I was skimming this article on slashdot, as I am wont to do. These people are saying that the problem with wikipedia is that it is widely trusted, but anyone could make a slight malicious change, thus spreading misinformation from a trusted source.
My question is this: Is there really such a thing as a trusted source? Should you ever believe anything you read, anywhere? Everybody could be making something up. If you do choose to believe someone, why? What basis can you have for choosing to believe one person and not another? It is for this reason that I claim to not believe in anything – if you believe in something, you have to trust something, and if you trust something, you may as well just trust anything.
Do I really beleive nothing? It’s something I often question. I am fond of making ridiculous claims, and claiming to believe in nothing is awfully ridiculous. But then, does my propensity for ridiculous claims cast any sort of doubt on whether I actually I believe them? I do feel like i can be brought to question anything that I beleive, but i would suspect that most people would probably make the same claim; they would simply claim to question a ridiculous statement and then answer it in the negative.
I have managed to wheadle my way around claiming to believe in nothing by saying that I frequently choose to make assumptions that work for me (i.e. that there is an external world) but that these are merely assumptions which I can freely disregard if it suits me. On that topic, if there is one thing I am sure of, it is certaintly not that there is an external world. If i could be said to ‘know’ one thing, it is that life is absolutely worth living. But then, is it really? What if you’re some poor bastard born into slavery in subsaharan africa and the only memory you have of your childhood is watching your entire villiage slaughtered by another villiage, and you barely eke out a subsistence living in the garbage dumps of some crappy town. Is your life really worth living? Hmmm.
The more I think about anything, the less sure I am of everything. I really enjoy thinking about things all too much, I suppose. But then, how much is too much? If you think about things a whole lot you start to have ridiculous opinions, opinions like mine and zeno and every other [wannabe] philsopher. If you don’t think about things enough, then you are ignorant, which everybody knows (here we go with that again) is bliss.
I do know that I won another poker tournament tonight, though. Sweet.
If you decided to read this post looking for salacious juicy tidbits of my personal life, you will have to look elsewhere, although I will say that, as has been the case for the past 6 months (almost), I am a very happy person.