First I want to get you up to speed on the subject that sparked this page. If you want, you can read a previous page to get the context for this one. However, I'll give a bit of the sense of it here first before moving on to my points...

I have a page on my web site that mentions the concept suggested by the movie "Matrix" and asks whether or not it could really be how things are for us. Of course, my answer is, yes. Sure it could be that way. It could also be any one of 6 billion (the number of potentially different fantasies must be at least as high as the number of people on the planet right now) other ways that are considered right now at this moment somewhere around the world. The point I make though is, where do we draw the line between what is actually real and what is not... or at least between that which we know for sure and that which we do not? 

I suggest that we take, as our scale upon which to weigh such ideas, that which is most real to each and every one of us, the reality right here, in front of our face. I say, "we can't be any more certain about any of [the alternate concepts of reality] than we can be about this reality right here and now that we already have to work with". Then I ask, "Why would we give [an idea about] something mysterious or unknowable more sway in our minds and more prominence in our lives than that which we can actually see and touch?". 

Jump to my current thoughts on this subject....

Recently, I've received questions or comments from a number of people relating to the concept of the Matrix. In at least a couple of the messages, both of which were from theistic religious people, it seemed like the point they were trying to make was that there may be something mysterious or supernatural "out there" that we're just not aware of yet (...or something like that). 

I got the impression that they thought that either I'm being too closed-minded to the multitude of (mysterious and supernatural) religious possibilities and really missing an opportunity to be in touch with their preferred Possibility, or that in my open-mindedness and lack of willingness to make an absolute claim about Unknowable Things (and a distaste for their willingness to do so), I may be on a slippery slope angling toward either Absolute Relativity (a condition or state in which nothing can really be known, or at least that nothing that can be known is relevant to anything else. Thus, nothing matters), or its lesser recognized twin, Absolute Certainty (Someone in this condition is often called a "Know-It-All"). 

I'm going to focus on the comments of just two of them for now. The interesting thing to me is that, one of them actually seemed to have read that page, while the other clearly had not. Yet, each of them were basically saying the same thing. Ya, that's interesting to me. Now, the one that didn't read that page obviously could not have known what I think about it, but the other one clearly must have just ignored my point and just wanted to find something to quote upon which to hang their argument. What follows is the basic sense of their questions and comments and some of my thoughts about them.

I decided to just simply paste their comments and questions onto this page just to make sure I've got them at least partially in context. Please confront me if I tend to stray. The comments from the person that had actually read what I had to say about suggestions of unknowable things like "the Matrix" will be in "this color". The comments from the other person (a religious friend of mine), the one that apparently hadn't read my page where I address things like "the Matrix" will be in "this color". 

Since my friend had not read my page on this stuff, and since I've already had the conversation once with the other person, I'll just list my friend's commetns first and not respond directly to them, but let my response to the other person serve as a response to both. First, my words that sparked my friend's comments on the topic...

Talking about religious people and believers of whatever kind, I had said, "I so much want to follow Jesus right along with the rest of them, but I have no intention of doing so (along with them that is) as long as they are more committed to pretending they know for sure than they are to acknowledging the truth of our physical, natural existence first and then being open to the possibility that what they've always been told and what they've always "just believed" may not really have as much basis in reality as it does in make-believe and wishful thinking. Sure, we can want something to be true very much (I recall me even saying things like, "I just know that I know that I know that I know that it's true!!!"), but without at least an acknowledgement of the possibility that it's not and that it might be the product of myth and legend, it doesn't seem to me that one is really thinking very clearly at all." 

My friend responded with... 
"It is of course absolutely possible that every spiritual experience I've had and all my beliefs about God and historic Christianity is wrong and the product of some psychological trick. Its also possible that the world of the Matrix is real and that nothing we see really exists. There are many possibilities and many reasonable assertions. But once they are all laid out, the only thing that matters is once you've analyzed the data, what is the most reasonable conclusion. "

Now the comments of the person interspersed with my responses... 

"well you seem to be saying that since the reality in front of us is easier to believe we should just believe that one. The fact that the others possiblities or existence could be true are good reason to believe the easy one infront you could be differnet. Who said that we don't live in things like the Matrix? You just want to agree with the option in front of you. When truely you should examine why you believe in the one that we live on a daily basis.
[Author's name]
I would love any kind of response! :)"

Here is the text of my response, in which I re-quote some of their comments and follow with my thoughts...

Hi [other person's name].
Thanks for the inquiry.

You said, "well you seem to be saying that since the reality in front of us is easier to believe we should just believe that one."

