Reason offers no path to objective truth. Syllogism requires premises. Premises require axioms. Reason and logic cannot create knowledge ex nihilo. They can only create knowledge within an already extant framework.
Empiricism is equally flawed, for the ghost in the machine problem is bidirectional. Many philosophers have asked how a construct of information, such as the human mind, can control a construct of matter such as the body. But I ask the reverse question, how can information perceive matter? How can matter act upon information? As we can see from the difficulty babies and children have with perceiving the world, perception is a learned process. How do we know we’ve learned it correctly? How do we know we’re not just reproducing social biases? The answer is that we certainly know that our perception is indeed a reproduction of social bias. For example, our perception of other people as men or women is quite immediate to us. We notice it before we can name any details that lead us to this perception. Yet some people are nonbinary, and transphobes perceive others as male or female when it is untrue and they are both or neither. The symbols that make up our perception, our schemas, are indeed founded upon social bias. They are not the source of truth.
And am I to point out the flaws with mysticism as well? I’m sure you are already familiar with those.
Thus the only answer is to consciously choose our axioms and our schemas, with the aim of imagining into being a better world, or at least the tools to create one. We cannot do this if we chain ourselves to belief in the objective.
Please elaborate
Reason offers no path to objective truth. Syllogism requires premises. Premises require axioms. Reason and logic cannot create knowledge ex nihilo. They can only create knowledge within an already extant framework.
Empiricism is equally flawed, for the ghost in the machine problem is bidirectional. Many philosophers have asked how a construct of information, such as the human mind, can control a construct of matter such as the body. But I ask the reverse question, how can information perceive matter? How can matter act upon information? As we can see from the difficulty babies and children have with perceiving the world, perception is a learned process. How do we know we’ve learned it correctly? How do we know we’re not just reproducing social biases? The answer is that we certainly know that our perception is indeed a reproduction of social bias. For example, our perception of other people as men or women is quite immediate to us. We notice it before we can name any details that lead us to this perception. Yet some people are nonbinary, and transphobes perceive others as male or female when it is untrue and they are both or neither. The symbols that make up our perception, our schemas, are indeed founded upon social bias. They are not the source of truth.
And am I to point out the flaws with mysticism as well? I’m sure you are already familiar with those.
Thus the only answer is to consciously choose our axioms and our schemas, with the aim of imagining into being a better world, or at least the tools to create one. We cannot do this if we chain ourselves to belief in the objective.