7 Apr 2025
Blindly accepting anything is ill advised. We all know that things can be different than they seem.
Optical Illusions show us that even though something looks (or seems) a certain way, it might not be that way.
The world we find ourselves in, including human society and the physical environment, are so complex that people feel at some point in life, you have to decide what to accept as your ground truth. There would be way too much mental work involved if for every decision, you had to logically derive everything from fundamental principles.
The problem is most people make this choice not based on a rational evaluation of what logically must be true. Instead they choose their ground truth based on other things like, for example, peer pressure or parental pressure.
My most fundamental ground truth is that I exist. René Descartes famously wrote "Cogito, ergo sum" (usually translated from Latin as "I think, therefore I am".) He originally wrote it in French in his 1637 Discourse on the Method. In any case, it describes the point well. If I don't exist, then who or what is it that thinks it exists? Whatever that is - that's me. So the premise (that I don't exist) is disproved. There's no possible way, from my perspective, that I don't exist. Others should apply this from their own perspective. If anybody is reading this besides me, then you don't know that I exist. (Maybe it was generated by AI, for example.) But you should know that you exist.
My next, possibly slightly less fundamental, ground truth is that things other than me exist. How can a distinct entity exist without something to be distinct from? My beliefs about reality build from there.
Another philsosopher whose works I admire and base much of my belief system on is the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle, who wrote "Knowing yourself is the beginning of all wisdom". He wrote so much, I'm not sure I can point to anything in particular.
For now, I will leave it at that, since Aristotle's works go far beyond the current topic - as do Descartes'.