No, actually I do not say that anywhere on my site. What I say is that I am not going to "believe" ANYTHING. While that which my five senses are presenting to me as real may in fact be wrong, it is not a matter of believing. Believing (what I think believing is can be read in many articles on my site) is when someone makes a conclusion about some "unknowable" thing and decides to count their conclusion about it as being real and actual, with no evidence what so ever to show that their conclusion has any valid basis in knowable reality.

My five senses are my first point of contact with the world outside of my own mind and body. Therefore, it is my five senses with which I take in all of the information I ever take in from the world outside of me. Since my five senses are the first point of contact with the outside world, they naturally have to be my starting point for understanding reality. So, when I count as real and actual, that which I encounter through my five senses, it is not believing. If my five senses are not real, then nothing else matters anyway since even all of the other stories people come up with and talk to me about also come into me through these five senses. This is not believing (jumping to an unsupported conclusion about unknowable things), but just simply accepting what seems to be real when experienced through the only natural apparatus I have available with which to interact with the outside world.

You said, "The fact that the others possiblities for existence could be true are good reason to believe the easy one infront you could be differnet."

I'm not even sure if I understand what you mean here. Certainly you don't mean that whatever someone presents to you might actually be true do you? Certainly there are some things which just simply could not be true.

You said, "Who said that we don't live in things like the Matrix?"

I don't say that we don't. All I'm saying is that since we have so much evidence for the present reality in front of our face, and since there is absolutely no evidence what-so-ever for anything even remotely suggesting anything like the Matrix (other than fictional stories), what's the point? Where do we stop with following such goofy nonsense. Like I say on my site, it's not goofy to think it might be that way. It's just goofy to be convinced that it is when there is no reason to think so. It's not even that the evidence is greater for the version of reality that I'm going with (the one I experience through my five senses)...there just isn't any "evidence" at all for any other. It's not a competition between two or more actually reasonable positions with regard to how we interpret reality either....we all have the same apparatus.

You said, "You just want to agree with the option in front of you."

What, as if that's somehow unspiritual or something like that? Damn right! Spiritual, schmiritual. Show me some kind of real evidence for anything outside of this present reality and I'll accept that there IS something "out there". Better yet, go to www.randi.org and sign up for his $1,000,000 prize. He's offering the money to the first person who can show him such a thing. Don't waste your time with me. Go make a million bucks man.

You said, "When truely you should examine why you believe in the one that we live on a daily basis."

As I've already said, I do not believe ANYTHING. Accepting as real that which is presented to me by my five senses, is natural. It is when people start becoming convinced that they know for sure about unknowable things that they are believing. I do examine my own world view. That is exactly what I'm all about. Examining everything that comes into my brain with the skill of critical thinking is exactly what keeps me from drifting off into such nonsense. Being convinced of something that has no basis in knowable reality what-so-ever is the real unreasonable position. How can you square that kind of world view with your confrontation telling me that I do not examine my world view? Critical thinking is all about examining (and sometimes reexamining) the things we think and the things we accept as real. 
Clearly it is the believer that is not examining, not the critical thinker.

Thanks again for your inquiry.
love, joy and peace to you
steven

Then they replied with the following...

"Hey Steven,
thanks for the reply. Interesting topics. I had a few comments in return. Sorry for the unoraganized, blurting of all my thoughts. I am a busy college student and for outside interests like this I just blurt! :)

"As I've already said, I do not believe ANYTHING. Accepting as real that which is presented to me by my five senses, is natural."

You don't believe in anything? I have heard people say this before. And then why do you feel the need to search and examine your life if there is nothing to be found to believe in? Do you search for the hell it and for the hopelessness it will onyly bring? As well accepting only the information your five senses give you...Your senses can often lie to you. I will agree with you that all the other ideas for what our reality could be seem way out there. But when you think about it the idea that there are these weird complex human things leading there life through smell, sight, taste, sound, and feeling is kinda weird too. Where did the senses come from? Did they just appear on the external part of our body. There is alot that our soul and mind understand without any help from the senses. That is exactly why I need no proof in God. I am not a crazy God fanatic but I do have strong faith in that he exists and that doesn't come from my 5 senses. That is how I know there are realities that lie beyond the simple one
I experience with the senses. I like to imagine the world is as complex as it seems. I like to try to figure out where it all comes. And too be honest, it could just be me and my five senses havin a good time here on earth. But there are so many other ways that stir my imagination and mind. Isn't that what the mind is there for? Or is the mind only there to pick up things from the 5 senses. 
Again thanks for the response. Have a good one! :)
[Author's name]" 

To which I replied... 

