Certain Knowledge

Q: “What can we know for certain”?  Timothy Fay — eco-communitarian:

Upon receiving this question, an immediate response came to me, one manifest fact or truth that we can know for certain: there is existence. In other words there is not a total void. If there was no existence at all, just an empty void, then there would be no universe, no stars and planets, no living beings, and no one asking this question. And there would be no one to know that there was nothing. There would simply be nothing forever and ever. . .  .   . Can we imagine that? I find this imagining mind-bending, and almost scary.  But of course, the fact of imagining such absolute nothingness immediately proves that it’s not the case. In asking this question we reveal immediately, and can know for certain, that there is not nothing. Some form of existence is clearly happening. Matter, energy, the cosmos, this planet, the presence of all the diverse forms that make up our world.

However, beyond this, how we analyze, understand, describe, and name this existence, this abundant something-ness, how we understand the “laws of nature”, how we comprehend existence, how we determine and articulate the nature of reality, all of that is less clear, less certain. Indeed none of the words I used above, such as existence, matter, energy, something are definitive.  Thus for me, the question of what we can know for certain lives in the zone where epistemology (theories of knowledge) meets ontology (what is true or real).  When we ask what we can know for certain it might sound like a largely an epistemological question, an inquiry into the capacity of our knowledge.  But when we include the question of “what” we can know “for certain”, this leads us into the question of what is, what is reality.

We might consider that the search for certainty is largely a problem of our use of language and other abstract models. Thus the search for certain knowledge can be seen as simply a function of the linguistic part of our brain grappling with something beyond its reach, looking for a definitive description, or model, when there is none?

The renowned early Zen master Hui Neng was in fact illiterate, though so wise, students often did not know this fact.  Once he was approached by a Buddhist nun, who asked him to explain passages in a famous Buddhist sutra which still eluded her understanding even after years of study and contemplation. He replied:

“I am illiterate. Would you please read out the passage for me first? Then perhaps I may unveil its meaning for you.”

The nun was astonished and said:

“If you cannot even read the words, how are you able to understand its meanings?”

Huineng memorably replied:

“Truth has nothing to do with words. Truth is like the bright moon in the night sky. Words are like this finger which points at the moon. Though the finger can point out where the moon is, it is not the moon itself. To see the moon, one does not necessary need the finger. Right?”

Of course words, and other symbol systems such as numbers and geometry, are important tools we employ in establishing our relationship with the world and each other. We use language and other forms of “knowing” to better align ourselves with our lives and our world, to live in greater harmony and safety and peace.  But it’s not really important or even possible that the pieces of knowledge we employ during our lives be certain. They are simply useful pointers, models of reality, or guidance for action that help us navigate our existence.  As Alfred Korbinsky pointed out, “the map is not the territory.”  Moreover, “knowledge” that is useful and important to me, may be unimportant or even harmful to someone else.  A tree has a certain meaning, value, and importance to me as a human, but to an ant crawling up the bark, it functions as a very different reality.

There is a model from Tibetan contemplative traditions, a description of what’s called “the Base”. It’s an attempt to provide a universally applicable model of what is, the base level of reality. My teacher who taught about the Base expressly warned his students that this model should not be considered a philosophical truth, but simply a model, or pointer, to serve us in our meditation practice, and in living our lives.  The Base is described as having three (inextricable) aspects:

1) Emptiness — always remembering that nothing is fixed, isolated, and permanent, and that there is always space, both outside and inside of all forms.

2) Manifestation (or Nature) — manifestation occurs, a multitude of forms proliferate in space.

3)  Energy — a descriptive term for the underlying reality of all manifestation.  Thus all matter, all forms, all manifestations are simply diverse expressions of energy.

We can see that Einstein’s famous equation E=Mc2 dovetails nicely with this model.  Matter and energy are interchangeable, proliferating in space.

The most important question for me personally is to how to act in ways that are in harmony with, and engage positively with, reality as it presents itself throughout my life, creating the greatest benefit to myself and others.  I am not so concerned with certainty of knowledge, because I do not think it is possible. All I know is that life is happening, and I want to live it as fruitfully as possible for the benefit of all, including myself.

Let me conclude by sharing the Three Tenets of the Zen Peacemakers, a simple and helpful set of pointers for concerned, spiritually oriented folks to understand and act in the world:

1)  Not-knowing — thereby giving up fixed ideas about oneself and the world

2)  Bearing Witness — to the joys and sufferings of the world

3)  Loving Actions —   acknowledging our not-knowing, and paying attention to what is, we make our best call, acting with loving intention to meet the needs of others, ourself, and the greater world around us

Life is happening, a complex dance of situations and interactions. We cannot know with certainty, but we can dance. We have to. And we can pay attention, and learn to be a better and more loving dancer.  In doing so, there is in fact one more thing we can be totally certain of, which is our own intentions. Committing oneself to a loving and compassionate approach to oneself and others is the best way to find greater harmony, joy, and fulfillment in ones life.

