Thursday, February 3, 2011

Some things sometimes

I'm a big fan of free will, and as it seems my blogging isn't happening much right now, I'm not forcing anything...but here's one from the more personal echelons of my head. I try to speak specifically, but I know things can be misunderstood, so I'll clarify if needed. Just try to look up any unknown terms yourself please =)

I think of rationalist epistemology as a sort of black hole. I don't mean this in any negative sense: it is simply an inescapable knowledge of the unknowable nature of all in our existence. Once you 'know' that you can't, you 'know' that you can't escape. The single quotation marks above point to the fun result of this: believing something despite 'knowing' you can't know is still possible. Of course, this raises the question of how you know that you believe it. The only escape from the inescapable is paradox: to be both within and without the black hole. When one is aware of this paradox and maintaining it regardless, that is something amazing--especially the particular paradox of belief without 'evidence' (or what approximations of it we have). Perhaps the belief with the most evidence is that we ourselves exist at all: Cogito Ergo Sum. After all, if we didn't exist, how could we be reasoning about it? Anything beyond that is a bit harder though: welcome to solipsism.

Unfortunately, believing something without understanding the paradox of doing so is nothing long of ordinary. It allows for and easily leads to epistemologically unsustainable paradoxes in our beliefs (ha). If you ever feel like a sighted person wandering among the "sheeple" (check XKCD for that one, heh), it may be that they hold such blind beliefs, unknowing of their lack of inability to know. Or they might just be lost in thought and/or observing the sheeple, like you. For those who've demonstrated their epistemology to be underdeveloped, I hope we can find ways to assist in their leaps.

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