A couple years ago I started working my way through the Crash Course Philosophy videos, to stay refreshed with some of the stuff I learned in High School and College. There's plenty of new stuff in 'em, too. All in all, lots of good stuff around and they're very well done.
But this one stirred up some thoughts as I watched it this afternoon with my little girls, just some family entertainment at the Lassen Home.
I won't deny having innumerable moments of local doubt (where you question or are skeptical of some isolated experience) and even moments of Global Doubt (where you question EVERYTHING you've ever been taught or experienced)
While I understand the value of Descartes's contributions to philosophy and modern thinking, I have a lot of issues with it. Understanding that one false belief can contaminate or rot other ideas and beliefs, the same way that a bad apple can ruin the other apples nearby, Descartes rationalized that he had to abandon everything he was taught and then examine each idea one at a time and put each "apple" back into his basket once he determined it was a good one.
I have an idea! Let's dump all these out, cuz some of them MIGHT be bad!
His foundational belief, the one thought that saved him from a severe existential crisis was the realization that because he had the ability to Doubt, he must be real, or there must be something REAL about his consciousness. So he reasoned, "I think, therefore I am." (This hearkens back to the ancient Jewish idea that God is the GREAT "I AM", or the Self-Aware one).
Not gonna, lie. If a glowing bush talked to me, I'd probably listen
I have a problem with this, because thinking, or self-awareness, isn't proof of reality, or vindication that you are not some made up entity in someone else's dream or virtual reality. What is a "thought" after all? It's a complicated series of chemical reactions inside of a brain. Not proof of a soul. Thought itself can take the form of complicated musings on philosophy all the way down to a protein latching onto a valuable amino acid in the immediate environment of a bacterial cell. At what point is that chemical reaction to the environment "Self Awareness"?? Where's the magic dividing line? If we made one, it'd be arbitrary, out of convenience, self-aggrandizement (or deprecation), or random chance.
This is your brain on...scanners
Unfortunately, everything in that spectrum is in the possibility of being an "illusion" or false belief. Now, in Descartes time, such knowledge of neurobiology wasn't as robust as it is today, so we'll give him a pass...this time. That still doesn't change the fact that THINKING doesn't make us EXIST anymore than anything else.
While C&H taught me a great deal about deep thinking, and philosophy as a little kid, looking back, Bill Watterson is REALLY pessimistic.
So what do we make of all this? Believe that everything has the possibility to NOT be anything more than some dream within a dream? Yup. So does that mean NOTHING matters? Of course not. Everything matters. Do we dump out all of our collective knowledge onto the ground, sort through it, and pick it back up? No. Haven't you ever noticed that dumping apples all over the ground, just to sort through the moldy ones, only bruises all the rest and further speeds the rotting of otherwise perfectly good apples? And if an apple is found with a large bruise, or mold on one side, do we throw the whole thing out? Not if you need to save all the apple you can! Get rid of the rotten parts, cut them out, and use up the rest of that perfectly plump Gala.
Similarly with our beliefs. Finding a rotten side to one, doesn't mean the whole was bad, only that you probably let that belief sit, unexamined or unchecked, for too long in the corner of your mind, or the produce drawer of your life-outlook. It wasn't always bad, you just let it go bad. And there's still goodness to it and usability in it. Scrap the rotten section, throw it back on your compost heap, and use it to regrow another apple just like it!
I'm gonna use these rotten ideas to regrow the same ones, cuz that's who I am. Not much changed about me just because I found a bad idea and threw away all the rest with it, in fact, I might be WORSE off
Getting back to our own existentialism. Do we really exist? Of course. If we perceive it, it exists. It is REAL to us. And of course, our reality is ALWAYS in flux. Reality, from our limited view, is the extent of our knowledge and perception. So, keep learning, keep growing, and keep changing your reality. Find ways to match your reality with your past and current experiences, they both hold value. Find ways that your reality matches up with others. And when your reality differs from the next person you meet, see if you can figure out WHY they differ. HOW they differ doesn't matter quite as much as WHY they do. Anti-fascists and White Supremacists both have a reality that's quite different from the rest of us, and WHY they are is pretty similar for each: they have stuck inside their head that the people belonging to that OTHER group all are the same, or all have an extreme philosophy and they are ALL dangerous and violent. Most of us can see that none of those ideas are true, in our reality, which is part of the reality held by most people. A majority opinion doesn't make it true, but it makes it more practical to live by and often makes life easier, unfortunately.
So, don't go dumping out everything you ever learned, bruising a bunch of your life on the way, throwing away perfectly good ideas because they were too close to some other bad idea, or just because you found some mold on a couple ideas. Just understand that you, like everyone else, will stumble across some of them inside yourself as you go through life, and address them as they surface. No biggie.
But that's just my thoughts.
I don't claim expertise in many things, let alone formal philosophy. Though even the few experts I've met aren't really very good at it either, but they sure can drop names like a Kardashian on a talk show