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Tim’s response:

Hey Genyo!

I'm so glad to be in this dialogue with you, as I see immense potential in your insights and work (and this is not to say that your work has not already borne many magnificent fruits). I feel very aligned with your outlook and approach to life, and was impressed by your response to such a challenging and fundamental question. In my view, this question is central to thought and to human life - it marks the core of any worldview/ideology and is indicative of the way (and extent that) one understands oneself and their experience of the world. It is therefore a perennially riveting and contentious inquiry.

While reading your response, a few moments distinctly delighted me and held a special importance. I'll recount and reflect on them here:

1. The first line reads, "Upon receiving this question, an immediate response came to me, one manifest fact or truth that we can know for certain: there is existence." I also find this to be an undeniable starting point for the inquiry into knowledge. For me, this coincides with the naming of the reality of our experience - that I experience means that I am something that exists.

2. I find your segway into the philosophical context of our question vitally intuitive: "when we include the question of “what” we can know “for certain”, this leads us into the question of what is, what is reality". Here, I think you demonstrate the importance of our present inquiry - it leads us to  investigate the nature (the reality) of our experience, and therefore the nature of our world.

3. You then question whether our inquiry really might be entirely in vain - whether "knowledge" is either impossible or irrelevant: "We might consider that the search for certainty is largely a problem of our use of... abstract models." You mention that you are not so interested in the "certainty" of knowledge, but rather the usefulness of the tools we employ to align ourselves with the world. I love the framing of "alignment", and use it often in my daily life. I completely align with the values you named - "harmony and safety and peace" - as the central goals of our action, or the reason for our striving towards alignment. You use the analogies of a map, and a finger, to represent or point to a reality that perhaps can never be fully captured with words. You even say that you do not believe certain knowledge is possible. This brings me to the last point, which is an attempt to clarify a confusion and a longing, and begin to posit a solution that I hope is not too long-winded!

4. I thought I would be able to make this section more concise, but I am choosing not to. Instead, I'll summarise it in the last paragraph, in case you might want a bite-sized response to post. 

I desire to come as close as I can to certainty about my intentions in the world, and therefore about my relationship to the world - my path in the world and the world's influence upon that path. I also desire to 'come to certainty' about reality because I imagine it would allow me to live a better life - being clear with oneself about the basis of truth might make for a more accurate understanding of the world and therefore a more well-adjusted approach to relating to it. I believe that being able to be explicit about our own truth-standard - our own certainties (and therefore uncertainties) - can help us live a life more aligned with our own intentions and understandings. Such self-awareness can bring humility and curiosity, widening our horizons of possibility and increasing the prospects of living more beautiful lives. And, if we have no standard of truth, how can we expect to come to resonance with others about important lifestyle decisions, morality, or ideology? I like to acknowledge that there IS a standard of truth that already allows people to resonate, align, and cooperate - there is a shared reliable reality through which mutual understanding can occur. I believe that articulating this standard can allow much more of our society to come deeper into alignment. At the very least, this points to varying degrees of uncertainty.

Is "certainty" possible, achievable, and articulable, or is it impossible? Can we arbitrate among these, or will we be eternally stuck in uncertainty? If we take 'fundamental uncertainty' seriously, a few contradictions seem to emerge - either we are 'certain of uncertainty' (in which case we are certain of something), or we are 'uncertain of certainty', in which case we still leave open the possibility of certainty. Claiming the 'impossibility' of anything seems to be a claim to certainty - the certainty that such a thing cannot and therefore will not exist. For me, 'possible' seems to mean 'imaginable', and coincides with a certain degree of expectation or anticipation that something will exist - that we can coherently imagine something such that we can expect it to be real.

You begin your response with the 'certainty of existence', which I appreciate and resonate with. You reiterate this near the end with, "all I know is that life is happening". You then add that you "want to live it as fruitfully as possible for the benefit of all". You finish the piece off by doubling down on this; "we can be totally certain of... our own intentions", and that "a loving and compassionate approach... is the best way to find greater harmony, joy, and fulfillment." I agree that we can be certain that life is happening, and that at the core of this life there are intentions that are unwavering. We mentioned these before - the values driving our actions; harmony, safety, and peace. I think we can safely add the last two you mentioned; joy and fulfillment. I see these all as synonyms representing the singular core value that I hold, and that I know all people and all beings hold. Harmony brings safety, which brings joy, which brings fulfillment, which brings peace, which brings harmony.

