“I think therefore I am” – but in what arena of awareness do I conjure a thought as the focus of my attention?

What is the truth that changes as the facts change?  What is the logic that pitches reason against reason?  What is the belief that shows us the ‘right thing to do’?

Is truth our imaginative representation of facts that are believed to defy contradiction?

Does logic become our guide to the truth only because we have decided beforehand that the truth must be logical?

Do we see as we believe believing we see as we see?

What is this chalice we call consciousness – at once a source of all pleasure and pain?

Is a memory the same thing whether or not we are actually remembering?

What is the fact of proof – for even as life can be found to have its causes in a preceding physical reality it neither proves that cause and effect are identical nor explains the difference?

What is entropy but an event that gains no purchase without the events that have already defied it?

What is reality apart from a convergence of events, now inclusive of a point of view?

What is the cause that allows us an insight into ourselves without the fundamental distinction initiated by taking a point of view?

Is the device that responds automatically to our movements aware of us no less than we are of ourselves when blindly accepting that perception is due to the causes that trigger our responses?

What is the observation that allows us to see the order of things and our place within it?

Are theism and atheism not conventions of belief – since we either believe that God exists in the way we believe, or that there is no God because there is no evidence to match our preconceptions?

Can there be a more classical case of begging the question than presuming that existence must have a cause?

Without philosophy how would we know how little we know?

Mike Laidler