I don’t know anything for sure. I’m not entirely convinced that there’s a laptop sitting in front of me now, as I type this. Sure, I see it, I feel it, I hear it, but I cannot be certain that my senses are not fooling me. I cannot be certain that I am not a brain in a jar, a computer simulation, a mad man in a asylum, an unknown species dreaming that I am man. If my perception of the universe is correct, this philosophy is called “fallibilism.”
If memory serves, I have subscribed to fallibilism for quite some time, though I didn’t know the term for most of it. For an even larger portion of that time, I held the belief that I could know axiomatic information; I could properly reason through, and assure myself that 2+2=4. Quite surprisingly, I became dissuaded from this not by the book 1984 (which spent a good deal of time on “2+2=5”), but from spending a week high out of my mind on pain pills. I’m not sure if it was the penicillin, the ibuprofen, the Demerol, or the meso-whatever, but during this time, I became convinced of the fallibility of my own mind, to a degree that I hadn’t been able to imagine before. Before, I accepted that my logic was fallible, that I made mistakes, but that I knew when I had some level of competence. I became fairly convinced that one can never rely on one’s self having some level of competence. Formerly I had been able to make the judgment that because I am thinking, I am; I am no longer convinced that I am not making a logical fallacy.
The most fundamental thing I believe is: it matters because I want it to matter. This is not something that I can prove, or something that I can reason through or back up. It’s something that I feel in my gut and accept. It’s something we all must do. We all must decide what matters to us and make the most of it. Whether or not reality is subjective, our perception of it is, so it is impossible to identify universal truths. Whether something “truly” matters or not (something we can’t properly judge), I have found that it is nice to choose what you want to matter, and pursue it. Make the most of it. We must, because, honestly, what else are you going to do, try to have an awful time?
In our pursuit of these things that only matter to us, we often try to convince others that it does matter. It is my belief that, whether we are aware of it or not, this is an attempt to get closer to other people. We are trying to alter other’s realities (or perceptions of it) to coincide with our own. For many it is an attempt to “aid” people, and show them the “truth”, and make their perception of reality coincide with what the convincer perceives to be the “true reality.” In doing so, we often become enamored of trying to justify why these things matter to us and ought to matter to others.
This is sometimes very difficult task, as it is hard to justify that hitting a ball, or whatever, is existentially rewarding. We all work differently, some of us are rewarded by hitting that home run, some aren’t. Since we all have different things that make us tick, each person must figure out “What matters to me?” in order to make the most of themselves. We can’t simply take the values of others, the freedom to decide what matters to us appears to me to be a fundamental freedom; our founding fathers recognized it as the pursuit of happiness. To find that happiness, one must recognize what rewards himself, what matters to himself. If we don’t, we’re just adrift.
Perhaps I’m all wrong, what do I know? I don’t know anything.