The Inside of Facts

But eventually I am forced to admit that there is nothing among the things I once believed to be true which is no permissible to doubt and not out of frivolity or lack of forethought, but for valid and considered reasons. Thus I must be no less careful to withhold assent henceforth even from these beliefs that I would from those that are patently false, if I wish to find anything certain.

I will accomplish this by putting aside everything that admits of the least doubt, as if I had discovered it to be completely false I will stay on this course until I know something certain, or, if nothing else, until I ay least know for certain that nothing is certain.

Rene Descartes wrote those thoughts in his first and second meditations which are part of his 1637 work, Discourse on Methods and Meditations on First Philosophy. The interesting element in Descartes thinking is his thoughts about the self and how that self is related to the God that was an external force to be reckoned with at that time. Certainly those thoughts continue today although many people are doing what Descartes describes as the permission to doubt instilled beliefs and educated guesses about the body, the soul, and consciousness.

Descartes approaches the fact that he exists in more than one form in a very methodical way. He senses that truth is relative to the believer and there is uncertainty in truth as well as in all beliefs if one gives oneself the opportunity to identify them.

The unknown reality which Rene wants to identify is usually dismissed using various hypotheses about the characteristics and nature of consciousness. We forget that the world as we know it is the result of a complicated set of consciousness coded sequences which are locked into one another and are dependant on one another in a variety of ways. The world and universe are perceived using the sequential codes that we are aware of, but when we alter one of these codes we intersect with another aspect of this space-time continuum and discovery that we limited ourselves by the beliefs that create individual truths.

Much of our inner life is overlooked because we focus on the exterior pattern of events even though the inner world is the only connection for those events. The objective reality only makes sense because the subjective inner world gave birth to it. We only see the topmost portions of these exterior events so our perceptions, beliefs, and truths are limited by our self-inflicted separation.

Descartes in his 17th century awareness thought that putting aside these exterior events would reveal an aspect of the self that was considered to be something else outside of the body and mind of each individual. He discovered that certainly nothing is certain since probabilities, perceptions, beliefs, and truths include probable selves as well as probable realities where inner consciousness shows the inside of facts and the realities that emerge from them.