I can name many people that I know personally that I like very much. Some of them, I love.
I am not afraid to die and rather look forward to the experience.
I am reasonably familiar with many books.
I don't need to worry about my fate after death.
My friends like to discuss philosophical questions. Half of them are professional philosophers who have spent their lives studying basic questions of life, trying to answer them and leading discussions of college students thinking about them.
I have difficulty thinking of questions of interest. The Zen/mindfulness/Eckhart Tolle approach of focusing on my senses and the present moment eliminates many questions from consideration. In high school, traveling to and fro on public transport from one side of the large city to the other, I read "The Tyranny of Words" by Stuart Chase and "Language in Thought and Action" by S.I. Hayakawa. Both of those books emphasized the value of paying attention to words and their referents. A lifetime in academic circles has re-emphasized how much of modern life relates to concepts that are not, and often cannot be, grounded in actual experience.
Whether I think about Thomas Jefferson, American debt, the physics of my car's engine, the gravitational pull of Mars or the pollution of the oceans, I am often dealing with abstractions, with ideas that are related to facts I didn't gather and can't verify. I am quite used to listening, reading, talking, thinking and writing about things I don't understand, can't see, can't test and am unsure about.
Descartes famously said that his search for certainty more or less ended with his recognition of his own activity of thinking and of doubting. I do feel rather certain about the statements above but I don't feel that much of my speculation, my thoughts that are not strongly certain, are of interest. When I write a post in this blog, I tend to ask myself what has been happening, in my life and in my mind. My focus is on observation, accurate or not, personal or not. I write to review what has been happening, not to speculate on what it means or what I missed or what I misinterpreted or what might be or what luckily wasn't.
Just for exploration, I put "philosophical questions" into Google and came up with more than 100 million results.
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