True Skepticism

[Ninshub]

I will start. 

From an intellectual and from a gut perspective as much as it will allow I maintain one thing that is truly knowable:

I apparently exist.

I'd reduce it to:

Something is happening.

I'm fairly certain that if I jump out of a 40-story window I will soon be dead.

~~ Paul

I know that's meant to be a bit of robust common sense, like Dr Johnson kicking a stone to refute Berkeleyan idealism.

I'm not that keen on philosophy myself, but "I will soon be dead" is quite a problematical statement when you start to think about it.

I'm fairly certain that if I jump out of a 40-story window I will soon be dead.

~~ Paul

So that would be in the "knowledge" category, right? ...something you're sufficiently certain of that you don't feel the need for further validation?

I will start. 

From an intellectual and from a gut perspective as much as it will allow I maintain one thing that is truly knowable:

I apparently exist.

From all my studies, you basically nailed it. 

That is the one and only thing you can truly ever know with complete certainty.

Everything else has various levels of uncertainly.

I'd vote for pure mathematics as the thing you can be surest of, in the sense that the whole structure follows provided the axioms are assumed.

And I don't believe something like number theory depends on the physical world at all. Fermat's Last Theorem would mean just the same thing to beings of pure spirit as it does to us.

We can certainly be sure of these things, but I wonder, if reality is infinite, could there be realms in which mathematics is different, in which the laws and rules of formal logic and the behavior of numbers are different. I would vote No. But even if they exist, as humans we are forever barred from visiting or even conceiving or imagining such places, since the very essence of our existence is based on known logic rules and behavior of numbers. 2+2 must = 4. Of course, this gets into the theological disputation over (if God exists) whether there are limits to His creativity.

Another way of looking at it would be the speculation that we actually live in a virtual reality hyper computer simulation created by some higher being or beings. There are some good arguments (especially from quantum mechanics) that this is the case. If it is true, the rules of mathematics and logic of our world could be part of the core operating system of the simulation, which presumably could be changed at will by this being or beings.