There's no such thing as knowledge

Anyone who sees simplicity realizes that nothing can be 'known' in the sense that we like to think about it. that therefore discredits all western religions, unless of course you want to bring your arguements to a lower level, in other words, a lower conceptual level.

MY GOD CAN BEAT YOUR GOD UP!
My god hates your god!
My god is real, yours is fake.

This is the Kali Yuga, the age of ignorance.

 

I know that I exist. I cannot doubt it. If I do, then who is doing the doubting. There are some things that are a priori synthetic truths. These are things that are known to be true but cannot necessarily be proven (nor do they always need to be). For example, the statement "the cat sat on the mat" presumes that cats and mats exist. That there a concept called sitting. That there is a physical universe. That there is, in some form, a space whereby one thing can be on another. Also that I exist (as I am reading the statement).

God, you need to study some more. I had that much figured out before I ever took a philosophy class.

 

There are some things that I assume to be absolutely true in order to get on with life.

 

Then how can we know it's the Kali Yuga?

How can we know it discredits western religion?

And how can we know we're 'seeing simplicity?'

And what is seeing?

 

Actually christ taught the same thing eastern religions teach. Only his followers chose to read something wholly different into his words.

 

You forgot one essential point. I am not even real...

 

Your premise discredits your conclusion.

Is that what you were looking for? I sure hope so and more than that I hope you can come back with something great.

Else you are a simple moron.

 

Well that's not very nice.

I think many people don't realize that all we know is subjective and truth is impossible. Our language and the categories we use to classify and describe reality are necessarily simplistic and idealistic. They work for our little conversations but in any attempt to find true meaning all of our predefined notions of knowledge come into question. I don't think the post was meant to be a brilliant new thought, only to expose our ignorance to the ignorant.

 

Truth is impossible you say? You may be on to something but it can't be entirely true. I mean, how else could you be so certain that truth is impossible. Isn't it true that truth doesn't exist? Unless of course you are looking at the answer subjectively in which case it could be that someone else thinks that the things we know, we know objectively. It would be terribly counterproductive to tell someone else that they can't have truths. It might lead to odd tinkerings with the idea that all you know is you, but certainly.

wait ... what?

 

certainly there is universal truth. it is accessible to every individual, but in equal measure, it is interpreted differently by every individual.

knowledge is only as solid as your belief in what you see/hear/smell/taste/touch

in that sense, there is no such thing as knowledge.
but if i stop trusting my senses, and deny the existence of knowledge... then i deny the intellectual and physical processes that are producing these thoughts and words.

i believe that this reality, as convincing as it is, is just an illusion. although my take on reality is created entirely by the consciousness principle that i call "me". anything that i could know or feel or sense in any way, is on one level, not real. but for the present, on this plane of existence, i enjoy feelings and thoughts and knowledge. they are good things (often misused) in this world full of games... but always with the mindset that these fantastic and beautiful things will always fade away.

it's just a matter of not getting caught up in the scenery...

 

As Henry Rollins once yelled, "You live in your head and you think that its real!"

Well, don't you? Where else can you live? What else can you think?

How can you be sure? All you have is faith and thought and wisdom, but when combined they can become the most powerful force in the universe: LOVE.

What is the universe? It is the creative thought and force we know as "God".

Where is God? Within each of us.

Where do we fit in? Somewhere in the universe.

(stop chasing your tail, Fido!)

 

Exactly

 

OSF... good point. How about the only thing you know for sure is that you know nothing for sure.

There is such a thing as 'real' but any attempt at defining that definitively is futile. There is also truth, but we are just unable to pen that truth.

 

To say something is "red" and to understand about wave lenghts and photons is not the same thing.

If Knowledge were not real, functional machines with predictable results could not be concieved, designed, and built.

As previously stated, to ask the question, "do I exist?", is to answer it affirmatively.

