Spiritual belief is important to me. The abstract mysteries of the human mind go beyond what science is able to understand, and most neurophysiologists believe it might go beyond what we may ever be able to understand. The pathways and structures of the brain are not the end-all-be-all of our minds and selves. There is something unexplainable about the psyche that makes us more than merely our synaptic triggers.
“Je pense donc je suis.” – Descartes
Cogito, ergo, sum. I think therefor I am.
It is one of the most well known statements in the vast history of philosophy, and most people don’t even know that it is only the tip of Descartes’ iceberg. It’s actually the spring in his trap, so to speak. Descartes was one of those guys that questioned reality. He was a rationalist. He believed that you could only believe in what you could prove to exist.
To most people that seems perfectly logical, and they don’t ever question anything after that.
Fortunately for me, like myself, Descartes was never willing to accept anything at face value, and he dug deeper and deeper into his own mind and research until he came to one conclusion:
Nothing exists.
I like to believe that he had a similar experience as my own, sitting in the kitchen of his shared 2-bedroom apartment one night, drinking freely and cracked out on pseudoephedrine while his room mate made very pointed and logical assaults on his sanity. The conversation would probably have been in French, but I still imagine it went something like this:
“You know, none of this is real. You’ve been completely insane for years, locked away in a rubber room.”
“Bullshit.”
“No, seriously, think about it. Why else would you seek more and more ways to isolate yourself from everyone you know, and why else would you pursue a romantic relationship with a woman that is at best physically frigid?”
“Because I’m an emotional train wreck filled with self-loathing and a determined subconscious need to self destruct?”
“Doesn’t that sound like someone who would have a psychotic break and live in a fantasy land? One where life is shit, but you manage to get by just well enough for it to not get any better?”
“You’re a dick.”
“As a voice inside your head, I blame you.”
It probably continued on like this for several hours until he had a nervous breakdown and began searching for his own soul inside the prison of his mind.
You see, Descartes came to a conclusion way back in the day. If the only things we could believe to be true were the things we could prove to exist, and the only things we could prove were our own perceptions of reality, how could we prove that reality wasn’t an elaborate hoax played by our minds?
He came to a conclusion, he could prove he existed because he was thinking about whether or not he existed. Therefor he was the thinking thing inside his flesh suit, separate from it. That’s important, because then he can observe his own flesh with his mind and conclude that it doesn’t matter if it exists or not. The knowledge of how it should exist makes it come into being.
This is all very quantum physicsy, and though people who claim to be physicists will argue with you in defense of their own religion, there are piles of evidence pointing to the core particles of the universe behaving like this.
From there, Descartes went on to state that anything we had a concept for had to exist, otherwise there would be no basis for our concepts.
Extrapolated, that meant he proved the existence of God by our existence of a concept of perfection, which so far has not been observed in nature.
And that’s where I find myself.
I believe in the world around me. I understand pretty well all of the technology and science we live with in our lives. What I don’t know, I actively seek, and the more I learn about our scientific understanding of the Universe the more I begin to understand that people are basically stupid.
There is something out there, guiding us and teaching us. We have hardwired into our DNA a universal moral compass, though obviously there are plenty of us that have some damage to those circuits, and we can see the same basic behavior in other society forming animals on our planet.
That’s not a very good statistical probability.
Probability is a bullshit math for people who like to just half ass it anyway.