How do we know?

How do we know that what happened in the past actually happened?
How do you know this?
How do you know what is happening now is actually happening?

Now understand that I cannot express what I am thinking exactly as I am thinking it in words, but I will try.

How do you know that you went to sleep last night? Well, because you are not feeling all that tired, and you remember waking up. Okay, your not tired, and you can remember something about waking up. But for me, that is not knowing it. How do I know the year, and that the sky is blue? Quite simply, I don't. I'm not even entirely sure that I am typing on a keyboard right now, even through I can feel it.

Right here I will state that I have never seen the Matrix, as a friend that I just showed this to prior too posting said that it reminded him of the Matrix, and was I copying ideas?

I can't really get the words out, but could it be possible that we were implanted into time just the last second, and that everything before hand, every memory we have, of family, work, travels and tax evasion - ahem -, is made up, implanted in some ridicously complicated net, where memories interconnect with ones other people have?
I mean, you actually cannot deny this. It cannot be proven untrue. Try it.

Or we could all be living (or maybe just some of us) in some sort of frozen animation, every feeling that we are experiencing right now fake, imputed directly into our nervous system by infinitely small and exact automatically controlled electrodes to stimulate actual touch and pain and movement. You could even take this a step further and say that our bodies do not even exist, and that we are all (once again, perhaps maybe just some of us) just electricity whizzing around a super-computers innards. For all I know, the year is 2966, and the human race has in fact been developing technology since the year A.D. 10, thereby giving them the ability to do who knows what with the amazing advances in electronics almost two millennium will give, and I am some sort of test.

Actually - this is extreme, I know, but think - you could take either of these two latter scenarios and imagine an alien race who has just had something unprecedented happen to them, and must change physical form to adapt to a new environment, whatever that may be. We could all be tests, put into a stimulated environment to not gauge our responses and reactions (because our mentality is not the issue) but to see how good we are at all different forms of, well, everything. And you could then imagine every other alien or monster you've ever seen in a movie, and think how this race would be testing that form of body as well, to see how adapt it was.
We could all not exist.


Hmmm, how the hell do I know that I am not the subject of some tv show of the far future, with "a rustic world in turmoil, how does this one person react to it?" for a promo???


I know that this is crude, and that many reading it will laugh and think "this watchtehrocks character is a crackpot," and you are welcome to reply; but I really want people that have thought or think along these lines as well to reply.

How do we "know" anything?
1) Reason
2) Authority
3) Experience

Given your premise, it could all be an illusion, but operating under that assumption lies the road to madness.

Couple of links for your perusal-
ARE YOU LIVING IN A COMPUTER SIMULATION?

Plato's Cave

Philip Jose Farmer wrote a series of books called "Riverworld", which I very much enjoyed 30-some years ago. The main character is Sir Richard Francis Burton, the explorer not the actor. One of the plot devices is that he can instantly move from one spot on this world to the other by dying and being reincarnated at a new randomly selected spot. He finds out after doing this repeatedly that each incarnation is an entirely new entity that retains all the memories of the former person, but is in fact a completely new conciousness. Wrap your mind around that for a second.

Riverworld series gets from me.

Are we all living in an illusion? Maybe, but what can we do about it? Nothing. So it's probably best to focus on all the countless things we can do something about right now.

you dont know...no one knows, if they do then you dont know...heheh

the info you need comes when you are ready and need it...

Peace

dalen