Molly was born completely blind. She has never seen a color, a shape, an object,
anything. She navigates and understands the world primarily through touch and sound. In order to
distinguish the objects she encounters, she runs her hands across their surfaces.
Molly is also very superstition. For good luck, she always carries with her her lucky marble
and lucky die. Depending on the situation, she often takes one of them out and rubs it
in her hand. She can distinguish between the die and the marble by feeling and discerning
the die’s angular edges and pointed corners verses the marble’s round, smooth surface.
At eighteen years old, Molly undergoes cataract removal surgery and an intraocular
lens implant. Her blindness is effectively cured. Molly awakes from the surgery, and for the first
time in her life, she sees the world around her: all the colors and shapes of objects previously
known to her only by touch and language. On the table next to the hospital bed are her
lucky marble and lucky die. In this moment, she wants to hold her lucky marble. She looks at both
items on the table. Before touching them, can she tell which is which? Can she tell the marble from
the die, having only touched them, but never seen them? This question is what is known as
Molyneux’s Problem, originally formulated by philosopher William Molyneux in 1688.
Intuitively, it might seem obvious to assume that Molly will be able to connect the smoothness she’s
touched in the past to the rounded appearance of the spherical marble, and the pointedness she’s
felt to the angular appearance of the cubic die. But without any prior visual experience,
without any reference points for what smoothness or pointedness or anything looks like, how would
she be able to make these connections? For hundreds of years, versions of this
thought experiment have divided philosophers. Eempiricists believing someone in this situation
would not be able to identify the objects because knowledge comes only or primarily from firsthand
sense-experience, which in this case, have not yet been had. Rationalists believed that
the person would be able to identify the objects because knowledge chiefly comes from our ability
to reason, and the connections would be able to be deduced through one’s rational faculties.
Nowadays, though, modern science allows for the possibility of this thought experiment to
not just be debated over but actually tested. In 2011, MIT professors Richard Held and Dr.
Pawan Sinha conducted an experiment in which a group of children and teenagers
who were born blind received cataract removal surgery, curing their blindness.
Just following their surgery, the participants were then presented with Lego-like blocks. One
collection of blocks was placed visibly on a table; and another identical collection was placed
hidden from view under the table, only perceivable by touch. When the participants were asked to
match objects they had felt with objects seen, the results were essentially equivalent to chance,
with 58% accuracy. In other words, Molly would not dependably be able to identify the marble or the
die. The experiment concluded that the empiricists were right: the primary tool we have to get the
outside world inside our head, into knowledge and understanding, is our senses, not our reason.
This study is not without critiques, though, and some argue that since there is variability
and other factors involved with things like the surgery’s recovery process as well as the duration
of time participants were tested after it, the problem is still somewhat inclusive. However,
regardless, Molyneux’s Problem points to a broader problem: our first unanswerable
philosophical question. How do we know that what we are perceiving is accurate?
If we come to understand the world not primarily through reason, but through our sense-experiences,
how accurate are our perceptions and understandings if our senses are limited
and often unreliable? Most of us assume that what we are encountering outside our head is
relatively consistent with how it seems inside, but how do we know? And can we ever know for sure?
The term qualia refers to the internal, subjective, qualitative properties of experiences.
This includes things like color, taste, and feelings (pain, love, sharpness, smoothness,
and so on). And so, whether or not what we are perceiving is accurate to the world in and of
itself depends largely on whether or not qualia, or our subjective experiences, are intrinsic
properties of the world or merely a product of the mind—or some combination. Even if we can use tools
to measure, test, and enhance our insights about the physical world, the last stop for
everything is still the mind. We are always left with and limited by the cognitive and perceptual
frameworks inbuilt in the mind. Since we can never experience anything outside of the mind—including
the mind itself—we can never know what anything is actually like outside of it. This is often
referred to as the egocentric predicament. This leads us to the next seemingly unanswerable
philosophical question: how do we know that what we are perceiving is the same as other people?
Of course, since we can never experience anything outside of our mind, we can also never enter into
another person’s to know what things are like for them. Not only can we not know if the experience
of blue is entirely unique to the human mind, but we also can’t know if the specific blue we
personally experience is unique to our mind alone—or at least is different from what is
experienced in some portion of other minds. Since we can communicate relatively successfully about
events and objects in the world, we can know that differences amongst objects and events outside our
mind are generally proportionally consistent with differences experienced inside our mind.
But just because we refer to the differences with the same terms does not mean that the differences
are experienced as the same thing. Perhaps what you see as green looks like blue in your friend’s
mind, and vice versa, but you just associate the same words with the same differences. Because
all qualia are housed in the conscious, private mind, we can never objectively perceive, measure,
or define them without using tools or terminology that don’t also fall victim to the same problem.
This leads us to the next unanswerable question: how do we know that anything or anyone exists
outside our mind at all? If you can never get out of your mind and experience anything outside of
it, and you can never enter the mind of anyone else, how can you know for sure that anything
or anyone exists outside of your mind? We reasonably assume that since the world
interfaces back with us—objects and people respond to our actions, people talk and
act like they feel and think things, and so on—that all of these things are real,
independent things outside of our mind. But how can you know for sure that those people and things
aren’t merely creations of your mind? You do this every night when you dream, without question.
