Friday, March 19, 2021

Not Knowing A Truth Does Not Damn One To Errors

There is a fact about knowledge and ignorance that could bring relief and liberation to some who are turning from fallacies to truth: someone who has yet to recognize a particular truth is not fated to embrace an error in the meantime.  Even someone who has failed to reason out very basic, foundational aspects of reality, such as that reason cannot be attacked without being affirmed in the process, can remain ignorant without actually going so far as to make an assumption or contradict their own self in the meantime.  Reasoning logical facts out might take plenty of effort at first, but it also takes at least some mental effort to embrace something without contemplating it or rationally proving it.  Otherwise, one could never align with or oppose any particular idea!

An example is not needed to understand that not yet knowing something does not free someone to either make an assumption or construct a false belief, yet it can still be helpful regardless.  For instance, it is possible to not know that an external world exists without believing that there is no external world.  Many people profess to believe a world of matter outside of their consciousness exists without having ever arrived at the only logical proof of such a thing, which I have detailed here [1] and elsewhere, which means that even though it is true that there is an external world and true that this can be proven, they do not have the intellectual right to believe it exists for their current reasons.  Either way, however, it would be asinine to believe that matter is an illusion--even if it could not be proven to exist or not exist.

Ignorance, even completely avoidable ignorance of how logical axioms cannot be false and how perception of any kind proves that one's consciousness exists, never pushes someone to a fallacious belief on its own.  Whether the belief itself is true or false is a separate matter; the point at hand is that it remains true that no one is forced to embrace a fallacy simply because they have not thought deeply about a given issue.  For this reason, no one deserves special treatment for their philosophical mistakes simply because they did not think about some logical fact properly beforehand.  An ignorant person can still realize that they are ignorant and refrain from siding with assumptions even when they do not deeply understand the epistemological necessity or possibility of making no assumptions whatsoever in a direct search for truth.

This is a freeing truth about knowledge and belief: no one is doomed to believe falsities even when they have not personally pursued logical truths with full awareness of their infallibility.  In fact, a person is ironically closer to rationality when they have not taken the side of assumption or error than when they choose to not consciously think about an issue at all.  Ignorance of the only self-evident truths (the ones that cannot be denied without contradiction and therefore error, like the fact that deductive reasoning inherently leads to fixed truths and the fact that one's own consciousness exists) at least does not become an embrace of falsehoods left to itself.  In order to take that step, someone must commit a double treason against logic by ignoring it despite its omnipresence and inherent veracity and then by believing something that contradicts it.


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