Hi [person's name].
As I've already made clear, believing is a matter of pretending that we know something for sure when we really don't. I no longer do that. So, I have no intentionally held beliefs. Now, (as I also say on my site), there may indeed be things still hanging on to my world view from my former believing days, and I am completely open to that possibility and always welcome anyone confronting me about them and asking me what I think of them, but they (beliefs) certainly are not something I desire to have as part of my world view any longer.

You said, "...why do you feel the need to search and examine your life if there is nothing to be found to believe in?"

First of all, I do not search and examine my life or the world around me because of "feeling the need" to do so. I choose to do so because I like the idea of doing so. Just like loving other persons I come into contact with. For me, loving them isn't a matter of feelings I have for them (That's empathy which I don't happen to have an extreme amount of as a natural part of my makeup. I wish I did really, but it was just not a necessity in the lives of my hunter-gatherer male ancestors. It was more helpful for them to be able to think critically about things and to be able to figure out how systems work so that they could work to acquire resources for survival.), but a matter of a conscious choice to care for them because it is something I've decided to do for personal reasons that have nothing to do with religion or philosophy or anything else like that.

In my life, I've either encountered or at lest heard about love and compassion in various ways along the way and I like it. Just to be sure, I do like it when people are compassionate to me, but my choice to be compassionate to others is not dependant on ever receiving an ounce of it from anyone else. I decided to start being compassionate to others....not to get anything back for it, but just simply because I like the idea of doing so.

The point is that I no longer desire to BELIEVE in anything. That doesn't mean that I no longer want to KNOW anything or SEE anything or HEAR anything or TOUCH anything or THINK ABOUT anything or DO anything or GO anywhere. It doesn't mean that I no longer have any ideas or thoughts or concepts or values or preferences or likes or dislikes or that I no longer care about anything. It just means that, for me, these things are no longer based on pretending to know for sure about that which I can't possibly know for sure (i.e. things made up by other humans and presented to me as being real and actual without the slightest bit of evidence other than their say-so or a Story written thousands of years ago by people that didn't know as much about the true nature of our selves and the world in which we live as we do now).

It's not about, as you've poked at me with so far, choosing the reality in front of my face because I prefer it over any other proposed concept of reality (whether I prefer it or not is irrelevant to the question of whether or not it is real. Whatever is real is real. The fact that some people choose to prefer fantasy over reality has no effect on the existence or nature of reality it self), or that I'm too lazy to go out and examine them (obviously I do my own homework), but because this one is the only valid claim I can genuinely say that I can verify with the natural tools I have available in this natural world.

I do not outright reject any claim about unknowable things. I do not accept them as valid explanations of the reality I experience either though. I do not say that they are wrong except for the point where they get into claiming to know for sure about such things. One can be very convinced of something without it being real and actual. When I was a child, I was convinced that Santa Claus was a real person. That state of being convinced though was a belief held in my mind based only on the stories given to me from my family and society. I used to believe in God too. The only difference between Santa Claus and God (with respect to this issue only that is) is the fact that I now know for sure that Santa Claus isn't real. So, I no longer have a belief in Santa Claus due to finding out the truth somewhere along the way. I no longer have a belief in God due to the fact that I am no longer willing to pretend to know something for sure which I do not know for sure (I no longer believe). 

You said, "Do you search for the hell [of?] it and for the hopelessness it will onyly bring?"

How is finding out the truth something which necessarily brings about a sense of hopelessness? Hopelessness is a personal choice. One can choose to be hopeful or hopeless. The truth about the future as I understand it is that I will eventually die and as far as I can tell for sure I will, at that point, cease to exist. Sure I'd like there to be something more beyond that for my consciousness, like living together with you and the others in heaven or whatever, but I have no way of knowing whether or not there is such a thing. That doesn't automatically bring about a sense of hopelessness in me though. Other people may get such a sense when they think of it, but that is their personal choice. Heck, someone could even choose to hold a sense of hopelessness in their mind in light of your world view (Obviously many people do). [a world view which in fact claims to know for sure that there is such a place as Heaven and that some will go there and some will not. What we choose to hope for is up to us. What we choose to be convinced of is also up to us. What is actually real is just what it is though. It is up to us to know the difference.] 

I do not choose to go there with it though. For me, it's just simply about acknowledging the facts at hand as best as I have them. What kind of attitude I choose to have in my mind and what kind of lifestyle I choose to live from that point on is totally up to me. My excitement about life and my drive to be fully engaged with it and with others has not lessened since I left believing behind and started doing more critical thinking. In fact, today it is actually even greater than it has ever been before. 

If you want to know what I "THINK", or what I consider to be real based on my personal experience of the world in which I actually live, then that is an area in which I have a lot to share.