Direct experience seems to me to be undeniable. It seems that we can also be even more explicit about what that means. Direct experience seems always to have intentionality alongside it, with it, and in it. I think everyone knows - in every sense of the term - that they choose what they think is the best choice "in the moment". They strive towards the better in their perspective - towards more of those things that can be described as "good" for them. All those other words - peace, joy, happiness, etc. - mean the same thing; less suffering, and more positivity - our omnipresent internal intention. 

So, we seem to agree on this much: that experience with positive intentionality exists.

I believe we can say even more, with nearly as much certainty. On the one hand, we can name particular direct experiences, and safely say that these direct but particular experiences are certain: that I am writing this email that I intend to send to you on what I call "my laptop". Why can I say this with confidence? In other words, what causes our higher degree of confidence in this statement than in a statement like "My email will travel to you via electromagnetic waves through wires and air from this laptop made by Dell"? I'll come back to this, but the first uses I statements, while the second makes a claim about the specific nature of things in the world, which seems to leave room for more ambiguity.

I understand positive intention as undeniably real because it has been true for every moment I can remember, which means it has always coincided with my experience - I can't imagine what my existence would be like without intention or experience. Experience seems to be the baseline - the constant. As much as I know that I exist - I also know that I expect my existence to always coincide with the experience of intentionality: striving, making choices, choosing preferences, preferring options, etc. There are other 'aspects' of this process that can be named or explicitly articulated, but everything is implicitly included; consciousness, relationship (subject-object awareness), change (the process of relating), and what I call "ongoing-ness" or infinity (that the process of relating must continue on in all directions if experience is to persist).

I cannot imagine life (my existence) without experience, because everything I remember and reference about my life - everything I know or can communicate about my life is an experience. Therefore, my experience, for me, is identical with my existence. It might seem like a leap to then say that 'existence is therefore identical with experience', but this is true for my understanding of the term existence: the only things that have existed for me have coincided with experience. Does this mean that this truth is an ultimate, eternal truth? We can say the words "existence without experience", but we do not know what that would mean for something in the world - what would happen internally, if there was no experience? Would there be an internal process? What would an internal process be without an internal experience? 

Of course, our own individual lives are not eternal or omnipresent... so perhaps experience might not be as well? It would then not be a timeless, ultimate truth. We can even question whether we have always 'experienced' through our lives - there are times in our lives that we don't remember experiencing, but for which we assume we still existed; deep sleep, forgotten dreams, early childhood, traumatic events, birth, the womb, etc. Did we have experience during those times that we simply don't remember? How can we understand our own existence and experience if we do not remember it? On the one hand, people who claim to remember their birth, or past lives, or comatose states, the fact that we do often remember our dreams if the conditions are right, and that we can be woken from deep sleep - these things point to the fact that we are continuously having experience even when we forget. How far from certain, ultimate truth have we already come? Perhaps too far to call it certain. 

It seems to me that we can only say that "we existed" during those gaps in experience by reference to our experience. We know that other people are still alive when they're sleeping, we know that people grow in the womb before they are born, etc. precisely because we have experienced the reliability of those things time and time again. By that standard (the standard of consistency across our experience), we can also surmise that we were experiencing during those times. We know we sometimes remember our experiences, sometimes not. We can wake people up during deep sleep because their bodies are responsive - they internalize and react to things, and when that person wakes they regain a more alert awareness. They act the same as if they were experiencing - so we can assume that their body had some experience. 

The reason that I can say my experience coincides with positive intention is because it has been constant/consistent - so I can therefore rely on it to continue. But because our memory does not extend forever into the past, and because we know people die, I can expect 'my own' positive intention to disintegrate, or else to radically transform. However, also due to the consistencies in my experience, I seem to be able to rely on the fact that existence will continue on after my death, and so will the experiences of existence, even if not in the particular bodily form I now inhabit. 

