock from a fish.

How did we know this? Fuck if I know, I wasn't around then, but I can speculate. I will presume it is the same way we do that now. Sensations come to us in all manners through both internal and external senses. Our minds hold on to this and it makes us feel things. We feel good or bad about something and all within the degrees of this. If it is something we like when we feel it, we find this is something we can go back to, but if it made us feel bad, we tend to not come back to it except for in special cases.

Everything can probably be rooted back to how we feel, what emotions we feel from things because this is a very primitive part of our being. These emotions root and begin to grow, they spread out and take on what seems to be new things. This eventually grows into reason, we can reason that something will hurt us if it gives us bad emotions, and it can help us if it gives us good. Be mindful, this is not the same form of reason we use now, but it was a start.

This thing that kept happening via emotions, or feelings, kept developing because it was useful. Everything we do, we feel. We cannot exist without feeling first and foremost. If you were born without any sensations, internal and external, you would never have anything that would cause any inspiration to create the ideas and thoughts. We need sensations, we live by them.

But what once was, has developed into new things and nothing seems to be what it is because we cannot really look at things from the outside. We can only see things through our eyes, our ears, our fingers etc.

So, we have sensations, and from these we feel them. They make us feel either good or bad and we discern from that. This continues on up something similar to a pyramid until we get to higher thinking like we have now, but it is all based on these simple concepts. It is this way because our bodies main purpose is to survive. We tend to think it is us who is doing all this, but the physical organism that is us is what created all this. Some form of near random and selective choices of physical organisms discovered it could sense the world outside it, and then it began to be real to itself.

At first there were no thoughts, but was probably some form of something that let it realize the other things. Then the more these senses developed and became more aware of the world around, it already had a platform for what we now call a mind. This kept developing until eventually more and more complex things happened and things because aware and were able to remember the senses. Once they remembered sensations, they were able to preemptively avoid dangerous things because they remembered it was bad.

Yes a lot of this is speculation, but if you think you could make any of your decisions if you were born with an absence of any senses, do tell me what your thoughts would be, what would they look like and how would you be able to even create them with nothing influencing it? I believe feelings are a core to everything even if we do not want to admit them as something important because of their pure subjective nature.

 

[Duxwing]

What is knowledge? How do we find it? How do we apply this knowledge?

I probably cannot answer these at all, but I will try.

Thinking is all fine, running through logic is nice, but it doesn't seem to mean anything or get us anywhere except within the logic itself. We as humans do not run on pure logic. Before we developed a mind that could reason, we were still able to discern a rock from a fish.

How did we know this? Fuck if I know, I wasn't around then, but I can speculate. I will presume it is the same way we do that now. Sensations come to us in all manners through both internal and external senses. Our minds hold on to this and it makes us feel things. We feel good or bad about something and all within the degrees of this. If it is something we like when we feel it, we find this is something we can go back to, but if it made us feel bad, we tend to not come back to it except for in special cases.

Everything can probably be rooted back to how we feel, what emotions we feel from things because this is a very primitive part of our being. These emotions root and begin to grow, they spread out and take on what seems to be new things. This eventually grows into reason, we can reason that something will hurt us if it gives us bad emotions, and it can help us if it gives us good. Be mindful, this is not the same form of reason we use now, but it was a start.

This thing that kept happening via emotions, or feelings, kept developing because it was useful. Everything we do, we feel. We cannot exist without feeling first and foremost. If you were born without any sensations, internal and external, you would never have anything that would cause any inspiration to create the ideas and thoughts. We need sensations, we live by them.

But what once was, has developed into new things and nothing seems to be what it is because we cannot really look at things from the outside. We can only see things through our eyes, our ears, our fingers etc.

So, we have sensations, and from these we feel them. They make us feel either good or bad and we discern from that. This continues on up something similar to a pyramid until we get to higher thinking like we have now, but it is all based on these simple concepts. It is this way because our bodies main purpose is to survive. We tend to think it is us who is doing all this, but the physical organism that is us is what created all this. Some form of near random and selective choices of physical organisms discovered it could sense the world outside it, and then it began to be real to itself.

At first there were no thoughts, but was probably some form of something that let it realize the other things. Then the more these senses developed and became more aware of the world around, it already had a platform for what we now call a mind. This kept developing until eventually more and more complex things happened and things because aware and were able to remember the senses. Once they remembered sensations, they were able to preemptively avoid dangerous things because they remembered it was bad.

Yes a lot of this is speculation, but if you think you could make any of your decisions if you were born with an absence of any senses, do tell me what your thoughts would be, what would they look like and how would you be able to even create them with nothing influencing it? I believe feelings are a core to everything even if we do not want to admit them as something important because of their pure subjective nature.

I concur. Logic is ultimately grounded in emotion, sensation, and intuition. Without them, there are no axioms, and thus, no philosophy. Therefore, we've developed logic as a very complex coping skill for that which can affright us. It also provides some sense of meaning and purpose to the atheists among us, an alternative God, if you will. Science, Logic, Truth, most every freethinker pursues these ideals in the quest to find meaning in reality. That search for meaning caused the religiosity of many theoretical physicists, who, having become deeply, permanently aware of the fundamental nature of this cosmos, have looked to a Newtonian God as an answer to their plea, "Why does the universe follow rules at all?".

To many, such a question is irrelevant to the necessities of the 'here and now,' but to the scientifically and philosophically inclined, these are burning queries in the mind, an unyielding drive to know reality at the fundamental level. Even CERN's recruitment posters (one of which I'm proud to own) advertise metaphysical enlightenment for those who work within its walls.

I wish I could live in that dream world again, without existential worry, despair, and angst, and live among those searching for the answers. Alas, the bell of fatal knowledge has been rung in my brain, and there can be no return to that land of hollow dreams.

-Duxwing

 

[dark]

I like that, "Why does the universe follow rules at all?" A nice questions indeed.

After delving into skepticism and existential woes, I find it hard to care about much of anything anymore. After reading through Heidegger, Hume and Sartre I don't think I can know of anything. My fellow philosophy students think they know so much, but I always tear their arguments down to nothing, to which they always resist and say I am insane, but I have gotten to the point to where I understand I cannot realistically say I am not a fly in the jungle and my sensations only make me think I am a human. Yes it is very unlikely, but I realize I cannot trust my senses, but they are the only thing I have to go by. For all I know, everything I experience could just be something I am making up and I am really just that fly, completely unaware of the jungle around me. Everything time I walk through some halls, that is a few leaves I have to pass around etc. Yes I am probably insane, but I don't really think I am a fly, I just know I cannot say I am not.