Wednesday, March 6, 2024

Misled By Experience

Experience is inherently subjective.  It is governed by objective truths, such as how subjectivity is itself and is not a proof of anything beyond one's mind, but one of only things it objectively (logically) necessitates is that one's consciousness exists along with the interior perceptions of this mind.  However, what is perceived as "strange" is almost inevitably disregarded by non-rationalists as even possible, what is expected or what subjectively appears to be true is accepted as if it is certain, and what is secondary to logical axioms is thus mistaken for being central to reality in any case.  They are led by assumptions about their personal experience and are therefore misled by them.

They think that someone could only care about morality on the basis of feelings, like disgust or sadness over the thought of murder or an aversion to human trafficking.  There is not even an attempt to evaluate the objective logical possibility of there being no such thing as morality in spite of moral emotions or of obligations being quite different than what someone's conscience would make appealing to them.  A person could have once had a conscience and lost it while retaining a concern for whatever obligations might exist, or maybe they never had a conscience but realized that it is logically possible for obligations to exist all the same.

Specific examples of not failing to look past personal experience are not necessary to realize that reason is self-evident and that possibilities and necessities follow from axioms no matter what anyone feels.  Reason also can lead people away from an inverse error: that of believing that if they have no experience as evidence for something, it must be false.  For instance, someone might believe that aliens do not or could not exist (as if mere extraterrestrial life contradicts logical axioms!) because they have never seen them, when this neither logically follows nor does it follow that them seeing an extraterrestrial means it is actually there outside of their mental perceptions!

Yes, they could see a real or imagined alien being or vessel and would still have no way of knowing if it is actually there, while of course not perceiving such a thing has nothing to do with whether it exists.  This is similar to how there could certainly be an obligation to kill every living thing.  Would most people have consciences that make them feel as if this is true?  Seemingly not, but conscience is irrelevant either way.  A conscience could perfectly overlap with objective obligations and no one could ever know from conscience.

One needs to experience conscious existence, with its capacity for subjectivity, to grasp even logical axioms, but axioms and what follows from them are true independent of conscious recognition of them, and of the existence of consciousness itself (their absence would still hinge on their veracity).  Many things that are perceived or desired could be illusions because the alternative does not follow by necessity, not that their possibility or impossibility cannot be immediately proven by their consistency or inconsistency with axioms.  In the same way, many things which might seem "weird" or "unlikely" on the basis of mere experience could be true, even obvious to rationalists if they are verifiable necessary truths.

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