The purpose of this article is to expand your mental horizon and test your intelligence. Are you able to comprehend and assimilate those theories? Are you able to find the necessary justifications?
One of the fundamental principles in the search for meaning is expanding our mental and cognitive horizon, and this article is here to help you get on another level when it comes to intelligence, so read it entirely, and read it carefully.
Aristotle brought up some intrinsic radical theories when it comes to thoughts. He believed that those rules are to be applied on our thoughts to reflect effectiveness.
The Law Of Identity, The Law Of Noncontradiction, and The Law Of The Excluded Middle.
The Law Of Identity states that each and every existing object has its own identity. You are yourself because you are identified with specific characteristics that differentiate you from others. If every existing object, whether its a tree, or a human being, or an animal, had the same characteristics, there would be one distinguishable existential entity which is uniform and homogenous. Only then can we find a ‘legitimate defined answer to our existence. The question of existence can have one answer if any, because the object of existence itself is a singular entity.
The Law Of Noncontradiction states that a statement can never be true and false at the same time. We will be looking at the Liar Paradox further on. The complexity of this paradox comes from the Law Of Noncontradiction itself.
Finally, The Law Of The Excluded Middle states that a statement can either be true, or it can be also, but it can not be in between those two answers.
As I said in the introduction, this book was written initially to make you think. It is only through thought that we can find answers. Take a look at the next paradox.
Plutarch, a Platonist and ancient greek philosopher introduced The Ship Of Thesus’s Paradox.
Thesus left on a ship with his crew for a long voyage. His ship was made out of wood and throughout his journey, the wood had to be replaced with new wood. When Thesus came back to his respective city, his ship was made out of completely different wood pieces than the initial pieces his ship was made of.
The question is, did he come back on the same ship? What if there was one single piece of wood remaining from the old ship, would it be the same ship now? What if there are three pieces?
If Thesus left his city on the ship X, he came back on the ship Y, then, does X=Y?
There was a lot of contradiction and opposed theoretical arguments but it was Thomas Hobbes who took this paradox to a whole new level. Following the same scenario, if all the wood thrown out of the ship by Thesus’s crew was collected by another man, let’s call him Cesar, who used the wood to build a ship for himself, When they both returned to the city with Thesus on a ship made out of entirely new wood, and Cesar is sailing on a ship made out of the old wood, which one is Thesus’s ship? Let’s say that Cesar’s ship is the ship C. By default B≠C as both ships landed in the harbour and two separate entities can not be the same according to the Law Of Identity. A=B, however, B≠C, therefore A≠C. But how is that even possible? But every part of A is a part of C. following the law of identity, on a basic object level, both ships have the same characteristics. I am not talking about the people on the ship, nor the supplies, nor the tools, I am talking uniquely about the ship itself. The only possible difference would be linked to a space-time continuum factor which leads us to the next question:
An interesting concept in your search towards self exploratory understanding, is the concept of time. Is time an illusion, or is it real?
Plato was an advocate and a pioneer in the field of knowledge, truth and belief. The three pillar dimensional structure is associated with a close correlation. The tripartite theory, introduced by Plato himself can help us understand this three dimensional core. The theory explains the three precedent concepts. A person can not have knowledge in a sense where he knows something, if he initially doesn’t believe it to be true. If knowledge is false, if it is not true, it can not be processed under the form of knowledge. For you to know that something is true, you need to believe it to be true. False knowledge is empty knowledge. For knowledge to not be erroneous, it has to be associated with truth. If you know something, then by default, at least on an individual level, it should be true. However, there is one last factor involved in the equation. Justification is needed for knowledge to become true. Let’s take an example.
You are meeting a friend that you haven’t seen in a while. From a distance, you glimpse the back of a person who you believe is your friend. You run up to him, only to notice that you mistakenly perceived him as your friend when in reality it was a stranger. You knew something to be true at first, however, it was later on proved to wrong. This perceptual delinquency was not justified by truth, and therefore the knowledge itself was erroneous, and it can not be considered as knowledge anymore.
A minute later, you notice another person walking towards you. You walk up to him, and it was indeed your friend. When you saw him walking from a distance, you knew it was your friend. You believed it to be true. It was later on justified with truth, adding to it the justification that the person was undoubtedly your friend. However, this theory had a contradictory approach. Edmund Gettier, an American Philosopher is the founding father of this opposing theorem. Justification in the present can be different than the justification in the the imminent reasoning. Once truth, belief and justification are correlated, knowledge is formed. In a scenario where the justification was later on proved to be wrong, the knowledge you had in the past was spurious. If the justification was false, then the truth doesn’t satisfy the veracity factor. If so, the belief was astray. The No False Belief theory states that A concrete and solid belief can not by any means be based on an inaccurate conviction. The Causal Connection Condition which states that there has to be a correlation between knowledge itself, and belief. Finally the Defeasibility Theory which states that a belief is known to be true is there are no present contradictory elements.
Plato’s approach can be ameliorated through the recognition of these previous theories. However, the opposing work of Gettier put a huge question mark on our true understanding of knowledge.
By the dint of consequentialism, we can introduce a different logical approach to morality. A moral action is one that produces the best accumulative result. When an act is associated with more atrocious than beneficial results, in opposed to another act that consequentially had further virtuous results, then acting upon the former would be considered as the an inferior moral related act than the latter.
