Contradictions

During this week’s reading, I found that my thoughts were drastically changing and contradicting each other from page to page.  For starters, when Pirsig first asks whether or not we really know anything, my answer was that we do not. The more we know, the more we know that we do not know. This opinion was further supported by this week’s lecture. The three structures, church, family and state as well as any other invention is made up, it is created. The method in which society works is just a interpretation of how we, as humans see it and decide to act on it. Knowledge is based of something else, but that something else, but that something else was created by humans, so are we really gaining any knowledge?

Then, I had no idea what to think when Hume asks if a person without any senses has a thought. At first, my response was no. There is nothing to create a thought, nothing has been learned. However, after I thought that a thought could be possible. Hunger is not a sense, it is a feeling. You do not hear, taste, or touch sense, you feel it and that feeling then causes the thought that you are hungry. Although you have not learned to speak or formulate those thoughts into words, a thought still exists. 

My first thought when Hume said that nature and nature’s laws are our imagination was that he was wrong. For example, gravity is not made up. It is something that just happens on earth, how else does an apple fall to the ground? If gravity was made up, then physics would be made up as well. But then I realized that I was going against my very first opinion that everything is made up and the more I thought about it, I decided that nature could in actuality be our own imagination. Physics is made up; humans created it, it’s an invention. In all honesty, I have no idea what the real answer is, but then again, neither does anyone else.

I think I agree with Kant when he states that all components of knowledge come from the sense at the moment the sense data are received. I thought is based off something else, then something has to exist in order to think about it. Although, I think he is wrong because Pirsig states that he and his followers have a sort of understanding of how we know things. I do not think that we truly know anything, nevertheless how we know it.