What Can We Be Sure Of. Analysis
What Can We Be Sure Of?
Humans cannot be sure of anything. The idea that we can know everything about our surroundings is absurd. The possibilities of everything we perceive being an illusion are endless, and there is frankly no way to distinguish the truth.
To understand what our world really is, we must first understand ourselves, rather, our own thoughts. Yet in saying that, the mind itself is too complex for a mere human to understand, let alone to understand the entire world. “If our brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we would be so stupid we wouldn’t be able to understand it after all.” (Jostein Gaarder, 1990, p. 141)
The phrase “Cogito, ergo sum.” (Rene Descartes, 1637) or rather, “I think, therefore I am.” hypothesizes that “The only thing that remains true [is] that there is a mind or consciousness doing the doubting and believing …show more content…
Even if we found out that we were living in a simulation, there would still be the possibility of the world that is simulating us, being in a simulation of its own. The only thing that we can know is real is that we have our own thoughts, and that, even if the simulation we are in is controlling our thoughts, we still manage to question life, and come up with theories about what is and isn’t real.
On the contrary, an elaborately planned and executed simulation that is able to create an entire world would not be flawed in any way. It is incredibly unlikely that it would be defective enough that we humans are able to break the system by questioning our existence. If whoever is running this theoretic simulation didn’t want us to know about (or question) what was happening, then we wouldn’t be able to. All our thoughts are controlled by the simulation, including those that think about and question the
Humans cannot be sure of anything. The idea that we can know everything about our surroundings is absurd. The possibilities of everything we perceive being an illusion are endless, and there is frankly no way to distinguish the truth.
To understand what our world really is, we must first understand ourselves, rather, our own thoughts. Yet in saying that, the mind itself is too complex for a mere human to understand, let alone to understand the entire world. “If our brain was simple enough for us to understand it, we would be so stupid we wouldn’t be able to understand it after all.” (Jostein Gaarder, 1990, p. 141)
The phrase “Cogito, ergo sum.” (Rene Descartes, 1637) or rather, “I think, therefore I am.” hypothesizes that “The only thing that remains true [is] that there is a mind or consciousness doing the doubting and believing …show more content…
Even if we found out that we were living in a simulation, there would still be the possibility of the world that is simulating us, being in a simulation of its own. The only thing that we can know is real is that we have our own thoughts, and that, even if the simulation we are in is controlling our thoughts, we still manage to question life, and come up with theories about what is and isn’t real.
On the contrary, an elaborately planned and executed simulation that is able to create an entire world would not be flawed in any way. It is incredibly unlikely that it would be defective enough that we humans are able to break the system by questioning our existence. If whoever is running this theoretic simulation didn’t want us to know about (or question) what was happening, then we wouldn’t be able to. All our thoughts are controlled by the simulation, including those that think about and question the