So if it seems that I'm thinking something, I'm thinking it. End of? — Kranky

We can explore the immediate causes of your thoughts (see: research into neural networks and contemporary models of human cognition for more information)...

The problem is that won't satisfy you. It's not enough, for you, to know the immediate causes of your thoughts, you want to know the "why" of every cause, which leads back to the big bang (which cannot be explained from a causal/"why" perspective).

It seems like you're actually asking for a general justification for life rather than evidence or reasons for immediate thoughts and beliefs...

I'm happy with evidence and reasoning.

I just struggle with the concept that my thoughts may not be my thoughts. Not in the sense that they belong to someone else, but that what I appear to think, I'm in fact not.

For problem with thoughts:
Play some music in your computer.
Enable the voices you hear from computer with thoughts in your head.

I'm happy with evidence and reasoning.

I just struggle with the concept that my thoughts may not be my thoughts. Not in the sense that they belong to someone else, but that what I appear to think, I'm in fact not. — Kranky

Are you familiar with determinism?

Try to accept it as a worst case scenario, that your thoughts are pre-determined by ultimately external causes, but also try to realize that from our limited perspective (lacking access to ultimate truth as a starting point) our thoughts appear to be enough our own that we must still put effort into pursuing reason or evidence, lest we be coerced to our disadvantage. (We still want to have accurate beliefs, and that still requires ground-work).

It can be very useful to question the validity, strength, and origin of our own beliefs, but once they have been reinforced and made accurate enough, the utility of questioning them declines further and further.

So what appears to be my thoughts right now, are indeed my thoughts? No chance that a Demon making me interpret them wrong or misunderstand?

What if reason and evidence is mistook and false also? "

It appears that I'm posting on this forum. — Kranky

Wrong! But don't despair - Raymond Smullyan's experimental epistemologist will sort you out.

That's confusing haha! What's the moral of the story?

Just because we can conceive of alternative(s) for X does not make the alternative(s) true. E.g. That the Earth is pyramidal in shape, though this is an alternative to the Earth being roughly spherical, is not true on account of having been conceived.

Just because alternatives for X are conceivable does not then imply that there is reason to doubt X. E.g., the quantity of alternatives to “Earth’s shape is roughly spherical” is, I believe, on par with the quantity of geometric shapes conceivable. But since all of our experience is most consistently explained (i.e., explained in manners devoid of contradiction) by the Earth being spherical, it then is irrational to doubt that Earth is spherical because someone says “Hey, maybe it’s an octahedron … or may a donut.”

Otherwise, to doubt Earth’s shape via each and every alternative to its being spherical would—to be consistent in how one thinks—also require one’s doubting each and every conceivable alternative in turn ad infinitum. At which point some would say, “man, to hell with all this ad infinitum doubting; just suspend judgment as regards absolute certainty and just go with what is most evident and justified, always free to change one’s mind if the evidence ever changes.”

So what appears to be my thoughts right now, — Kranky

Be that as it may, can you justify any alternative to the highlighted quote? If not, then your awareness of the thoughts you are aware of is not possible to rationally doubt … because you can’t justify any conceivable alternative by which to doubt it ... because you'd have to be aware of the alternative in order to use for the purpose of doubting, thereby proving the alternative wrong (again, because you hold presence as an awareness aware of this alternative).

Are you or are you not aware of thoughts?

And if one’s own awareness is not possible to rationally doubt when one is aware of anything (such as of one’s own thoughts), then there might be other such forms of not yet absolute certainty* that is nevertheless not possible to doubt in practice.

*It can’t be absolute certainty because you can’t prove that you or someone else will never find justifiable alternatives that facilitate the possibility—but not the necessity!—to doubt the reality that you hold presence as an awareness while in any way aware of anything. This even though I’m guessing the given verdict of your presence as, minimally, an awareness is not possible to rationally doubt in practice.

But again, try to read up on those who would argue that one should suspend judgment on matters such as that of what is of absolute certainty. They used to go by the name of Skeptics.

I just struggle with the concept that my thoughts may not be my thoughts. Not in the sense that they belong to someone else, but that what I appear to think, I'm in fact not. — Kranky

Let's look more closely at this use of possession as exemplified in "my thoughts." The property of ownership is bound up with other people recognizing your claims. If you are sure that you have a right to something and nobody around agrees, that really sucks. The whole world is literally against you on that score. On the other hand, if all the ways you claimed other peoples' space was met with only nods of the head, you would have good reason to believe you are the king of everything. There are a number of ways one can see ourselves reflected in various ranges of isolation and communication. As a matter of everyday experience, we do better in one situation and worse in others

That is why it is hard for me to understand what you want when the act of reaching out to others disproves your premise. Not from anything that is said in response but from you, asking for stuff.

That's confusing haha! What's the moral of the story? — Kranky

The problem is identified by the doctor at the end of Scene 5: "Besides, when one starts doubting one's own sense perceptions, the doubt spreads like an infection to higher and higher levels of abstraction until finally the whole belief system becomes one doubting mass of insecurity."

The moral is that while it is true that any judgment can be critically analyzed, it is better to trust one's considered judgments than to doubt everything.

