Deception
First day of freedom today, and it doesn't feel very much different, aside from having slightly more free time than usual, which has led me to pick up my paint brushes again...
Not quite finished yet. I may put pictures up later, when I do.
Anyway, I had an interesting conversation last night, which kept me thinking for quite a long time, so I'm going to share (whether you like it or not). Take a moment to imagine the following. Let's say you're in high school (which I'm not anymore, hahah!). There's an end-of-term dance, and everyone in your high school class says it's going to be a costume party. You talk about costumes with people for weeks and weeks. And when the day comes, you show up in a ridiculous Bozo The Clown costume, only to find that everyone else is dressed formally, and you look like t3h B1g Cl0wn (figuratively and literally).
Most people don't like having tricks played on them (especially elaborate ones such as the above). And sometimes, even our own senses play tricks on us - you could see someone on the street that you think is your friend, but is actually a Complete Stranger...you could be watching TV but can't hear the sound properly, and get confused about what's being said...you could be driving in a fog and not be able to make out the road signs, so you get lost...and in all cases, in all probability, you'll end up feeling rather annoyed. Well, no one likes being deceived by anything.
But there are those who wonder if our senses play tricks on us - not just sometimes, but all the time. Maybe the whole human race is the butt of some cosmic practical joke...are things really what they appear to be? Can we really know about the external world?
Well, on one hand, the argument goes that we can know about our own experiences, but not about the world as it is. We can't get outside our own minds to check the accuracy of our eyes - we can't compare how we see a penguin (or anything else) with the penguin itself, because it exists independently of us. All we can know is what the penguin looks like to us. Colour is a good example of this. If I think something looks green but someone else thinks it looks more blue, who's right? What colour is the thing, really? Or let's say sometime in the future, scientists were able to duplicate the signals sent by our optic nerves and stimulate experiences of seeing a green-or-blue penguin. Then I'd have exactly the same experience as seeing that penguin, but it wouldn't actually be there. Does that make it real? Are we all permanently mistaken about everything?
The other view says that we can't be mistaken about everything, and that we can know the world. I don't find this argument convincing, because what it basically boils down to is: "No one can be mistaken in such a way that we can never discover our error" - in other words, it is impossible that everyone has a false belief that no one could correct, because to be "mistaken" about everything, i.e. off-track or wrong, there must be some standard of "correctness", some measure of "right". It's like how you can't say that everyone is "tall", because there must be an opposite ("short") to provide a contrast. In the same way, it's not possible for everyone to be mistaken. This view says that it may be possible for everyone to have a false belief (like when everyone thought the world was flat), so long as we have an opposite to provide a contrast to how false the belief was (the world is round). But you can't say that we are being permanently deceived.
Or something. I don't find that view convincing, as I said, so I probably didn't argue it very well :) Ahh, and I call myself a historian. Bah. Thoughts like these are good for a couple of sleepless hours at night, at least. It's not a comforting thought, in bed at night when you're suddenly struck with the epiphany that nothing you see might be "real" (for a given standard of "real"). You lie there, terrified that if you close your eyes, everything around you ceases to exist, because you aren't actually experiencing it - so how do you know it's still there? And eventually the body functions take over and you fall asleep anyway. And then the next day you'll wake up and everything will still be there, still exist, and you'll think, "wow, I thought about all that deep stuff", and then you'll head downstairs and have some water, putter about your daily life, go to bed, sleep, repeat ad morium, and that single night of existential epiphany, that one moment of divine thought...vanishes in the ebb and flow of the everyday. So hurrah for the mundane...after all, it keeps us all distracted. Or sane. Same diff.