*Angry screaming*
Oh, Christ. Okay, stop, stop it! I know this can be a contentious topic, because it basically either credits or discredits every other pursuit that humans have, but it is kind of an important one so shut up and listen. It is pretty much the most fundamental branch of philosophy. For those of you who don't believe me, I have a transcript of the first philosophical debate in the world:
Philosopher: "Things exist"
Skeptic: "How do you know?"
...
Philosopher: *Clubs skeptic's head in* "No further questions."
You see, one of the major problems with any part in philosophy is that it's kind of based on the assumption that we actually are capable of understanding things. Of course, this is an annoying question to answer, because any conclusions we make are made within the confines of our own knowledge. The reason I have always stressed the importance of axioms and definitions of words is that these define our logic and meaning respectively. But at the same time both these are entirely arbitrary decisions, and are actually quite meaningless when you get right down to it
For example, take the infamous Orwellian spookitude, 2+2=5. When I read 1984, this particular doublethought struck me. The mind, after all, takes the path of least resistance, especially under duress and so it seemed much more plausible to me that when Winston was convinced that 2+2=5, it was not his observation of reality that changed so that a pair of pairs actually appeared as a pair and a half of pairs, but rather the four letters "five" the phoneme "faɪv" and the squiggly line 5 was the visual, audible and numerical representation of a pair of pairs. That is not to say that you couldn't convince someone that 2+2=5 in the sense that it was meant, but it would take a lot more work. Honestly, it would have been easier for O'Brein to give Winston the ol' lobotomy spike and called it a day.
My reasoning for this is as such: pattern recognition is one of the primary functions of the brain. It has literally been doing this ever since we developed photosensitive cells, back in our younger days as a proto-chordate. For hundreds of millions of years we have been honing our ability to instinctively recognize ++++ is as many pluses as ++ and ++. It's actually hard to explain, it's that innate. Then, this upstart of a prefrontal cortex with its fancy symbolic reasoning and linguistic representation comes waltzing in and declares that they've got it all wrong, that actually 2+2=5 and since 2+2 is ++ and ++, then 5, which is defined as +++++ is also ++ and ++. Of course, our old pattern recognition is having none of this whipper-snapper's bullshit and promptly tells him that his definition of 5 is wrong and that the actual definition of five is ++++, as per pattern recognition rules. Then the symbolic reasoning says oh and changes it's ledger while the pattern recognition grumbled that back in its day, visual aides were all they had and they were grateful. When you get right down to it, nothing has changed: ++ and ++ is still ++++, but that is defined by the logical phrase 2+2=5, rather than 2+2=4.
Of course, if you're anything like my high school English teacher you would probably be yelling something along the lines of "But Big Brother is just that good! He can change you innately using mind tricks alone!" And if this is so, just like in my English class, both of of us don't actually care about the points we are trying to make. I don't care about a depiction of an implausibly efficient totalitarian society, and you don't care about the limitations of the psychological mutability of the human brain. However, this blog isn't about 1984, now is it?
Nevertheless, people fail to accept that our mental capacity is physically limited by our chunky pink salsa. It's actually kind of disturbing how much people buy into the cultural epidemic of delusional positivism, positivity fueled-latent-omnipotent-telekinetic-wizard magic, and the idea that humans can know everything, do everything and change everything if you just try hard enough.
For those of you who do by chance believe that here's an experiment for you to try out: do a back flip to the moon. Go on, I'll wait (don't forget, pics or it didn't happen).
...
I'm going to go out on a limb and say that you didn't do it. If I was being a real dick, I could say that it's your own fault that you couldn't do it. Under the axiom of human exceptionalism, a human is intrinsically capable of everything, disregarding the limitations of anything, be it psychological limitation, economic inflexibility or the laws of physics, and if you can't well then you're probably not a real person anyway, so fuck you.
I won't consider the No True Scotsman fallacy in this argument, because the main point its that it's fundamentally flawed. Humans are limited. I know that because everything is limited. For those of you who've forgotten, let's review the laws of thermodynamics
1: The house always wins
2: The house always wins
3: Hit or stand, chief?
Sincere Regards, Michael Coffey
(PS: it turns out the Bible of all things already covered this point. Talk about not listening the first time...)
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