Results determine whether an act was morally right or wrong. The more positive the consequences are, the better the action, by nature, is. Going back to our tripartite theory, another contradiction can arise. If the act was falsely considered as the choice producing the best positive outcome, only to later on, be associated with greater negative consequences, would the action still be considered as the prime moral approach to the situation?
The Trolley problem highly emphasizes the concepts of morality and consequentialism. A trolley has lost control of its brakes on a railway. Standing from a distance, you notice the out of control trolley heading towards five workmen standing on the trail. Next to you is a lever that can shift the direction of the trolley. However, on the adjacent track is another workman. If the trolley was to keep going on the same track, five people will die, if you pull the lever, only one person would die. In this scenario, what is the optimum moral action to take?
Adding on to that, despite the complexity of the answer, it can get even more complicated. If you notice that the individual person on the adjacent track is your father, who you love and cherish, what should you do then? In terms of consequences, personally, losing your father would have further negative implications and consequences on you. That puts another question mark upon the idea of morality. Having different facets, moral actions are highly individual, yet collective, which makes it all the more arduous.
In this very moment, the only thing that exists is the now. The past is irreversible and therefore out of reach. The future is oddly controllable yet out of reach.
What is an illusion? It is simply seeing something that isn’t really there, that isn’t necessarily real. Your past is an illusion as it can only be reached by forming vivid or in some cases complex images in your brain. The past is no longer here, it is no longer reachable, and therefore it is an illusion. People think their past is real, and how can it not be? Why do atheists not believe in god? Why is he an illusion for them? It is simply because there are no tangible or intangible perceivable elements that stand as a proof for existence. Similarly, there is no perceivable elements that proves the existence of the past. It is simply an illusion, that we created, to differentiate between what is now, what is real, what is beyond the scope of reality, and what is yet to be our reality.
The future, is also an illusion. Simply, the future is something that did not happen yet, something that is yet to happen and doesn’t exist until there is a chronological coherence between the situation and reality. Once the future becomes real, it ceases to be the future, and becomes the present, becomes reality, becomes our now. Every single second, reality is changing, and the first step to understand yourself is to understand the following. Reality is shaped by the conceptualized illusion of your future, and the pre-existent non-reachable illusion of your past. To understand who you are presently, you need to understand who you were, and who you are meant to be.
Your past and your future are interchangeably creating your present. You, reading this book can be a good example. In this moment, you are able to read this phrase, because in the past, you bought the book, and the moment that formed your reality in this past chronological phase, was shaped by the yet-to-exist scenario where you actually read the book, and here you are, the result of parallel and correlated illusions. Our reality, aka our present, is the intersection between our past existence, and our future existence. However, in order for you to understand what was said previously, you need to make sure that you understand that there’s a difference between existence and reality. Reality is something that you can perceive at any moment. Existence sometimes can’t be perceived. The past exists, but it isn’t reality anymore, reality is the now.
Another concept that correlates with the illusion of time, is whether we control our future or not. Sure, you can decide right now that you want to drink water and then when you do, you basically created your future through your present. But what about other cases where a person has an accident? It is called accident . Tracing back this word to its Latin origin, it can mean misfortune, it can mean a chance or an occurrence.
This one question, do we create our future, changed my entire perspective on existentialism. People look for a meaning in life, whether it’s something they are meant to do, or live, or experience. It is a reason that explains why they exist among other human beings in any given society. While looking for the meaning behind our existence, we do so to reflect on our present and our future in an action oriented matter following a meaning related course of action. Going back to the question as to whether we create our future or not, there is one very interesting apprehensive conceptualization that can answer the question. We do indeed control our future. When you were driving and you got into a car accident, it was you who created your future. Even if it was the other vehicles mistake, you deciding to drive, at the very moment, you positioning your vehicle in a certain spot, you took those decisions, nobody imposed them on you, even if you have obligations, you are never deprived of the free will to let go of these obligations barring in mind the consequences.
Future is highly individualist. Yet it is collective. Someone else’s future can effect yours. When your co-worker got a promotion over you, his future and your future had an interception, you were both planning on taking the position, but sadly it wasn’t you. When your lover breaks up with you, whilst you imagined living the rest of your life with her/him, it shows that her future effected yours. When you were a baby, you did not have control over your future, I mean how could you? If your parents moved into a new house when you were 6 months old, you had no control over that. However, when you were hungry, by the natural process of our instinctive survival mechanism, you would start crying until you get fed. In this case, you did control your future, on a non cognitive but instinctive level. In both cases, you still did. Tracing this back to individualism and collectivism, you can, to a major extent, control your individualistic future. However once your future intercepts with another individualistic future, you create a third intangible collective future, made out of the consolidation of both cognitive functions and aspirations of the group of individuals.
Pastness, presentness and futurity were the topic of discussion of many contemporary philosophers. John McTaggart introduced the A-series and the B-series to try to answer the chronological existential question. The A-series expresses a timely position. Pastness, presentness and futurity when linked to an event, object, or action can be positioned chronologically. Past events already happened. Present events are currently happening, and future events are to eventually happen. Was, is, and will be. Every event occupies the three different positions. An event that already occurred, and is now in the past, was once in the present, and furthermore, was once in the future. An event that is currently happened was positioned in the future, it is now present, and it will be in the past. A future event, will eventually happen in the now, and as its done, it’ll be in our past. No event can occupy a timely position forever, and conversely no event can be a combination of different chronological positions.
All those concepts we talked about are made to expand your cognitive horizon. If you have any thoughts you want to add on or any arguments you would like to discuss with me feel free to reach me on my email noahmerriby@gmail.com
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