That is a pragmatic consideration (since we have lives to live), not a guarantee that our considered judgments will be correct. But the point of epistemology is to provide tools to help test and identify mistakes in our thinking, not to produce mistake-proof conclusions. As Gilbert Ryle aptly put it:

What is wanted is not any peculiar certificated process, but the ordinary careful processes; not any incorrigible observations, but ordinary corrigible observations; not inoculation against mistakes, but ordinary precautions against them, ordinary tests for them and ordinary corrections of them. — Gilbert Ryle - Concept of Mind

We are such a tiny spec in the existence of everything. To think that we have any real substantial certainty about any of it beyond what we are capable of experiencing and rationalizing at any given moment would be incredibly naive.

We are taking shots in the dark on a regular basis at what we can possibly understand.

That's just something you have to accept, and then play along with like the rest of us. Are we trying to understand things with certainty? Yes. Can we/will we/do we? Maybe. Maybe not. Just accept it.

So my thoughts are my thoughts?

One thing I struggle with is the fact that reasons and evidence for a particular position. These reasons and evidence are subjective.

I could think of a thousand logical reasons why my thoughts are my own and are occurring. But what if this evidence is implanted, along with my false perception of thought?

Before we say "my thoughts" we need to question who is 'me' , are all our thoughts just the product of our brain or is the real me something or someone else? If, as I believe, we are all just the one God who is only able to experience itself as love and compassion, then it can only experience those human and therefore flawed thoughts via the brain.

Whether implanted or not, you do think what you think and feel what you feel and experience what you experience right? Whether implanted or not you do experience all of that, so if something has the power to make you experience these things that's quite amazing right? For what purpose would something trick you? If you are tricked it means that you exist in some way. But why would the thing that tricks you allow you to think at all about the fact that you may be tricked? If it is so powerful it could have made you not even think about that, then you might say maybe it's another trick to trick you. But why do you care so much about being tricked? What is it that you fear?

You have the power to control your life more than you think, you have the power to experience things that make your life worth living. And then when you experience that what does it matter whether you were tricked into experiencing that or if you are the one who made it happen? It's worth it either way. If you can be tricked to experience amazing things, then the trickster isn't such a bad guy. And then once you stop fearing the trickster maybe you will realize there was no trickster and it was you all along.

I'm still so confused lol.

I still interpret my thoughts as potentially not even occuring.

I still interpret my thoughts as potentially not even occuring. — Kranky

What does it mean for you for something to "occur"? If something occurs it means you observe some change. The word occur would have no meaning to you if you didn't perceive change. But you see that you are thinking what you are thinking and not something else, so these thoughts that you are having are occurring, you are experiencing them. Whatever you might be tricked to experience, you are experiencing it.

I am reading your words here, they are real to me, you're real to me.

You're right that we can't be certain about anything, that includes our own existence and, a fortiori, any meaning that attaches to it. The reason for this uncertainty is because the universe at its essence is chaos. The human predicament boils down to the inevitably futile attempt to impose order on that chaos, whether in the form of religion, logic, science, language, social customs, law, or whatever. Your anxiety no doubt stems from an attachment to this hopeless project. In other words, there is a part of you that is clinging to the hope or to the ungrounded belief that somehow we will be able to make sense out of what I take to be innately senseless. Let it go. Embrace non-being and chaos, and "you" will be stronger. You will be stronger because you will achieve exactly what it is that you take to be the ideal of the failed human project: some kind of correspondence between your beliefs about the world and the way the world happens to be. The rejection of the structural project and the acceptance of the limitless chaotic nature of "your" own being will be identical to that-which-is(n't).

I realize, of course, the paradoxical nature of even making these claims, but rather than seeing that as problematic, I take their paradoxicality as a testimony to their truth. Also, while I additionally recognize the advice is reminiscent of the teaching of some eastern religions, that is not the point of view that motivates them. Rather, I think probably like yourself, it is from the repeated failure of trying to arrive at even a half-acceptable account of experience and coming to the conclusion that the reason why no such account is forthcoming is because none is possible.

So if I'm aware of thoughts, then they must be occuring?

So if I'm aware of thoughts, then they must be occuring? — Kranky

To you, yes.

But hey, that’s the wacky nature of mind: it’s personal to the awareness involved.

If you are aware of your thoughts and your thoughts thereby influence your awareness—which they do just by you being aware of them—then they occur as thoughts.

If you are experiencing thoughts, then by definition of "thought" and by definition of "occur", your thoughts are occurring.

Then this too represents certainty?

Who cares about certainty? It's always this weird kind of desire for something that is either impossible because it's formulated to be so or else it doesn't really matter because having it wouldn't get one much of substance.

It's why the solipsism bit is nonsensical. People will admit there's no way to know for sure that solipsism is false, but that is because any observation or perception is compatible with solipsism being the case. But that means there can't be any reason to accept solipsism because anything would count as evidence for it. It's trivial, no refutation because no justification uniquely supports it, even in principle. Its always less likely to be the case than not to be the case, so where's the worry?

Ditch certainty. Ones knowledge of anything is fallible, you could always be wrong. But what matters is what reason you have for thinking something to be true or not. Idle possibility suppositions are pretty impotent so... yeah. I'm not really good for therapy on the issue if it's really bugging you

Trouble, death and taxes.

Baby's First Descartes