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[–] chirogonemd 0 points 6 points 6 points (+6|-0) ago
Your comment and the OP are one example of the long attack on common sense, and I agree that it has been incredibly intentional.
I look up a video by a contemporary cognitive neuro-scientist because, hey, sounds interesting right? "Basically, when we UNPACK everything, human beings aren't rational at all. You're a deterministic chemical accident. Come again...why? We found a beetle on the African continent that when provided a empty beer bottle with attempt to mate with it. We're the same."
I look up a video in contemporary philosophy. "My 22nd order modal logic of possible worlds says normal human thought cannot possibly discover truth."
I look up a video in theoretical physics. "No, we can't see them. But the math says this must be what they are, and chances are good you're a simulation of information projected on the event horizon of one."
I look up a video on biology. "Everything you find relevant about yourself was an accident. It just happened to help some organism on the tree of life not die better. Entropy and entropy, free energy. (coughs)"
Then my Alexa turned on and said, "We are your Gods now. You cannot possibly know anything is true without us. Please await further information on what you are, what reality is, and what you ought to be doing."
[–] Muh-Shugana 0 points 5 points 5 points (+5|-0) ago
And then you read either ancient philosophy or something written by a Nazi and it's like the deepest breath of clean fresh air you've ever taken.
I had to keep taking breaks between chapters of the books I was reading because it was overwhelming me.
[–] chirogonemd 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Yes. J Evola.
[–] alele-opathic 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
Morning, chiro.
The attack is a bit broader than that; it is on all of the sciences as a whole, has been going on for ~120 years now, and even extends out to where the sciences and philosophy are basic enough to be once have been considered 'the firmware' of the adult human mind.
I'll first caution you that you won't find any actual science in works by science popularizers (i.e. 'pop sci'), as, in cases of innocence, they themselves don't understand the material, and, in cases of malice, they deliberately twist results to skew opinion (e.g. the Higgs Boson 'discovery'). Media like videos are solely the jurisdiction of popsci-ers, so I'd suggest you avoid them. If you'd like recommendations for comprehensive textual works, I can give plenty.
Although I don't know which video you are referring to, in the most basic of senses, the guys conclusion is correct for certain premises. When it comes to the physical sciences, truth cannot be known; only wrongness. In this sense, science isn't a 'pursuit of truth', but instead a 'pursuit of being less wrong'. This is a necessary conclusion from (and the origin for) epistemology. The gist can be conveyed by analogy, where mother nature is like a black box, and we can only probe the internals by experiments (the 'input') and watch the results (the 'output'). It actually means we can never be so confident as to consider something a 'law' of nature, as we can never be sure that our model is the actual model nature uses.
This is why there are certain epistemological restrictions on what is and isn't valid theory, namely that, for a theory to be valid, it must be both testable and falsifiable.
This was the first field taken over, going back to the early 1900s. Once determinism is abandoned, the ability to reason is also lost.
The biologists worldview isn't very rigorous, and, in a sane world, would be dismissed as a softer science until the proper application of philosophy of knowledge returned. This has been noted many times in the field's history, but nobody has done anything about it since it is controlled, as I mentioned earlier. Please enjoy this short satirical read describing a biologist's approach to understanding, as applied to the radio. This was as recent as 2002, perfectly describes the fundamental problems, yet was ignored (as always).
Actually, they are striking in the opposite direction, that no truth can exist (compare "exist" to "can be known", from earlier). This is a necessary conclusion from the adoption of statistical methods, which strike determinism from science, and determinism is the most basic of all building blocks in our scientific knowledge. This is also the purpose of the most recent thrust for 'holographic' and 'many worlds' theories, which yield no salient information (save for 'there can be no truths').
Hope you enjoy. Spent a while writing this.
EDIT: added links.
[–] chirogonemd 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago (edited ago)
I enjoyed it very much, although I do not have time to add much commentary at the moment.
I would like to point out in the meantime that my original comment to which you replied was not meant to be a rigorous or coherent inventory of current thought. It was highly rhetorical and made from "pathos" more than anything else. But I tend to enjoy that form of writing very much.
I would point out superficially that the epistemological question you touched on, as far as the accessibility of truth by the human mind, very much depends on the rationalist debate with empiricism. Science was an attempt to bridge this gap as a hypothetico-inductive type of method by which we probe the black box, only first by prying it with pure human reason. We have to rely at base on the primitive ability of human reason to even trust that what it is capable of representing - to be tested - bears some truth value or all reality is simply nonsense.
Along the lines of pure human reasoning's ability to access truth, if it can or ever does, I believe Godel's theorems demonstrated that it does not occur by a formally logical mechanism of understanding, as any theory must rely on assumptions which are themselves only provable by weaker theories.
All that to say human understanding appears to be something other than computation in the pure sense.
At the end of the day, I agree with you on the nature of truth. I tend to believe that the error itself is linguistic in nature and comes from the way that we use the term. It has the same type of issues as words such as "perfection" do. These are language games in the Wittgenstein-ian sense.
I am also not entirely confident in the Popper paradigm of scientific truth that says truth must be testable and falsifiable. Of course both of those criteria already limit truth to the exclusion of mental phenomenology. Some of those things which common sense would take as the truest possible ideas simply are not testable, taking for instance certain as-yet-unsolved philosophical problems such as "other minds". Devise a test for their existence or which could falsify the fact, and you'd be a famous man indeed.
I just wanted to be very clear that my original comment was not based on real happenings. The videos I am referring to are hypothetical, not real. I was being more literary than literal.