 

I disagree. Imagine yourself in a box where all our laws of physics are bass-ackwards. You could create machines which worked bass-ackwards and they would work (although we could debate on just how predictable they are too). You build your machines and rest assured in yourself that you have acquired knowledge and then someone lifts the box your in. Your knowldege was nothing but approximation of your conditions all along.

Just like the color red, machines work for us. We can say with some degree of predictability what red is. Does that mean everyone sees it the same? Does that mean you can't continue to disect visible light again and again ad infinitum? There is no accepted boundary for how closely you can measure the cycle of a light wave, so our ability to define 'red' will go on forever, as long as our technology improves. It will never be truth. No two eyes are the same, no two machines are the same, no two atoms are the same.

Knowledge depends on sameness (not similarity) and sameness is completely theoretical.

 

Within the box the laws would remain statistically consistent.
The Universe is the box. To suppose something outside the box that is irrelevant to the contents of the box at a given time is to suppose a difference which makes no difference.
It is not a rigid thought experiment.
----
How someones "sees" the color red is a matter of poetic description.
The wavelength commonly labeled "red" does not register in the eyes of some color blind people, yet excites specific nerons in most people.
This alone gives confirmation of the independent existence of "red".
The verbal label "red" is not needed, and ,indeed, only adds to the confusion. )( works just as well and has the added advantage of singular meaning.
---
I will go you one further and say that no two ANYTHINGS are the same in that they do not ocupy the same point on the time/space continum.
But this is clear from the statistical nature of the Universe.

 

Our PERCEPTION is the box. Our little organic bodies have only come up with so many ways with which to examine the universe. This is NO WAY implies that the forces we can measure are the only things going on here. If it were all that simple, I think, a grand unified theory would have emerged decades ago.

I would never argue that there is no independant thing called 'red'. But I owuld argue that we can never KNOW what TRUE red is. The boundaries are up for debate depending on how many colors you want to have in your crayola set. Want a million colors out of visible light then red has a certain band, if you want a trillion colors in your set the band is smaller. You can have as many colors as you want to (and are able to) measure.

Agreed, no two anythings are ever the same. So our attempts at describing any two things as the same are flawed, albeit necessary for any type of scientific examination.

 

hence the basic statistical nature of scientific "laws".

I can't debate truth. Only consistentcy. And Knowledge is consistent enough to be deliberately utilized by anyone in it's possesion, for all to percieve.

That fits the definition of what is real.

If thier is an "Ultimate Truth", than I think this is as close as we've gotten:

(dp)(dx) > h/(2Pi )

 

Fair enough. Math IS as pure as it gets. Unfortunately math without some variables to plug in is useless and those variables are filled by inaccurate measuements and even many of our constants remain undefinable and thus inaccurate. Approaching truth, but not truth. Approaching an accurate description of a very real thing called REAL, but not ever reality.A perfect circle exists ONLY in an equation. Does that make it real? Something imagined may be something real but that has profound implications and I think it has been adequately refuted.

 

as several have pointed out or implied there is no need as far as i can see for there to be such a thing as 'ultimate truith'. what we can 'know' is that somethings happen more often then others and some theings happen more often when other things happen first. we can to a great if imperfect degree aquire a great deal of understanding as to which is which and put this knowledge, this kind of knowledge to fairly relyable good use.

the computer in our heads, our brains, collect this kind of potentialy useful data through our senses, really everything we learn from anyone else, any living tangable person or being else, comes through them, and can be sorted, intigrated, recombined, and synthisized into new and other and more useful forms. proccessed in other words.

there are perhapse nontangable inputs or connections as well, but i don't believe anyone knows nearly as much about this other then to speculate on it, as far too much of organized belief tends to suggest.

i'm pretty sure there are nontangable forces and beings but to me this is a totaly different and seperate subject from knowledge in any meaningful sense of the word

the only place where knowledge and this kind of thought overlap is the reasonable confidence i feel that such things exist: and even there many might convincingly argue that to call this knowledge is really streatching any useful deffinician of the term.

=^^=
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