Wednesday, May 6, 2009
Lecture 3
Chose any premise you hold as true and consider why you hold it as true. Consider the foundations of your premise and your supporting premises. Is there a point at which a "leap of faith" is required to undergird your premise? Consider how "far back" in your personal knowledge system this leap is positioned. Do you remain confident of it? Why or Why not? (Adapted from the course Guide Book.)
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For some reason "the Matrix" comes to mind. Are the premises of our very existence leaps of faith? Somehow we all need a baseline that we agree on, then we create our "own private Idaho"s from there. (If you are not familiar with my Idaho reference, search "you're living in your own private Idaho" in song lyrics.) So, Orion, at what level are the premises that we should be considering? Are we in the "physical beings must obey the laws of physics" level, or are we more along the lines of "there is an omnipresent God who is evaluating our daily thoughts and actions"?
ReplyDeleteI do not think that the premise needs to be as profound as either of the examples that Tom gave. Consider the color green. What makes that "Green"? Here is a premise that I hold as true: green is that color that is green. (This is something I think we can mostly all agree on). Upon examination, I see that I only hold that as true because that is what others have called it. The "leap of faith" occurs where I believe that it is green because that is what I have been taught it is. I find the question is an exercise showing how much of what we know is "faith" based.
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