nathanael.ink

Well here I am, a few videos into a series I hope to maintain and already I feel the pressure to offer up a defense of myself. I’m not really educated in the way our society acknowledges. I’m something like arrogant I think, or egotistical, maybe prideful at best. Who am I to start thinking I could educate anyone? Well, that’s sort of the thing, I don’t think I’m anyone to, and for the most part, I don’t really think anyone actually is. We’re people, you and I, and so is everyone else you’ve ever met. I’m not sure how to be a trustworthy historian or an authoritative biologist, but so far as philosophy is concerned one should like to believe that an argument stands for itself. That is, I should very much like to believe that when an audience is presented with a rational way we might arrive at some conclusion, well then the audience will see the case as clear. People can be free to agree or disagree, and by free I mean they are free to take a knife to a premise and expose it’s being false.. It’s like all I can say over and over again is “it seems to me” and, while it’s apparent for most who hear it, still it does not satisfy; I also do not think it should even be necessary at all for me to say. Of course it seems to me, just as it seems some way to you, and that is made obvious by your saying so. Furthermore, to affirm that it seems to you or I to be some particular way does not itself establish something as true but does establish that at least we think that it is true. There is a distinction, namely, an epistemological one.

Knowledge is when my belief happens to accurately reflect an objective reality, but knowledge to its possessor looks mostly identical to belief. There is a difference, I remind you, between knowledge and ‘mere belief,’ but as far as I can tell to the subject they share the same face when seen from the relevant perspective. I have only formed a belief to begin with because at some point I set it into my brain to behave as though a particular proposition is true. It is in this way that I am sometimes unaware of what I believe, that is, when I attempt to recall to my mind my opinion about some proposition, it comes with it the predisposition with which I stored it. Now of course the ideal is to sort of all this out, align my brain states and recalling mechanism with what I currently take to be the truth of things. It just takes quite a bit of work of course to do this sort of thing. I’m up against all the forces that be. I think minds are the kinds of things that posses the faculties to discover what truth is, and brains are the kinds of things that minds use to deal with stimulus from the senses.

All this to say, of course I think I’m right, and even in your deepest skepticisms you too are making a claim about the nature of things, a claim I might add, that you think is right. You believe it. You have counted it good to catalog it with the other propositions you take to be true, I know because even your most primitive actions depend on your having stored such data. Had you not formed the belief that the pumping of your lungs is good for maintaining life then you would not find yourself today with lungs pumping. If this example rubs you, then you haven’t yet seen what it is a belief is. It does not bother me that I might have beliefs that I do not recall forming. I mean, really, you think you’ve got to remember when and where and how it was you formed the belief in order to admit that you’ve got it? Many of my beliefs I suspect were formed in the womb when my brain was in it’s most malleable form. But that does not make the beliefs less mine and therefore any less my duty to sort out.

I don’t know why you and I choose different words sometimes, but I think if we work at it long and hard enough we can sort things out. We can convey meaning. We will have to sort out vocabulary words and define things far more exact than we’ve ever done before. We’ll have to be comfortable with deep disagreement but maintain our sense of journeying together. This is ultimately all I hope my videos will at least get at accomplishing. Getting some words on the table, some thoughts from those who have come before us, and help us learn how to see our personal views with respect to those famously articulated.
Who knows well we will finally know something, were I alone in my room perusing worldviews it might be that the truth is passed up upon my first objection to it.. hence why I absolutely must know that there are others coming along this journey with me, others whose biases keep them investigating the models I have passed up in my ignorance. It is unlikely the truth will have no objections, after all, were we to encounter it, it would be the only thing of it’s kind.