{"id":20995,"date":"2019-03-15T06:43:16","date_gmt":"2019-03-15T10:43:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/?p=20995"},"modified":"2019-03-15T06:46:19","modified_gmt":"2019-03-15T10:46:19","slug":"i-do-know-that-i-know-what-i-know-because-i-know-i-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/2019\/03\/i-do-know-that-i-know-what-i-know-because-i-know-i-do\/","title":{"rendered":"“I Do<\/em> Know That I Know What I Know, Because I Know I Do”"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Image:<\/a><\/p>\n

[Image: “When I Grow Up I Want to Be A Ballerina. No, An Astronomer. No, A Ballerina.,” by Tom Waterhouse. Found on Flickr<\/a>, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)]<\/em><\/p>\n

From whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

What do we know for sure? That’s the real question. That’s what the cogito is. That’s what solipsism is. This isn’t theory. This isn’t belief or faith. This is the basic fact of existence. It’s all about figuring out exactly what we know for certain as opposed to everything else. It’s truly amazing that something so glaringly obvious and irrefutable is so universally ignored by science and philosophy and religion.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Jed McKenna [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

We don’t live our lives by choice, but by default. We play the roles we are born to. We don’t live<\/em> our lives, we dispose<\/em> of them. We throw them away because we don’t know any better. And the reason we don’t know any better is because we never asked. We never questioned or doubted. Never stood up. Never drew a line. We never walked up to our parents or our spiritual advisers or our teachers or any of the other formative presences in our early lives and asked one simple. honest, straightforward question. The one question that must be answered before any other question can be asked:
\n“What the hell is going on here?”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Jed McKenna [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Not from whiskey river<\/em>:<\/p>\n

Are We There Yet?<\/strong><\/p>\n

You only have to make her one grilled cheese
\nin the suffocating heat of summer
\nwhile still wearing your wet swim trunks
\nto know what it’s like to be in love.
\nAnd you only have to sit once
\nfor a haircut in the air conditioning
\nwith the lovely stylist to forget all about it,
\nand to forget that anything in the universe
\never existed prior to the small, pink sweater
\nnow brushing softly against your neck.
\nIn this world, every birth is premature.
\nHow else to explain all of this silence,
\nall of this screaming,
\nall of those Christmas card letters
\nabout how well the kids are doing in school?
\nWe’re all struggling to say the same old things
\nin new and different ways.
\nAnd so we must praise the new and different ways.
\nI don’t like Christmas.
\nI miss you that much.
\nFor I, too, have heard the screaming,
\nand I, too, have tried to let it pass,
\nand still I’ve been up half the night
\nas if I were half this old,
\nand like you, I hate this kind of poetry
\njust as much as my life depends upon it.
\nThey’re giving away tiny phones for free these days,
\nbut they’ve only made
\na decent conversation more precious.
\nOne medicine stops the swelling,
\nanother medicine stops the first medicine.
\nJust like you, I entered this world
\nmad and kicking, and without you,
\nit’s precisely how I intend to go.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Dobby Gibson [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

Heat<\/strong><\/p>\n

My mare, when she was in heat,
\nwould travel the fenceline for hours,
\nwearing the impatience
\nin her feet into the ground.<\/p>\n

Not a stallion for miles, I’d assure her,
\ngive it up.<\/p>\n

She’d widen her nostrils,
\nsieve the wind for news, be moving again,
\nher underbelly darkening with sweat,
\nthen stop at the gate a moment, wait
\nto see what I might do.
\nOh, I knew
\nhow it was for her, easily
\nrecognized myself in that wide lust:
\ncame to stand in the pasture
\njust to see it played.
\nOffered a hand, a bucket of grain—
\na minute’s distraction from passion
\nthe most I gave.<\/p>\n

