Saturday, April 11, 2020

Online Information Storage (Part 2)

As far as logical truths are concerned--not logical truths about empirical observations, but logical truths that can be reasoned out in the privacy of one's mind without any sensory input whatsoever--the internet at large is not a particularly helpful place.  If someone truly needed the help that the internet might offer when it comes to discovering purely logical truths, it would be difficult to find even the most foundational and basic logical facts elaborated upon in a rational way!

The self-verifying nature of deductive reasoning, for example, is hardly even alluded to online, and yet completely unverifiable scientific and historical hearsay are commonly accepted.  Sometimes such hearsay is even dissected with a level of detail that is almost never present in a great deal of what is said on internet about more explicitly philosophical matters.  For all of the advantages offered by the internet, the information most people discuss and debate online is trivial, incomplete, or highly fallacious.

If logical axioms are neglected online (not that people should immediately rush to the internet to discover basic logical truths they can reason out themselves), one should not expect to find that the more precise truths about logic, metaphysics, and epistemology somehow avoid this fate.  I am not even referring to logical facts like the ones on this list [1], much less the logical truths that are even more specific and original which I have hinted at someday addressing; I am referring to facts such as the unverifiability of the connection between seeing an external stimulus and the stimulus actually existing or the inability to prove the existence of other minds.

The more specific a logical truth is, the less likely a random person is to know it.  As such, it is less likely that people will discover it on their own or that it will even be mentioned on the internet in the first place.  This does not always reflect negatively on those who contribute to the internet because some logical truths are particularly abstract.  Nevertheless, the average person's lack of autonomous discoveries of basic logical facts (for instance, that consciousness cannot be illusory, that perception does not always match the reality behind the perception, and so forth) is reflected in the internet, and this does cast a negative light on most modern people.

One of the goals behind this blog was to, at some point, address or reveal several key philosophical points that very few or, in some cases, perhaps no others have even thought of.  On multiple other occasions, I have already briefly mentioned or alluded to some of the philosophical points which I have never heard anyone else even hint at (I plan on addressing these directly at some point), although some have found the logical facts that underpin them.  However, the internet does not merely have no information about these particular things, but it also has little sound information about logical truths that should be far more commonly known as it is.


[1].  https://thechristianrationalist.blogspot.com/2018/12/a-list-of-neglected-truths.html

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