How Do We Know Anything?

There are many ways of how people see the world around them. One person's view of reality might differ from another's. People may belive that an external physical world may be affecting or interfering the way they think the world is. For example, when a rainbow is created after it rains on a sunny day, how do we know if we're really seeing what we're seeing? There are many people out there that might have claimed they've seen spirits or creatures that we're not even sure exist. Everything we've experienced could possibly be a dream that we're really not waking up from. And in that dream our mind is free to create whatever we do or do not want to see.

What might account for the differences in the way we percieve things are our beliefs. For some their views may fall into the category of solipsism. It is the view that your mind is the only thing that exists. For example, think about when you touch or see things. They may not really be there, but you know what you're supposed to be feeling or ssume that it's suppose to be feel, look, or sound a specific way. When you look back at everything you are experiencing, all your evidence that you hold about anything has to come through your mind. This is the most radical conclusion to dream from these beliefs. For others there may or may not be an external world, and if there is it may or may not be completely different from how it seems to you. This is called skepticism, making there be no way for you to tell what's real and what's not. For example, as Thomas Nagel argues, that you don't know about your own existence and experiences of the past because you only have the present memories to remind you of them. It would be unreasonable to think that your past may exist when you believe that nothing outside your mind existed before.

Some people could argue if there could be come absolute realities. From my point of view I say there can be depending on what perspective you look at it from. Your life and experiences could be all a dream, but everything in it is completely real to you. You could be a deep sleep from the moment you were born to the day you die, which may be when you finally wake up from the never ending dream. There may be certain limits to what it "real" and what a "hallucination" is. Take spirits and figures that are supposedly when certain elements of the earth come together creating a colorful rainbow. Do we honestly believe that any of that is real and that our minds are not just making them up? But for some things like, the ground, solid objects, or even people are programmed in our minds to consider them real.

Apparently there is no correct way to verify that the world exists beyong our mind. People for the most part are pretty convinced that we are all hunman beings, living in a real world, with real things surrounding us that we created. But not everyone will think the way another person does. There will always be someone questioning our own and the world's existence. As Nagel states, "Science won't help us with this problem either, thought it might seems to," in What Does It All Mean: A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy.