Jordan Parker

So I’ve joined a philosophical discussion group and went to their first meeting in Manchester. It was particularly dandy I’ve got to say – I like to think of myself as someone who really tries to consider things as deeply as one is able to do so and explore other viewpoints that wildly differ from my own. So, this group really seemed up my street and my goodness it was!

As a person, I tend to lean towards the mathematical application of logic and rational reasoning whenever I’m presented with a problem – it sits right with me to take what I can unquestionably define as a fact and allow that to inform my decisions both for the present and the future. What delighted me about this group, was how that just isn’t how everybody sees the world – I hold onto the rational and scientific method as perhaps as strongly as say a crutch or other walking aid. But, to venture into the more irrational and try to glean a deep understanding from something that I can’t necessarily quantify… it’s the kind of questions that (I’m finding since I’ve moved here) really intrigue me and challenge my established ideas about the world and its functionality.

The main question we discussed was this: ‘What if everything was false?’. More specifically, the premise dictated that you discover that your entire reality is an illusion. Everything that you thought existed – your friends, family, pets, favourite places and people that you hold dear were not real and never were. Absolutely everything you thought to be true including the understanding of fundamental things like colours, mathematics and science were all false.

The first question we tackled regarding the premise was ‘Can we know anything at all in this situation?’. My immediate response would actually be yes. If everything you believed to be true is false, then what can you know? That you had the physical capacity to register all of the lies in the first place. That your brain was capable of understanding an impression of the stimulus in front of it and was able to generate an idea from that. I like the comfort in that idea as it really means that, no matter what happens in the world around me, I still retain my vessel of control. At least the control over my personal impressions of what’s in front of me – that kind of human agency is our inalienable right as part of the package of mortality. This was however, challenged by another member of the group who theorised instead that you couldn’t possibly know anything as since you had been tricked all along how could you possibly trust your brain to know anything at all if it’s been proven to be unreliable.

What a thought! Stopped me in my tracks that’s for sure! It is a very good point – sure, you can definitely say that I can appreciate my minds’ ability to recognise stimuli and even if everything were a façade, I can know that I had the capacity to think at all as a truth. However, it’s also a very fair standpoint to disregard an unreliable narrator in their assessments if they’ve indeed been proven to be unreliable. Can you hold both thoughts at the same time? How can you truly know that you’re capable of ‘experiencing’ and ‘understanding’ if your personal impressions of those two things have been false readings all along?

Really fantastic session for sure – will definitely be going back!