Are You Sure You Exist?

            On Friday I had to do laundry because I had put it off for way too long. I noticed while riding to and from the Laundromat though that the problem with my left crank arm is getting worse. No matter how much I tighten the lock nut it comes loose again as a result of pedaling a short distance. Even though my need to get started on an essay that’s due in a week and a half means that I really can’t sacrifice the time, it looks like I’ll have to go to Bike Pirates on Saturday.

            I managed to do the reading for my essay but still hadn’t even written a rough draft before my afternoon sleep:

           

One bit of good news though was that it was less excruciating to lie in bed in the afternoon and so it looked like the shoulder pain might be subsiding.

            Shortly after getting up from my siesta I was able to slap down some ideas for my essay:

 Augustine wants to disprove the sceptics because his argument requires that there must exist an immutable truth. If he doesn’t destroy their counter argument then his argument will be shaky. If he can’t prove that human beings are alive then proving the existence of god will be very difficult. He is able to prove that even if one is hallucination or dreaming one is nonetheless alive, though neither the madman nor the dreamer would necessarily know this. A dreamer could possibly be dreaming that they are somebody else observing that the dreamer is not alive. To know that you know that you know, etcetera, adds objectivity and distance to knowing, suggesting that human being are theoretically capable of approaching infinite knowledge and possibly recognizing omniscience.

But then I had to switch to my weekly Philosophy assignment to make sure I would be on top of that. I read it twice, changed it from a PDF to a document, condensed it and read it again. It contains Anselm of Canterbury’s “proof” of the existence of “god”. He seems to be saying that if you can think of that being that is greater than you can imagine then it must exist, but the trick is that you still have to believe it exists in the first place for that to work.