Three a week: Feeling

You feel? Three questions:

Question 1: What is feeling?

You say you feel a certain way. Please, explain. Your back feels itchy? Don’t you mean there are just little electric signals being shot from your back to your brain? Why does this have to be accompanied by what you call a “feeling”? I can perfectly explain “feeling” by third-person language (nerves, signals, brain, etc.), so why confuse things by claiming there is some experience accompanied all of this?

Question 2: Who is feeling?

It is a preposterous assumption to assume that you feel something. That presupposes, without argument, that you are a thing which exists. To claim that there is a unified center of experience is to claim the existence of mind. This is only a small feat for those who have not studied the issue. Ask your nearest brain scientist if you have a mind.

Question 3: Are you sure?

Can you be absolutely sure of your feeling? I am concerned with what things we can know, and is feeling one of them? Should a statement like, “I know that I taste steak” be held as absolute as “There is no married bachelor”? If you claim both these statements are absolutely true, and that you can know them, what does that say for the process by which we come to know truth? Has our methodology expanded from logical certainty to include some other method?

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