Tuesday, December 12, 2023

Anecdotal Experiences

The supposed distinction between anecdotal (personal) experience and scientific observation is one that is popular only because most people are not rationalists.  As fiercely as the latter is regarded as separate, non-anecdotal scientific experience is logically impossible because if there is such thing as sensory perception, which is an inherent prerequisite for scientific observation, it is inherently experienced from a subjective standpoint of perception.  One can scientifically observe a given thing oneself, meaning one is by default merely engaging in a particular style of subjective experience, or one can believe what others say about their own alleged scientific experiences, and these other people not only cannot be proven to exist or to be honest (their mind is not one's own, so there is already a massive epistemological disconnect short of telepathy), but they would also be reporting their own subjective perceptions.

This could not even be avoidable if it was not the case that humans cannot verify the ultimate correspondence of most sensory experiences with things outside of their immaterial consciousness.  In that case, it would still be true that all sensory experience, whether they are passively perceived or intentionally sought out in a scientific manner, is inescapably subjective, for it could not exist apart from a perceiving, conscious subject even if the matter being perceived does/did exist without human observation.  How could there be scientific experience that is not universally anecdotal?  It is not just that there happens to not be such a thing, but it is logically possible for it to have been achievable.  It is a contradiction and thus impossible.

It is objectively, demonstrably true that any sort of sensory experience proves that the senses and one's perceptions exist, but there is no experience apart from subjectivity, even in the divine mind.  To reject what is in one sense the obvious (but still crucial) logical fact that scientific perceptions cannot not be anecdotal, one must confuse the qualities of science and reason, failing to even distinguish between the laws of nature that, whether subjective perception shapes or sustains them, are not the same as subjective sensory perceptions--unless there are no particular laws of physics outside of perception altogether, a genuinely possible thing, unverifiable and unfalsifiable.

The laws of logic do not share in these epistemological limitations or this metaphysical subjectivity.  For the laws of logic to be false, they would still have to be true, for axioms, and what follows from them, are true by necessity.  They are what governs the very possibility and impossibility, necessity and contingency, or knowability of everything.  One must still subjectively perceive in order to think, and one must think in order to grasp the laws of logic, and yet the intrinsic truth of logical axioms allows them to be known with absolute certainty: it is impossible for necessary truths to be subjective because they could not have been any other way, no matter how much or little they are loved, acknowledged, or pursued.  Logical truths are not epistemologically or metaphysically a matter of subjectivity, but sensory perceptions cannot be anything else.

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