Here's a notebook one I can't shake. Because there's a *possibility* of God — there is a God. I wrote it like it's obvious. It isn't. But part of me means it: if the thing is even possible, doesn't the possibility have to live somewhere?
Another notebook God-line, and this one's almost a joke until it isn't: if there's no God, then everything is mathematically probable, and over infinite time everything happens. So eventually, somewhere, a God happens. Therefore God exists. I know. But tell me where it's wrong.
And the flip side, which I like better because it bites its own tail: if God doesn't know he exists, then we can't know he exists — because everything we know, he knows, and if he doesn't even know himself, he doesn't exist. God's existence depending on God's self-awareness. That's a strange loop to leave a man in.
What is knowledge, and can we even have it? Traditional answer: something's true, you believe it, and you're justified in believing it. Hard to argue with on its face. So let me not argue with the definition. Let me argue that the definition quietly makes the thing impossible.
Some people want to add a fourth condition — true, believed, justified, and *discovered*, or something like it. Maybe. But here's why I set that aside. A fourth step we haven't even found yet can't be the thing breaking knowledge; and if we did find it, it'd probably be hard to argue with anyway. So the rot isn't in some missing fourth piece. It's in one of the three we already have. No point hunting a new ingredient when the existing recipe already fails on its own.
Three legs to knowledge. Truth doesn't depend on me — everyone thought the world was flat and it stayed round, so truth's fine, it's not the problem. Belief is mine, it's the inner confidence, and you can't know without it, so belief's fine too. That leaves justification. And justification is where the floor gives out.
Justification needs justification. To be justified in B, the thing that justifies B has to itself be justified, and so on back forever. A rests on B rests on C rests on D — it never bottoms out. The only thing that could end the chain is *knowing* something is true. But that's the very thing we were trying to get to. So you'd have to already have knowledge to be justified enough to have knowledge. Round and round.
A red car drives by. To be justified I need reasons to believe it — and I've got plenty, I saw it, heard it, someone else saw it. But to be *fully* justified I'd also have to rule out every reason to doubt: that I'm dreaming, that there's a deceiver, that red isn't really red, that the car was still and I was moving. There's always one more doubt. So I'm never fully justified. Unless I just *know*. Which I can't.
So knowledge is unattainable. Not impossible — I'm not a skeptic, it's a real thing we defined — just permanently out of reach, because we built the definition to require the one move we can't make. Knowledge is a dog chasing its tail. It's not going nowhere. It's going in a perfect circle.
If knowledge is unreachable, what's actually doing the work in a person's head? Two things. Memory — what I've held and revisited. And opinion — not a whim, a *stance*, a belief with weight on it. That's how we tell who's knowledgeable from who isn't. Not by knowledge, which we can never check in another person, but by memory and opinion, which we can.
Why do memory and opinion get to exist when knowledge can't? Because neither one needs truth. Truth is the leg that makes justification impossible. Pull the truth requirement off, and suddenly you're allowed to be justified on grounds that aren't truth — and the whole regress that strangled knowledge just lets go. Memory and opinion are free precisely because they ask for less.
A quieter suspicion, off the record from the paper. Maybe knowledge is impossible because it isn't instantaneous. Belief can't be of the present — you can't believe the thing happening right now, you believe what you already hold. And if knowledge needs belief, then knowledge always arrives late too. Which makes memory feel more real than knowledge ever could. Memory at least shows up.
Unless there's innate knowledge. Which would wreck my whole argument — because how do you get the first justification to believe anything if you start out knowing nothing? Where does the bottom brick come from? I admit innate knowledge would screw me. I'm just choosing to believe I'm right, because I like it there. That's not philosophy. That's me being honest about being stubborn.
Russell says belief needs a mind, so knowledge needs a mind. I don't buy the "only" in there. A mind has a role, sure. But all belief stemming from the mind? That's naive. I think there's another door, and I'm going to walk a dog through it.
The dog. We mostly agree animals don't have minds. Now watch a dog learn a task, know it has to eat, know to protect itself, make a choice that's in its own interest. A choice means a judgment. A judgment means a belief. So the dog has beliefs. But no mind. So belief came from somewhere that isn't a mind — call it instinct. And if a dog can do it, a human's beliefs don't all have to start in the mind either.
I notice the trap I set and I'm fine sitting in it. My whole dog argument runs on "animals have no mind." If you grant me that, I've shown belief can be instinctual. And if you *don't* grant me that — then I've accidentally proven dogs have minds. Either way I walk out happy. Worst case I'm wrong about the thing nobody can prove anyway.
Where am I? Dennett gets his brain pulled out, set in a vat, wired back to his body by radio. He looks at his own brain and tries to think "here I am" — and "here" keeps landing where his body is standing, staring at the brain. Not in the vat where the thinking is. He can't flip the view. And I think that refusal to flip is the whole problem worth chewing on.