Then she’d return to what burned her:
\nthe fence, the fence,
\nso hoping I might see, might let her free.
\nI’d envy her then,
\nto be so restlessly sure
\nof heat, and need, and what it takes
\nto feed the wanting that we are—<\/p>\n

only a gap to open
\nthe width of a mare,
\nthe rest would take care of itself.
\nSurely, surely I knew that,
\nwho had the power of bucket
\nand bridle—
\nshe would beseech me, sidle up,
\nbe gone, as life is short.
\nBut desire, desire is long.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(Jane Hirshfield [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n

…and:<\/p>\n

You think to yourself:<\/p>\n

Here I am reading page 5 of this book; I see my hands holding this book. I have hands. How do I know they’re my hands? Silly question. They’re fastened to my arms, to my body. How do I know this is my body? I control it. Do I own it? In a sense I do. It’s mine to do with it as I like, so long as I don’ harm others. It’s even a sort of legal possession, for while I may not legally sell it to anyone so long as I am alive, I can legally transfer ownership of my body, to, say a medical school once it is dead.<\/p>\n

If I have<\/em> this body, then I guess I’m something other than<\/em> this body. When I say “I own my body” I don’t mean “This body owns itself” — probably a meaningless claim. Or does everything that no one else owns own itself? Does the moon belong to everyone, to no one, or to itself? What can be an owner of anything? I can, and my body is just one of the things I own. In nay case, I and my body seem both intimately connected and yet distinct. I am the controller, it is the controlled. Most of the time.<\/p>\n

Then [this book] I asks you if in that case you might exchange your body for another, a stronger or more beautiful or more controllable body.<\/p>\n

You think that this is impossible.<\/p>\n

But, the book insists, it is perfectly imaginable, and hence possible in principle.. You wonder whether the book has in mind reincarnation of the transmigration of souls, but, anticipating the wonder, the book acknowledges that while reincarnation is one interesting idea, the details of how this might happen are always left in the dark, and there are other more interesting ways it might happen. What if your brain were to be transplanted into a new body, which it could then control? Wouldn’t you think of that as switching bodies? There would be vast technical problems, of course, but, given our purposes, we can ignore them.<\/p>\n

It does seem then (doesn’t it?) that if your brain were transplanted into another body, you would go with it. But, are<\/em> you a brain? Try on two sentences, and see which one sounds more like the truth to you:<\/p>\n

I have a brain.
\nI am a brain.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

(Daniel C. Dennett [source<\/em><\/a>])<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[Image: “When I Grow Up I Want to Be A Ballerina. No, An Astronomer. No, A Ballerina.,” by Tom Waterhouse. Found on Flickr, and used here under a Creative Commons license. (Thank you!)] From whiskey river: What do we know for sure? That’s the real question. That’s what the cogito is. That’s what solipsism is. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":21000,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","h5ap_radio_sources":[],"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"activitypub_content_warning":"","activitypub_content_visibility":"","activitypub_max_image_attachments":3,"activitypub_interaction_policy_quote":"anyone","activitypub_status":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"Jane Hirshfield, Jef McKenna, Tom Waterhouse, et al.: 'I Do Know That I Know What I Know, Because I Know I Do'","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[247,1393,250,5,50,251,4159],"tags":[270,370,1400,3256,4861,4885,4886,4887],"class_list":{"0":"post-20995","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-ruminations","8":"category-whiskey-river-runningaftermyhat","9":"category-art","10":"category-06_writing","11":"category-language-writing_cat","12":"category-poetry-writing_cat","13":"category-essays","14":"tag-jane-hirshfield","15":"tag-consciousness","16":"tag-the-self","17":"tag-douglas-hofstadter","18":"tag-tom-waterhouse","19":"tag-daniel-c-dennett","20":"tag-dobby-gibson","21":"tag-jed-mckenna","22":"entry"},"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/03\/whenigrowupiwanttobe_tomwaterhouse_thumb.jpg?fit=500%2C334&ssl=1","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p6kZSG-5sD","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20995","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20995"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20995\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":21002,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20995\/revisions\/21002"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/21000"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20995"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20995"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/johnesimpson.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20995"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}