Food for Thought

Renown philospher John Locke quotes "Nothing can be more evident to us than our own existance. I think, I feel, I know pleasure and pain: can any of these be more evident to me than my own existance? If I doubt all these things, that very doubt makes me perceive my existance". This short excerpt leads us to believe in our existance. Indeed, Rene Descartes himself said "I think, therefore I am". Is there any flaw to this fortress of an argument? Seemingly none. However to debunk this, we must move past the superficial realm of words and phraes, and into that of the great ideas: truth, equality, liberty, justice, and many others. To understand such ideas we must first understand philosophy. Philosophy is most like mathematics in that it deals with ideal things, not those that are real. We can speculate and develop our own axioms and theorems, but we cannot expierience them. That is why mathematics, like philosophy may be called "armchair thinking". All these ideals exist independantly of our perceiving them. For example, our believing that a Honda Accord produces X amounts of pollution for Y amount of miles traveled does not change the truth if we discover that it in fact produces Z amounts of pollution. The truth has not changed, rather our perceptions at a given moment are now different. Through this reasoning we can deduce that perception exists independantly of the ideals, proving him wrong. If we were to believe him, we would find private notions, such as the pain of a pricked finger to be objective. I cannot feel your private pain, thus it cannot be subjective. Rather, pain on a larger scale is objective, and in pricking your finger, you have at that moment expierienced it, just as in passing we may know truth at one moment and then lose it later. Therefore perception and reasoning are simply superficial, and are subjective. So do we really exist?

On public opinion

The status of human being is characterized by the ability to seek and gain knowledge. As individual humans we are constantly learning new ideas and theories. When we acquire new knowledge, and interpret it within our minds, we begin to develop our own ideals and our own opinions. It is through this process that we have shared such ideals, creating the foundations of democracy. However, is public opinion truly a manifestation of democracy or simply attempted censorship stemming from anticapitalist ideals? Democracy was initially made widespread by the people of Athens, led by the great philosophers Socrates and Plato. However, all men were educated to think, and thus made Athens home of of the greatest governments to ever come. Essentially a utopia, evry man was an intellectual, enabling society to move towards progress. However what is the case in our current day? Our ideals are poisoned by media, who have taken the liberty to exchange our minds with theirs, as we let ours rot and simply soak in what is told to us. As a result, we have forgone debate, instead choosing to act with primitive forms of mob behavior, acting as the slaves of higher minds. Democracy is dead. No longer have we retained the ability to think concerning human understanding. What is known? The formation of basic ideas through perception of primary and secondary qualitites, and more sophisticated development of such concepts is a trait that has been supressed from the gene pool. Our primary ideals no longer exist, allowing our initial impressions to be wholly influenced by secondary perception of the external world. We would no longer notice if we made the transition to classic Orwellian society, characterized by notions of thought crime and newspeak, for that is essentially where we are headed. Although we have gotten smarter, have our minds grown stronger? Have we nurtured and trained our abilities to think? What is it about the inflexibility of public opinion, that through mob behavior we have ostracized great minds such as Kepler or Copernicus? Higher minds have taken advantage of tabula rasa, separating the weak from the strong, be it apparent or not. Is this democracy?