Can you prove right now that you are not on some sort of spaceship, hurdling through the cosmos, a
member of an advanced species that has sent itself off on a long journey to avoid a catastrophe
happening on its host planet. The only way to make the duration of the journey endurable was to be
placed in a stasis tube with wires plugged into your brain, temporarily clearing all memories and
actively stimulating your brain’s nerve impulses throughout the trip in order to create a lifetime
worth of experiences until arriving somewhere else and remembering it was all a simulated reality.
Of course, odds are arguably very unlikely that this or anything similar is the case.
But the point is, the odds are not zero. And you simply cannot know for sure.
Although you can never know for sure about anything that exists outside your mind,
the one thing you can know for sure is that you exist somewhere in something. As philosopher Rene
Descartes pointed out, if you can think and doubt, you must exist. But then, where did you come from?
Even if what you perceive isn’t real, there still seemingly needs to be something other than
yourself that created you and simulates, causes, or implants what you perceive. If you, in some
form, exist, you must either be the creator of yourself or something else must have created you.
If we assume the more likely and normal belief that other things and other people do exist,
and you were created by other people, then those who created you must have also been created by
something or someone else, and whoever created them, again, must have been created by someone
or something else, so on and so forth, all the way back ad infinitum to the beginning of humanity,
the beginning of life, the beginning of Earth, and the beginning of everything.
And so, no matter the case, where did it all come from? If something or someone created everything,
who created it or them? If everything came from nothing, how could it have come to be at all?
This brings us to our final unanswered and possibly unanswerable philosophical question:
does God exist? Of course, God means different things to different people,
but in terms of what is traditionally considered God, defined in all three of the Abrahamic
religious texts, the Bible, the Torah, and the Quran, there are quite a few problems.
In these religions, God is defined as omniscient, omnipotent, and omnibenevolent.
This means that God is all knowing, aware of everything that has happened, is happening,
and will happen; all powerful, possessing unlimited power and able to do anything;
and all good, possessing maximal morality. The problem is that there are a multitude
of paradoxes that arise from these qualities. For example, the classic omnipotence paradox,
the paradox of the stone, which shows that if God is omnipotent, he must be able to
create a stone so large and heavy that even he can’t lift it. If he can’t create this stone,
how can he be omnipotent? But if he cannot lift it, how can he be omnipotent?
Similarly, if God knows everything that will happen, then he knows every choice, intervention,
and action he will ever make. Thus, he can never change his mind. If he does change his mind,
and he’s omniscient, he must have known that he was going to change his mind beforehand,
and therefore, he wouldn’t be changing his mind. If he didn’t know he was going to change his mind,
he must not be omniscient. If he can’t change his mind, he must not be omnipotent.
Lastly, there is what is known as the problem of evil, which is defined as follows: if God is all
powerful, all knowing, and all good, why does evil and tragedy and suffering pervade the world? If
God is omnipotent, he must be able to prevent evil and suffering. If he is also omniscient, he must
be able to know and foresee it. And so, he either wants to prevent evil but he is not able to do so
or is not aware of it, or he is aware of it and can do so but does not want to prevent it. In the
former, he is not all-powerful or not all-knowing, or both. In the later, he is not all good. If one
argues that God provides the individual with freewill so as to allow the individual to
choose to follow him or not, would not God’s plan and or awareness already include the individual
choosing or not choosing to follow him? For what reason would God cause and allow individuals to
not choose to follow him or be morally good if it meant that they would cause evil and
suffering? If these instances are, rather, some sort of test, why would an all-knowing,
all-powerful God need to make people undergo tests involving horrible evil and suffering if
he can create a flourishing world without the need for tests involving horrible evil and suffering?
He must work in mysterious sadistic ways. Of course, it could be possible that God is
maximally great but not all powerful; or he is not omniscient and is not aware of what’s going on;
or he isn’t all good, but rather, he is morally fallible. And of course, God, or the creator
of everything—or perhaps more accurately, the underlying nature of everything—could be something
entirely different, completely beyond our ability to imagine let alone define. But the point is,
the God we have traditionally defined has its problems, and the God we haven’t,
we don’t know of. In truth, we cannot yet disprove the existence of any God any more than we can
prove the one many claim to know. Currently, the only honest answer is we don’t know.
Ultimately, we can’t get out of our minds to know what the universe is really like in and of itself;
we can’t enter into other minds to know what it is like for anyone else; we can’t know if outside
our mind, there is anything at all, or if it is real in the way think; and we cannot dig within
our mind to know where it originally came from. But perhaps the problem is merely our conception
of our mind—or more accurately, our conception of our self. We often view ourselves as a distinct
and separate thing perceiving other things. We see ourselves as being in the mind and our mind
as being in the body. But the body is inescapably in the world, and we are no less dependent on the
world than we are the body. All of these things are simultaneously interlocked and interdependent.
Thus, perhaps in this way, there is really no outside of you. You are merely a fully embedded,
non-separate part inescapably attached to the body of the universe. If we view ourselves in this way,
there is no accurate or inaccurate perception, no dichotomy between the world as it is and the
world as you experience it, no beginning, no end, no outside, no inside, no separate,
no other. There is just a single, unified whole of everything, everything equally true,
everything equally proportional, eternally dancing the dance of everything to the tune of nothing.
To doubt the existence of anything outside of you is perhaps entirely reasonable,
because in this sense, you are everything else, and everything else is you.