There is no debate when it comes to the chaos of life. It’s a mess regardless of your social standing, gender, hair color, fashion style, etc. However, some things take the cake when it comes to the category of ‘what on earth did I just read/watch/experience.’ As you might expect, many of these can be witnessed in the wonderful world of TikTok.

For those of you who would like to keep all your brain cells intact and your hours wasted on something a little more productive, you may want to keep off the platform, as it is addicting as no other. But, if there’s a little voice of curiosity nibbling on your earlobe, then the Twitter page “Wild TikTok Screenshots” has you covered, posting some of the most unhinged things they find. 

Although the page was only created in February 2022, it has managed to gain over 677.2K followers, each post getting thousands of likes and views. People seem to live for the chaotic content that pushes the boundaries of our understanding of existence as a whole, as well as diminishing the little amount of faith we have left in humanity. 

But what is reality and what is our knowledge of it? Is what we see on the internet, social media, and TV really all there is? What about the fact that most of it is manufactured at least to the degree of it being one-sided? Lots of questions and, thankfully, even philosophers disagree; the greatest minds our species had the chance of experiencing fight with one another on what is true. 

I like to torture myself with trying to understand philosophy as a whole, so let’s go on a very short journey together into the Theory of Knowledge. Keith Lehrer of the University Of Arizona is going to be our aid in the search for the true and the fallacious. First things first, epistemology is the philosophical field revolving around (the study of) knowledge and how to reach it, whereas metaphysics is the theory of reality. 

Where one asks what we know, the other asks what is real, with both overlapping, yet maintaining differences. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, these notions are as old as philosophy itself. Plato attempted to understand what it was to know, and how knowledge (unlike mere true opinion) is good for the knower. Locke attempted to understand the operations of human understanding; Kant, to understand the conditions of the possibility of human understanding, and so on, and so forth. 

How do we as people come to know what we do and what conditions must be satisfied in order for that information to be believed? These two are interesting questions to consider as we see all these screenshots from TikTok. Are all of them true? Do we wish some of them weren’t, therefore placing them into the category of being untrue? 

The first condition of knowledge is that of truth. The second condition of knowledge is acceptance. Sometimes we believe things that we do not accept; other times we may believe something for the sake of peace rather than for the sake of truth. However, accepting something as true does not suffice for knowledge, so we meet the third condition—justification. 

René Descartes insisted that we must first decide what we can know about what is real and must remain skeptical about what is real until we have discovered what we can know. If you feel as though you don’t have enough brain squiggles to understand this, you’re not alone. 

To simplify it all, for us to claim to know something, we must believe the thing to be true and accept it as such, with the aid of evidence and justification. That is a very basic structure of it all, and all these elements can be further debated, because there is no end to anything, after all. Especially when what we believe to be true may indeed be false. Dun dun dun, le plot twist!