no doubt
a critical inquiry into the limits of knowing, knowledge, and belief
Reading time...
This treatise is a collection of observations, intuitions, common-sense reasoning, anecdotes from personal experience, and a handful of quotes — mostly from authors close to my heart.
I wrote this a couple of years ago and it still feels right to me. It fits well in my "Dark Spirit" fantasy, and my other essays on this website, but it is more philosophical and a bit more "academic".
Introduction
I begin with reason — and for that fact itself, I can find no reason. It's simply how I find myself. And that fact, in the end, seems just as irrational and blind as, say, a devout believer taking the opposite stance. While I am, in a sense, forced to rely on reason, a believer needs no reason, knowledge, or evidence to believe in whatever it is they believe.
I am not out to convert believers or to talk anyone out of their supposed truth (there's anyway no point in trying). Everything written here is an exposition of my own insights — insights that apply to my situation, my sandbox. You may recognize something in it. Or not. In any case, take nothing I write as self-evident. In other words: what is your truth?
“If you read a book without examining its ideas with skepticism as you go, those ideas will simply become your new entrenched ideas. If you truly want to see things clearly, then — in my view — an open-minded skepticism is the standard posture, the baseline, the conditio sine qua non.”
