This is pretty much my philosophy summed up in three words.
Can you prove you exist? No? Well how can you prove anything else either?
Cogito ergo sum, no? The real question is, how do I prove you and everything else exists?
Cogito ergo sum doesn’t prove that you exist, but rather that your mind exists in some form. What we perceive may not be reality, but that’s my point. We have so little knowledge of existence to make conclusions about anything.
I can think, learn, and create, therefore I must exist at least in some form; be it mind or soul and regardless of the influence of the material world.
However, the fact that you are unable to even determine in what form you exist makes it impossible to prove anything else. An objective fact is out there, but it is so far from our grasp; when we get it how will we know it’s real?
The only objectivity is our subjectivity. We know we exist by virtue of being alive, by being embodied consciousness, by feeling rain in the wind, sun against stone against skin, by knowing voice, structure, chaos, by the infinite totality of the relationships we coexist within. We know other subjects exist because they are part of who we are. We are our minds, we are our bodies, and we transcend these because we are also inseparable from the world.
The material world, the phenomenal world, the social world, the ideological world are all the same thing: reality.
Reality is the real world. Everything that you’ve described is merely your world. Your world may not necessarily be the real world, and that’s the problem I pose. Prove that your world is the real world. How can you do this? Your perception may be unequivocally flawed. What we perceive could be so far from the truth, and it’s because of that that I say that because we are unable to even determine if our world is reality we are unable to determine anything else as fact. Truth is not subjective; our perception of it is.
Objectivity exists; how do we obtain it?
