You Don't Know Anything. Neither Do I.

The title of this article is not meant to be offensive, but rather to bring up an interesting point. Think back to your last dream. Did you know you were dreaming at the time? Probably not. When we are dreaming, even the strangest things seem to make sense, and the most unbelievable things seem to be real. For all we know, we could be in a dream world right now. There's no way to be sure.

Another thing to think about is that everything we know and experience comes to us from our senses. We know that during a dream our senses can be fooled. It's possible that some type of deceptive demon could be constantly feeding us false sensory information, and we'd be none the wiser. We have no way to know whether or not our senses are reliable, or even if we "sense" the world in the same way as other people.

That last sentence might be kind of confusing, so let me give you some examples. Try to define the word pain. It's much harder than you probably think. Most people would say that pain is something that hurts. But then, if you ask someone to define the word "hurt" they would say it means to experience pain. However, we can see pain in others. We see them cry, grimace, and scream. But that doesn't mean they experience pain in the way we do. What we call pain could be experienced by someone else as a completely different sensation. As long as the person is experiencing a feeling that they find unappealing, and reacts in the same way that we react when we get hurt, we assume that they are in pain. But we still can't describe what pain actually is.

Another example is color. We can all recognize different colors and agree on which are which. But how do we know that we experience them in the same way? What I see as purple, you could see as blue. In turn, your red could be my orange. Our experience of color, and even vision, is completely subjective and unexplainable. That's why a person who has been blind from birth finds sight completely unfathomable.There are things about the world that they will never know or understand.

In a similar way, we are all limited by our senses. We can only experience things that we can touch, see, hear, smell and taste. We have no idea, nor any ability to understand things that exist outside of our senses. However, some animals do. Pit vipers can track animals by the heat they give off. Bats can create a three dimensional representation of the world from sound. Birds can use the electromagnetic fields of the earth to find their summer and winter homes. It's entirely possible that many things exist of which we will have no knowledge because we can't sense them.

The end.