Conatus: THIRD EDITION by Tom Wallace - HTML preview

C O N A T U S

consideration?

We can be sure:

That, at least for each of us individually, we exist as a conscious presence.

We can reasonably assume:

Other conscious beings exist.

Consciousness is nothing more than our interactions with other consciousnesses (and possibly with an external reality).

Other people have a similar conscious experience to ourselves.

Some animals at least, and possibly a good many other creatures, have some kind of conscious experience.

Everything else — and the rest of this conclusion — is what is in doubt.

Should we then just abandon the search for truth? Anjam Khursheed (The Universe Within) points out that even to give up the search for truth is really to imply that there is some higher truth about why the search is pointless. Likewise, with meaning. All statements and endeavours imply some kind of underlying meaning, even for those who claim that meaning does not exist.

To qualify as viable, a theory must have correspondence with the facts it is trying to explain. Let’s imagine for a moment that we

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