Actually, the fundamental problem of philosophy can be described quite quickly in a few steps:
1.) As conscious beings, we perceive the world and move within it.
2.) What is present in our consciousness as something perceived is an image of an external world. The house itself, which I see, is not in my head, or in my consciousness. I have an image of it present in my consciousness.
3.) This gives rise to 3 central questions:
- What exactly is this world that is given to me only in images, really?
- How does the image present to me relate to the real object (the house itself)?
- Who has this image present?
These are admittedly not easy questions. And so the most diverse sciences, philosophies, and religions develop out of them, because:
The sciences try to find out what the world in itself is like. Science acts as though consciousness were not so important, since it is, after all, only a perception of something that precedes it.
Philosophy traditionally proceeds the other way around. It says that only because I have a perception of the world can thinking about the world take place at all. It therefore thinks about thinking, and quite rightly asks whether the way we perceive the world might not be subjective, and whether what I perceive might, on many levels, be quite different from what is the object of perception. I mean not only the relation between image and object, but also structural dimensions. Perhaps static objects, for example, are not static at all; perhaps we see and measure only a small part of what exists.
Religion and spirituality are essentially concerned with thinking about who this I—the one that perceives—actually is, and how this I relates to other I’s, where it comes from and where it goes after death.
That is all there is to it.
OM
p.s. Everything is thinkable, but philosophy does not like contradictions.