"There's far too much to take in here, more to find than can ever be found"

First off, it wasn't Locke that I meant to say for the philosopher. It was Hume, although Locke had a similar idea so it doesn't particularly matter.

Is our way of knowing better than Columbus' way of knowing?

Nope. It doesn't even matter how you define better, our way of knowing isn't better than Columbus', and 600 years from now when some college kids are reading some book by some guy about the other and are asked the same thing, their answer should still be nope.

Knowledge is completely subjective. You don't know what I know, and I don't know what you know. We may know some similar things, but you, in all likelihood, don't know what it's like to have my maternal grandmother as your grandmother, and I don't know what it is like to grow up in your hometown (unless you're from the Fresno/Clovis area, in which case, we can relate, but doesn't mean we know the same things).

Getting back to our sporadic discussion of the "Here be monsters"...we all assume that now what it is placed on a map, it's done in jest. There are no monsters there. That's a silly notion. ...But how do we know? What if there are "monsters"? What if mermaids, dragons, minotaurs, yetis and all those other cryptids exist? What if just one of them exists? How do we know they don't?

Bringing Hume up again, let's look at some causation: (ok, yeah, I'm going to copy this off Spark Note's summary of Hume from Sophie's World [which is a great history of philosophy book] because it just explains it better than I can at 12:30 at night.):

Hume believed that what we cannot know for sure that what we call laws of nature are unbreakable. Just because every time we have seen a stone dropped it has fallen to the ground does not mean that it has to do so. We simply expect it to fall. We impose our idea of cause and effect on the world. ....we ascribe causality to what we have seen occur again and again. ...He warned against concluding that what is is what ought to be.

Alright, so, what if that stone doesn't fall (what if a mermaid is found)? Columbus expected the stone to fall too. If it didn't, he'd have his own explanation for why it didn't. If it didn't for us, we'd have our own explanation. In our case, we assume the stone falls thanks to gravity.

Gravity, by the way, is just a theory. It, feasibly, could be proved wrong (like say if a stone doesn't fall).

We discussed in class that we listen to physicists and such in order to garner knowledge about the world.

...Physicists mostly come up with theories, which can be proved wrong. Einstein? Yeah, can be proved wrong.

So just because we think we proved a lot of the beliefs during Columbus' time "wrong" doesn't mean that whatever we replaced for those beliefs couldn't happen to us as well.

Going with the whole "disenchantment" thing, I don't think we've become disenchanted. We've just replaced one type of mythology with another and dubbed it science. We can say it's based off of logic, reason, analysis, facts, experimentation, whatever, but, who knows? Maybe we're missing something BIG. Or something little? You don't really know either way. You can't really know either way.


But you know what, Circle of Life, man, Circle of Life. (Please, you know it's amazing.)