Library document
What We Can and Cannot Know
The capstone: the epistemic status of every open question in one place. What is proven (only that experiencing is occurring), what is a calibrated lean, what is open, and what may be undecidable in principle, past the reach of any possible evidence. The map of certainty and its limits.
The essay What We Can and Cannot Know is the readable version. This is the tagged backing.
The open questions have been walked one at a time (the origin, the nature of the ground, one or many, the sustainer). This pulls their honest verdicts into one place, sorted not by topic but by how much can be known.
The one certainty ESTABLISHED, uniquely
Exactly one thing is beyond doubt: experiencing is occurring (see Foundations). Everything below is a credence carried with a defeater, and the point of this page is to be honest about which credences can ever be raised and which cannot.
The map
| Question | The honest lean | Status |
|---|---|---|
| Experiencing is occurring | certain | proven, the only one |
| A world beyond my experience | very high | open, unbridgeable by proof |
| Is there a ground (canvas) | present awareness yes; an eternal, necessary ground, a lean | proven thin, leaned thick |
| The ground is aware, not blind | leaned toward | open |
| The ground is still, not in motion | softer lean | open |
| Did it begin, or always was | a false dichotomy: ground eternal, world begun | mostly resolved; the arising itself UNDECIDABLE |
| One ground or many | monism the better bet | open; a sealed-off plurality is UNDECIDABLE |
| Experience is fundamental (panpsychism) | leaned toward | open |
| What sets the specific laws | dispositions the best fit | open |
| The dreamer (a creator mind) | past proof | belief, not knowledge |
| The miracle (a creating event) | past proof | belief, not knowledge |
Three kinds of not-knowing
- Proven. One item: that there is experience. It needs no frame and no evidence, because it is not a claim about the world; it is the world present to itself. ESTABLISHED
- Open. Most of the list. Genuine questions that better argument or better evidence could still move. Held as leans with defeaters, and the defeaters are stated on each page. OPEN
- Undecidable in principle. A few. The arising of the world from the ground, and the question of causally sealed-off grounds, are questions where every possible observation sits on the wrong side of the thing being asked about, so no evidence could ever settle them. A question can be perfectly meaningful and still be permanently closed to proof. Where that is true, the honest output is a clearly marked blank, not a guess dressed as a finding. UNDECIDABLE
(This category now carries its own tag, UNDECIDABLE, to keep it distinct from the ordinary OPEN: not a question we have yet to answer, but one no possible evidence could ever answer.)
The bottom line
One thing is certain. Most of the rest is a calibrated bet, honestly weighted and honestly defeasible. And a few of the deepest questions are not open in the ordinary sense at all: they are closed to evidence, and the discipline is to say so rather than pretend a lean is a discovery. That is the whole epistemic shape of this section, and of the site: certain at one point, graded everywhere it can be, and honest about the places no grade will ever be earned.