Still haven't Figured This Out Yet!

I still haven't figured this, or anything else out yet. And from here, it looks like there isn't much that any of us have figured out. Lets start at the beginning. Creation. Some people have figured out that there was a big bang, while others are still skeptical. But even those scientists don't know why life formed. What the hell is this vacuum that we exist in??? I haven't decided where I stand in the debate of some unseen force (a god?) giving things a higher purpose, or the existentialist view of uninhibited free will, that this here is all we get. There is no before, there is no after, there is no reason. What else haven't we figured out? We know that people have genes, and that our genetic codes have an influence on who we are, but we still don't know exactly how they do this. Are personality traits like confidence due 25% or 50% go genetic vs environmental factors? Nature vs nurture. Every single thing that we debate about! They show that we haven't figured out the universe. But, unlike the post prompt suggests, I disagree with the placement of a "yet" at the end of it. I don't believe that we ever will figure everything out. To figure everything out would be for our knowledge containing vessels to be full, and I do not believe that this is either desirable or possible. Not knowing things, not knowing if we have any purpose IS our purpose. Being able to search for some answers and have theories and debate our ideas is what gives us purpose. And so no, we weren't meant to be able to figure this out... ever.

How do I know what I know?

What I have to say in response to this question is just another form of the nature versus nurture debate. On one hand we have John Locke's idea of tabula rasa, where our mind is, at birth, a blank slate on which experience writes. To me this is a very logical idea. As someone who doesn't believe in a definitive god, it makes sense to think that we cannot inherently know anything. Instead, everything we know and think is a result of our life experiences. I can read and write because I went to school. Therefore I know things because I was taught them.

On the other hand is the very loud argument for innate knowledge. The best evidence that I can use to support this idea is IQ. Some people are naturally smarter than others. People with an ultra-high IQ seem to have a head start because they appear to inherently know more than the rest of us. But I've actually just started to see the flaw in this argument. What does IQ measure? Some studies day it measures our motivation to do well, but for the purposes of this argument I will use a different definition. I see intelligence tests as tests of pattern recognition and connection making. Those who are best at making connections score the highest. They are the most observant, the fastest thinkers, and the "smartest." So if people with high IQs are just more observant than the general population and can make more connections than us, they didn't start off already knowing more. They just had better tools to learn more.

By my own mis-shaped argument I would say that we know what we know by how fast and how well our brains can make connections between different pieces of knowledge, and that everything we know is learned.

The Garden State

The concept of the garden state appears to refer to the garden of eden, and to the quote from genesis stating that "the lord took the man, and put him into the garden of Eden, to dress it and to keep it." Dressing it and keeping it is what Candide is referring to when he says that "we must cultivate our garden" (p. 94), implying that at the end stage of the book, Candide and his companions have reached an Eden of sorts. If we are to go along with the myth that Eden is the closest thing to paradise, Candide has apparently found heaven on earth, also known as, the best of all possible worlds, proving that throughout the entire book, even having gone through many hardships, he never does shed Pangloss's philosophy.

I also think that it is important to note that even in their garden state, they are undeniably bored. According to the dervish on page 92, man is supposed to "Cultivate your land, drink, eat, sleep and [keep your mouth shut]." This does not give Candide the sense of higher purpose that he has been striving for, and the old woman even proclaims on page 91 that she thinks it might be better to "undergo all the miseries we have each of us suffered" than "simply to sit here and do nothing." These views are important to me because I believe they portray the way that society tends to view "happiness." We see being happy as something primitive and simple. Those who are happy are somehow inferior? Like the story we read at the start of the year about the Omelas, people need suffering in order to be interesting.

So if the garden state is paradise and the best of all possible worlds, and in the best of all possible worlds we are happy, and happiness is "basic," and being board does not translate to happiness, the best of all possible worlds and the garden state cannot exist.