The technician tells Dennett: move your brain an inch in your skull and your mind doesn't change. Small line, big job — it's there to get you to take the sci-fi seriously, to think straight about a brain in a vat. And here's why it holds no matter what the mind turns out to be. Either the mind is its own separate substance — then the brain's position never touched it. Or the mind is something the brain builds — then the brain can build it from anywhere, an inch over or a mile. Both ways, distance doesn't matter. The setup survives either answer.
Dennett gives three options. I am where my brain is. I am where my body is. I am where I think I am. He picks at each, and they each spring a leak — brain-swap cases, amnesia, the guy who falls into a movie but is obviously not on Mars. Three options, three holes. And then he stops. Three. That's the part that gets me — he had room for a fourth.
Here's the fourth he skipped. We're the thing that *controls* the body and the thoughts and the awareness — not the body, not the brain, but whatever sits over them. He says "soul" a bunch of times and never lists it as an option. Weird. And the case for it is simple: he disproved the other three himself, and there has to be an answer. The last door left standing gets some weight by default.
What convinced me it's the controlling thing? He starts losing his body — blindness, deafness, pieces going dark — and he keeps existing. The things he never loses are thoughts and awareness. So whatever we are has to be made of those, or has to have its hands on those. You can shed the body. You can't shed the awareness and still be there to notice.
And awareness is the tell. How do you get awareness without something conscious behind it? If I'm not my body or my brain but I'm *aware* of both, then there's something with a grip on them — sitting above, watching, steering. Dennett brushes right up against this and then dives back into his story and drops it. He calls it a revelation and then ignores his own revelation. Drives me a little crazy.
Why do I trust Dennett where I distrust most metaphysicians? Because he's more logical, and logic is the only honest tool you've got in metaphysics — if you've got any. You can't run an experiment on the soul. So the one thing that reaches what experiment can't is logic; it can prove what you'll never prove empirically. Ayer would say the same. Most metaphysics is people emoting at the void. Dennett at least builds. That's the whole difference between a theory I'll follow and one I'll set back down.
Long before any of the school stuff, the rawest version I had of this: we're three things. A body. A conscious mind. And under both, a subconscious. The body has its reflexes. The conscious mind — the part we call "I," the part with all the thoughts — that one can be controlled too, because none of our thoughts are really ours to control. So the "I" we walk around being isn't actually who we are.
The subconscious is the real one. The body and the conscious mind are just vehicles for it — and the thing about a vehicle is somebody else can drive it. So we're this subconscious self trapped twice: once in a body, and again in a conscious mind that we mistake for ourselves. We are more than the "I." We're indescribable. We're the thing underneath the thing we think we are.
Plato splits the soul three ways — reason, spirit, appetite — and says everybody's got all three, in balance, and society mirrors the mix. I think he got the parts right and the "balance" wrong. They're not three slices everyone has evenly. They're three *types* of mind. Some people just are appetite. Some are reason. Pretending we're all an even blend is the foolish part.
Watch three men fight over a woman and you'll see the types. The first jumps in on pure appetite — sees only the reward, never the cost. The second fights when his honor's on the line, with some thought first — courage, but it has to be fitting. The third, the reason type, doesn't fight unless the outcome makes sense. Same situation. Three different men. Not three parts of one man — three kinds of man.
Where I split hardest from Plato: he says his philosopher-kings desire *only* knowledge. I say that's still a desire — and desire is an influence, and influence is exactly what the rational mind is supposed to be free of. A truly rational man doesn't crave knowledge. He pursues whatever's rational at the time, and sometimes that's money, or fame, or sex. Wanting only knowledge isn't the top of the ladder. It's just a nicer-looking cage.
And Plato was boxed in by his century. Three rigid classes in front of him — rulers, warriors, everybody else — so of course his ideal society came out in three rigid classes. He could only build with the bricks on his table. We're not in that world. We don't sit in fixed groups. So we can't copy his map. The mind-types are real; his class system was just the local costume they were wearing.
The simple mind runs on influence. Tell a man of simple mind to do something dumb and, with the right push, he'll do it — eat the thing, drink the thing, anything. Not because he's stupid exactly, but because the outside voice steers him completely. Philosophers love him as their example, because he's the one whose strings you can actually see.
The logical mind is one step up and still gets caught. He watches friend after friend jump off the cliff into the water, unhurt, and by induction he jumps too — and hurts himself. Was it a dumb choice? No. It was a logical one. It just wasn't a *rational* one, because the outcome was never guaranteed. Logic deduces from what it's seen. The seen can still betray you.
The rational mind takes only one influence: his own mind. He's not fooled by logical outcomes because he knows nothing's guaranteed, so he weighs and then gambles on the most reasonable move available — and sometimes the reasonable move has no sure result, because the world doesn't hand out sure results. Maybe these people are perfect, or maybe they just think they are. Hard to tell from outside. Might be the same thing from inside.