Last Updated on March 25, 2025

What can you know for certain?

In college I was a Philosophy major.

I was obsessed with the question of “What can we know?”

Especially, what can we be absolutely sure that we know.

This might have just been my anxiety.

I was worried that I might be wrong all the time.

But this also the area of Philosophy called “Epistemology,” or the study of knowledge.

As it turns out, the answer to “What can we know for sure?” is “Almost nothing!”

But there is one thing.

And knowing that changes everything.

What we can actually know

The one thing we can know with absolute certainty is this:

Right now, I am having the experience that I’m having.

That’s it.

Our memories are fallible.

Our ability to predict the future is inaccurate at best.

But right now, in this moment, I can know without a doubt that I’m experiencing what I’m experiencing.

I might be hallucinating.

But even so, I can know that I’m experiencing my hallucinations!

This self-knowledge is absolute.

The primacy of perception

In The Phenomenology of Perception, French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty called this idea “the primacy of perception.”

And it’s incredibly important to understanding how reality works.

And also for dealing with narcissists and other abusers!

This idea is this:

Before we can do any sort of science or observation of the world, we have to be able to fundamentally trust our experiences.

For instance, if we look through a microscope and see cells, we have to trust that our eyes are working.

If we doubt that what we are seeing is what we are seeing, we wouldn’t have any science at all.

Nor any other sort of knowledge.

All knowing relies on believing that we know what we are experiencing right now.

We don’t know yet if it refers to anything outside of our experience.

But we know we are experiencing it.

Experience and the brain

Many people refer to neuroscience to explain subjective experiences.

For instance, people say, “meditation changes the brain.”

Or hypnotists will say hypnosis works because of some brain area being activated.

Merleau-Ponty would say that is madness!

“The brain” is an abstraction compared to our direct experience.

I think it’s likely that I have a brain.

But I can’t be sure about that without further observations.

No one has ever opened up my skull and checked whether I have one or not.

Maybe I’m a robot or an android!

I’ve often wondered that myself.

However, I know, without a doubt, that meditation changes my direct experience.

I don’t need further proof of its effectiveness.

I already know it.

So what’s the point of this?

If you’re trying to change your subjective experience, you don’t need anyone’s permission.

And no one can tell you that what you’ve discovered is incorrect.

I found lots of weird things that worked great for me to transform anxiety and stress.

Will they work for you?

Who knows unless you try them?

I’ve met people who refuse to try NLP or hypnosis techniques because they aren’t yet proven effective in a series of double-blind, placebo-controlled experiments.

To me, this is wild.

I think it’s more like going to the store and trying on a new shirt.

Does it fit or not?

Do you like how it looks or not?

That’s all that matters.

What we can know and what we can’t

Your subjective experience is more absolutely knowable than scientific observation, which relies on the absolute knowingness of experience to even draw conclusions.

And then at every step of further observation and modeling, more predictive errors are possible.

So even the best scientific calculations are approximations based on mental models.

Whereas your direct experience in this moment is absolute.

Either it feels better or it doesn’t.

Either you like it or you don’t.

This doesn’t mean that you can just make up any old truth about reality.

It’s the exact opposite.

It’s that we can’t know for sure about external reality.

The best we can do is make guesses or predictions.

Absolute confidence

I can know certain things for sure.

Like that motivating myself from love and joy is better than from fear and pain.

Like that taking breaks every couple of hours works better for me than pushing through.

Like that being empowered feels better than being disempowered.

Perhaps you share my experience.

Or perhaps you have a different experience.

Either way, you can trust yourself, completely, to already know.

Narcissists try to gaslight people by doing the opposite:

They try to get us to doubt our subjective experience.

They say, “I never said that,” after just saying that.

And then they ask us to believe things about external reality simply because they said them.

Reality works the opposite way.

External reality is a gamble.

But internal subjective experience you can absolutely know for sure.

And this is why it’s possible to have absolute confidence.

Not in your ability to predict the future.

But in your ability to know what’s right for you.

Take care,

 

 

 

~Duff
(they/them)