The five senses.....
Well, I never said that my only tools are my five senses. What I said was that they are my only way of interacting with the world that exists OUTSIDE of my own mind and body. Where else am I going to start? I have no other organs or parts or senses with which to interact with the world outside my mind and body. Yes, I do use my mind to process all of this information and I also use it to come up with my own thoughts about things which only exists within my mind. However, I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about the most common denominator I have with which to interact with the world on the OUTSIDE of me. 

Where did these senses come from you ask?
Well, they came about as the result of the process of life evolving. To know what I mean by evolving, please see my page about evolution. http://www.everyforkintheroad.org/NatSci/evolution.htm

God...
As far as my thoughts on things like God/god/gods, and all other human fabrications of imagination and creativity which have most likely most often been created somewhere along the way in our species evolutionary history to help them explain things they don't understand yet, please take a look at the section of my site called "What it Means to Believe and Why I Think it Matters".
http://www.everyforkintheroad.org/belief

You said that you have "strong faith in that he exists"

You are pretending to know for sure that God is real. I will not be drawn into any arguments about whether or not God exists because I have no belief, one way or the other. All I can say is that I am not sure and that there is no way for me to be sure based on the available data by using the tools I have available in the natural world. You may want to talk about the Spirit witnessing to my spirit or things like that....however, I've been there before and am no longer in that place. Every supposed "confirmation" I ever thought I received was clearly just my interpretation of subjective experiences which I interpreted through the world view of already being convinced that God was there and already pretending that I knew for sure that God could and would try to do such things.

We are going to interpret the world we experience through our world view. Since my world view was based on pretending to know for sure about things which I couldn't have possibly known for sure, there was no valid basis what-so-ever upon which to make any claims about God interacting with me. Imaginary Friends are one thing, but when we loose sight of the fact that they are imaginary, I think that's a pretty sad situation. Growing up in a religious family, I was never afforded the luxury of critical thinking. I was just given things to "believe in". Now that I am thinking for my self, I can still appreciate some things from the Story, but I no longer claim to know for sure that IT is real.

Also, for a little of what I think about our species' history of "being convinced" of unknowable things, see my page called "From Pattern Seeking to Denial" in my Humanity section.
http://www.everyforkintheroad.org/NatSci/anthro/FromPatternSeekingToDenial.htm

Thanks again for the interaction [person's name]. I hope you are well and that all is well with you.
love, joy and peace to you
steven


Final thoughts... 
Also, it seems to me that "knowing for sure" can only happen through mediums that we know for sure are really there. For instance, what about the idea of the Spirit of God confirming some belief to my spirit (something I used to think was happening when I was a believer)? Since there is no evidence what so ever that we even have anything such as a spirit (let alone whether or not there is a Spirit out there that could communicate with it if we had one in the first place), it is not a valid piece of evidence when trying to honestly study the issue of whether or not it is reasonable to be convinced of any kind of Supernatural Existence. The only way one can claim to "know" that they have a spirit, or that they've been contacted by the Spirit, is by faith. 

i.e. You have to have faith (pretend) that there is a God. You have to have faith (pretend) that the only way to know for sure that there is a God is through faith. You have to have faith (pretend) that the only way (other than supernatural intervention) to be in contact with this God is through your spirit. You also have to have faith (pretend) that you even have such a thing in order for such contact to take place in the first place. You have to have faith (pretend) that you actually received some kind of message from this God through the Spirit of God to your spirit. The only way to do this is to have faith (pretend) that your personal interpretation of your subjective experiences is correct. 

Faith in faith, built on faith. It's a circular argument all the way. Now, I hope it's clear by this time that I'm not saying that it is not possible that there is a Spirit/spirit "out there"/"in here". What I'm saying is that it is not reasonable to claim that we know for sure that there is. 

Getting back to what my friend said, I'll conclude this page with a response... 
Once again, they said, "There are many possibilities and many reasonable assertions. But once they are all laid out, the only thing that matters is once you've analyzed the data, what is the most reasonable conclusion."

Exactly. That's what I've been trying to say. Perhaps I should have just left it at that when I included this quote earlier in this section. 
You want to get down to the nitty-gritty of what's reasonable though? Ok, fine. Based on the actual evidence at hand, when using all of the tools available here in the natural, real world, I don't think it is reasonable to conclude that one knows for sure that anything supernatural even exists, let alone what it is like and/or not like. Remember also, I don't say that the suggestion of such a thing is necessarily unreasonable. Considering the endless and infinite possibilities is simply a function of our natural skill set of imagination and creativity. It's only the claims about such things that seem unreasonable to me. 
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