Jeebus
Sorry to do this to you but I also want to disagree with what you wrote. Much of it seemed to me well reasoned, but there were one or two serious flaws.
Eh. I do not believe there can be any absolute proof, as each person's experiences are subjective. The fact that you are aware of your own existence is enough proof for you to logically state "I exist". However, that is not proof that others that you interact with exist, or that the world with which you interact is real.
I'm afraid you'll find that your first sentence is the opposite of the truth. Philosophers have always concluded that absolute proof is precisely equivalent to subjective experience.
What JuJu said was that he knew, he did not say that he could demonstrate a proof. This is an important difference. By 'prove' we normally mean something like - demonstrate to be consistent with the axioms of some formal axiomatic system or other. But proving something to ourselves involves a quite different process. (That 'prove' has these two different meanings causes a lot of trouble in philosophical discussions).
It is perfectly easy to know things that we cannot demonstrate in this way. We do it in every moment of every day. You yourself do it in every moment of every day, and sometimes at night. You know that something exists, as you yourself say, even though you cannot prove this to me. And I know that you cannot prove it to me. I know this even though I cannot prove that I know you know it but cannot prove it to me, and so on into absurdity.
Knowing is not 'being able to demonstrate a proof', it is exactly the opposite. Equivalently, 'knowing is not being able to demonstrate a proof'.
Now, you might argue that this one piece of certain knowledge you have(that something exists) is an aberration, a single exception to a rule, but this again is the opposite of the truth. If you delve into the mathematics of the incompleteness theorem, into epistemology, metaphysics, formal logic, and other academic piqeon-holes, (and I don't mean after years of study, just after a bit of root around these things), you quickly see that what we know to be the case but cannot demonstrate to be true is the only form of knowledge that we can ever have, the only type of knowledge we can know. In a strong sense it is the only kind of 'knowledge' that there is.
(By 'know' here I mean as in having a certain knowledge that something is the case, in the strict philosophical sense of 'certain'. In linguistic form it might be the statement "I CANNOT POSSIBLY BE WRONG!" in relation to some assertion or other).
We can all make this statement in relation to the assertion "Something exists". We all seem to agree on this. But we cannot say that we cannot possibly be wrong when we are discussing the theory-laden evidence of our physical senses, nor when discussing the outcome of a demonstration within some formal system of symbols or other that some statement or other is true or false. Kurt Goedel proved this. All we are doing is showing that the statement (theorem, proposition or whatever) is consistent with our axioms. By definition our axioms are assumptions.
Now obviously all this places a limit on what can be known. JuJu's assertion came in under this limit. He said that he knows what he knows in just the same way that he knows that something exists. He knows by just, well, knowing, being aware of it, being conscious that it is the case, knowing because his own conscious experience proves that it is the case.
If we knew how people performed this feat of knowing then perhaps we might find away of testing whether people know things or not. However as yet there is no scientific or western philosophical explanation for how we know things, we just do. Direct experience can bring certain knowledge. That's it. That's all there is to say. Why? How? Unless you know then it just depends on whose explanation you want to believe.
But only direct experience can do this, bring certain knowledge, things that can be known. All philosophers and mathematicians agree on this. It may be the biggest and deepest scientific/philisophical mystery that there is, with the possible exception of why anything exists.
Your assertion that JuJU couldn't know what he knows, on the other hand, is very different to his. You cannot possibly know whether your assertion is true. How, after all, can you know that it is impossible for him to know from direct experience what he knows, when what we learn from our direct experience is known to be the only thing we can ever know?
By the way, nothing I say here is at all contentious in philosophical or mathematical circles, (not as far as I know). It's all fairly easy to prove, and often has been. (Not easy for me, I hasten to add, I can't do all that formal stuff, but easy for any decent mathematician or philosopher, someone like whoever Hypnogogue is).
We've known about all this since the early Greeks philosophers wrote about it. Aristotle put it "Certain knowledge is identical with its object", meaning that to know one must become.
In more Kantian terminology we might say that all that we can ever know is the noumenal, since we cannot ever know anything for certain of the phenomenal. The only noumenal thing of which we are capable of knowing anything at all is what we are, or can become.
I'm can't be sure that I agree with JuJu about reality, reality as JuJu says he knows it is. But I don't know that he doesn't know it. However my guess is that he does. While I can't be certain about it, or ever sure that I'm interpreting his words in the right way, it seems to me that he knows something rather like what I know, and others here, even if we may differ about some of the details.
It's not often I agree with Bertrand Russell on most things, although I'd give a lot to be able to write like him, but I agree completely with him on one issue.
"There is one great question," he writes in 1911. "Can human beings know anything, and if so, what and how? This question is really the most essentially philosophical of all questions."
From Buddhism comes this little gem.
Knowing Fish
One day Chuang Tzu and a friend were walking by a river. "Look
at the fish swimming about," said Chuang Tzu, "They are really
enjoying themselves."
"You are not a fish," replied the friend, "So you can't truly know
that they are enjoying themselves."
"You are not me," said Chuang Tzu. "So how do you know that I
do not know that the fish are enjoying themselves?"
From 'Zen Stories To Tell Your Neighbors'
The point is, we cannot absolutely prove the reality of our own experiences.
After the above I hope you can see that the reality of our experiences is the only thing we can ever know. For each of us nothing else exists except our own experiences. The reality of our experiences is the only thing that we can absolutely know, prove to ourselves, despite the fact that we cannot demonstrate a proof of their reality to anyone else.
Not to ourselves, because we are by nature subjective, and therefore prejudiced towards our own viewpoint; nor to others because the experience itself is subjective, and further we have no absolute proof of the existence of anyone else. For more on this theme, read "The Mysterious Stranger" by Mark Twain.
I agree, and I agree also that it's a relevant issue. In philosophy what you say here is equivalent to the assertion that solipsism is unfasifiable, a well established fact. And, as you say, we are prejudiced towards our own viewpoint. But then according to philosophers ours may be the only viewpoint that exists.
A good example of subjective experience is color. How do we know that what we have been told is "red" and what we see is the same as the "red" that others see? They may choose the same crayon from the box, but only because that is what their experience has taught them to do. But is it truly "red" in an absolute sense? Do I know that the other person is not seeing what I perceive to be green? They could be daltonic, who knows. We cannot prove the reality of our experience of "red". That's that.
I'd go along with that also. Equivalently, experiences are incommensurable. Again this is an established fact. We can only know what we experience, and when we know it we can
really know it, whatever 'it' happens to be. But we cannot communicte our experiences to someone else, they have to had first-hand.
Don't ever let anyone tell you that you cannot know things. Yes, nothing can be proved. But this is one meaning of prove, there is another, and knowing is not the same thing as proving. Not only can you know things, and do you know things all the time, but in a sense you could say that it's the only thing that you can do, the only thing that your consciousness does, just know all the time what state it is in, and what other states it can be in.
I hope that mostly made sense. What it all means is that the original question ('What is Consciousness') has to be answered in the first-person. It can only mean 'What is My Consciousness', for I (or you) can never know that any other consciousness exists, and mine (or yours) is certainly the only one you or I can study.
All the best
Canute
future