I would propose that we can rely on the idea that existence always includes experience as much as we can rely on the idea that the world will continue on when we die. Therefore, the entire universe probably is conscious and intentional. There are even a few different avenues to arrive at that conclusion - that consciousness is not exclusive to humans, nor to mammals, nor to animals, nor to plants or fungi, or any micro-organism. After all, we are made of cells too. And those cells are made of atoms. I see no good reason to make a hard break between "life" and "non-life" at some arbitrary size and shape. It seems undisputed that humans are conscious, and these days, so too with much of life. Why not all of life? If we accept that there are very different forms, different degrees, different amounts of awareness/consciousness/knowledge of beings, then it is not hard to accept that our cells are conscious, as well as all cells, and then all organic molecules within them, and all the smaller parts of those, ad-infinitum. After all, the way we understand existence is through/with experience. Existence always has experience alongside it. I believe that meditation and unusual states of consciousness can retrieve memories of birth and perhaps even before then. It also might be conjectured that our entire body, and all its emotions, drives, and movements, are results of the bodily memory of evolution, going back even to before cellular life. 

If something has repeatedly been a certain way, we can expect it to continue to be so. That's how the scientific method works, but it's also self-apparent. I don't know what my computer being "made by Dell" really means, but I do know that I call it a "dell computer". I don't know to what degree the electromagnetic waves will travel "through" wires rather than around them - I watched a video attesting to the latter. But I can say that I can use that model and be understood generally by others - that there are waves of interacting fields of a specific type carrying energy. And I can imagine you not receiving this email, for whatever unforeseen circumstances, so I can't say that you will read it for certain, but I can say that I expect it with high likelihood. 

Although I can expect to die, I have no reason to expect existence itself, and experience itself, to stop. I cannot rule out that I will pass into a portal or bardo before reincarnation into another life. It seems less likely to me than simply dissipating into less ordered energies in the soil, being eaten by many other creatures and becoming a part of their consciousness. Might it be at all likely that experience will come to a full stop? Insofar as our judgment of likelihood comes from and requires experience, we cannot put any likelihood on existence and experience ceasing all together. So, as much as I know anything, I know that I have no reason to expect that the existence and experience I am a part of (this universe) will cease. This would be nonsensical and meaningless from the standard by which everything assumes meaning for us. Perhaps I am wrong. I have been wrong about things before. But I hold onto these truths with a high degree of closeness, certainty. I want to say that I know this is the ultimate, universal truth as much as I know my own experience, but it's certainly some degrees removed from my own direct experience.

Without too many more words, the reliability of certain phenomena means that knowledge comes from patterns within our experience. The patterns of phenomena are what we call 'cause and effect'. In order for things-in-the-world to influence each-other, and for us to be able to witness or experience anything, these things must connect to us somehow, and enter into our experience. That means there can be no gaps or breaks, but rather varying degrees of connections between things, varying degrees of clarity, fullness, certainty, likelihood, and alignment. 

All of this is to try to explain, as transparently as possible, why I believe that the universe is conscious, continuous, endless and ongoing (infinite), and therefore intentional and causal to the core. Everything happens for a reason, and this reason is the expansion of greater consciousness - the self-preservation and therefore extension of forms of existence that are better able to navigate environments - ones that are more aware, more powerful, more effective, more knowledgeable, and therefore more aligned with the reality they are embedded in. The more we can know, the more we can do, the more we can align with each other and our world, the more we can come closer to stability, harmony, peace, and the flourishing of life. 

Summary:  I think coming to clarity about our own inner reality - our own standard of truth, the degree of certainty of our own beliefs, and our perspective on our fundamental relationship with the world - is helpful for understanding and relating to our reality. To state that certainty is impossible is a statement of certainty. I agree that our own experience, including the experience of our intentions, is essentially undeniable. Our experience is the baseline, the requirement, for all knowledge. What's more, is that the consistency of our experiences is what makes some more reliable than others. Just like science and statistical measures, it seems that repeated behaviors or patterns are what we use to rely on the outcome of certain actions. We call this cause and effect. Through all this, we know that we must come into connection with something in order to experience it - it must enter our experience, and therefore share existence and experience with us. Since experience is always connected to existence, we can expect everything that exists to have some experience - awareness, consciousness, striving, choosing, moving. This would imply an ongoing and endless - infinite - universe, that is always striving towards the same thing we strive to: harmony, balance, stability, peace, and all of this through alignment with our world - knowledge of it and effective actions through that knowledge. This could be considered expansion or evolution of consciousness towards more energetic, dense, complex, full, or powerful forms. 

If this discussion is worthwhile, we can come to some practical insights into our own lives and thoughts through it. I imagine it could unfold into the many implications regarding morality, community, ecology, and science that I have been pondering along with it. I'm hoping this is all clear, but expecting many ongoing questions. I'd love to continue this dialogue and move into deeper clarity and alignment with you, and with my own understanding of things. I think I have, through this response, so I appreciate the opportunity to write it. 

With care and faith,

Timothy Fay