Why We Can't Know Anything

How many times have you been asleep and not realized it? In the middle of a dream, and you have no clue it is a dream. Everything in it seems perfectly normal. Until you wake up. Then you think back and realize how surreal it was and you wonder how you could have thought it was real.

Now, lets say that I somehow tricked you in some way. Unless you are a fool, you will be somewhat weary about believing and trusting me again, right? Then my question is this: Why do we wake up every morning and think about how our senses fooled us, and then believe everything they tell us for the rest of the day?

This was first brought up by a philosopher from the 1600's named Rene Descartes. He wrote a piece called "Meditations on First Philosophy" in which he wrote in a journal entry style as he thought about what he knew and why he thought he knew it, and if it could have really been true. He realized that some things may be true and some may be false. But as an old man, he believed to know many things and could not possible make a list of all of them and check the right and wrong ones off. So, what he attempted to do was to seek out basic principles and try to justify them. He found this very difficult to do as it is hard to look at your hand and tell yourself that it may not truly exist.

Now, I am not trying to tell you that nothing exists and everything is a lie. Though this idea has been brought up in many movies such as "Vanilla Sky", "Stay", and most notably, "The Matrix". I'm just trying to get people to think. What if some of the things you see don't really exist? What if you really are just sleeping and everything is just a dream. The idea that this really COULD be possible is kind of unsettling. There is no way to prove that you are awake and everything is real. How many times have you thought you saw something only to find out that you really didn't? Your senses can decieve you. The brain is a wondrous thing. Your eyes work like a camera, taking multiple pictures and sending them to your brain. Your brain flips them rightside up, and melds them together. Putting pictures in between the REAL pictures to create the seamless motion that we see. Who knows what our brains could be getting wrong? Because of this, we can't know ANYTHING for sure. We can only believe.