What do you know?

Disclaimer: This post has been written with the idea of readability, not completeness. Therefore, while I could have been more explicit with a lot of the reasoning, I chose not to. I'd hate for my reader to be bored.


I'm in a philosophy class this semester. We've had multiple debates in class over issues. It's interesting to me that no one has ever come up with a way to ever really know most of the stuff that they are sure of.

Just reading that sentence probably inspired a sudden indignation in you. "Of course I know things!" But that's just the thing. What do you actually know?

Let me perform an exercise right now to determine what I know. Using Descarte, I know that I exist because I'm considering the fact of my existence (cogito ergo sum). I have to accept this premise or the entire exercise becomes invalid. I also know that this computer in front of me is a tangible object and that if I manipulate it correctly, these words will be published so that anyone can read them (implying that there are others, Descarts does this one too, and I'll not repeat his work). My computer is playing music, I can hear it, whether I wish to or not. This is all great. I've established a current physical reality.

Let's go another step toward the abstract. I know that this music was not created by me. This implies a past and other people. Someone else put their mouth next to a microphone and recorded the song I'm currently listening to. Do I know who that was? I have a name that they've given themselves (DC Talk), but I don't know precisely who that is. I could look it up, but that would depend on how much I trusted the sources I looked at. This knowledge is secondhand. The most I can know about this music is that someone created it, because it exists and I'm hearing it.

I've established that the music has a past, even though I can't know for sure what that past is. I also have a past. I can remember that several hours ago I did not possess this particular computer. I remember a time before it. Very good. Now I know that there were things that happened before to me. I can even recall some of them. Do I know these things for sure?

Apparently, my memory is faulty (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
Memory_bias). Of course, just as in the example above, I still have to decide to trust the source that gives me the information. However, I can confirm that my own memory is biased. I do not remember exactly what I was doing at 3:00 PM today. I can, however, imagine several possibilities and "remember" them as if they actually happened. Since I do objectively know that I cannot do multiple things (or be multiple places) at once (I know this because I just tried to be simultaneously in my kitchen and my bedroom and I failed), I can logically determine that my memory can be manipulated.

I simply don't know for certain very much beyond the fact that I am sitting in a room, by myself, typing this on a computer. I don't even know what the other room looks like, even though I vacated it recently. It is possible that something in there has changed, though the odds are against it.

What are the implications of this little exercise? Simply this: the amount of stuff that we truly know is pretty limited. We accept a lot of things that we cannot be certain of. I accept that when I look up who was in DC Talk, the information that I receive is correct. Granted, I can look at multiple sources and pick the information that appears most often, but this is still no guarantee that I have the correct information. It merely means that I have better odds of having the correct information.

This has some pretty serious consequences for daily life (I detest philosophy that doesn't affect my choices). Basically, if I cannot KNOW very much about the world, I am going to have to decide which sources I want to accept. That's what most debates in American society are about. We have to decide if we accept this scientific study over that one, this news source over that one, this holy book or that one. No matter how much we delude ourselves into thinking that we "know," we are, at the end of the day, choosing a source to trust.

Sure, we have lots of other factors that we like to bring into it. We've created an epistemology that rewards certain forms of presenting information while discounting others. One of the clearest situations where this happens is in the religion/atheism debate. Religious people often argue that their personal experience is more convincing than any other kind of evidence, while their opponents argue that the abundance of physical evidence must outweigh personal experience. Neither of these sides can know for certain that God does or doesn't exist. They cannot prove either state, no matter how hard they try. The only way to prove/disprove God would be to have been everywhere and seen everything, which would, ironically, make one godlike.

It's a matter of trusting one source over another. What sources do you trust? Think about it next time you seek to argue with someone over the truth. If they don't trust the same sources you do, you're wasting your breath.