Monday, February 24, 2025

Not Having Realized Something

Someone who has never realized that logical axioms are inherently true or even started to think about them, short of being a literal baby or in an ongoing coma, can only be irrational, stupid, a fool.  Anything they believe could only be an assumption since absolute certainty (the requirement for knowledge) is solely attainable if one recognizes foundational truths that could not have been any other way--yet everything about reality hinges on logical axioms, which are true independent of the rest of reality, so that no person can get through life without constantly relying on the very necessary truths they neglect, misunderstand, or perhaps outright reject.

Since to be rational one must not be irrational, and one cannot be rational without grasping the intrinsic truths of reason free of assumptions, not having realized logical axioms are inherently true automatically requires that someone is utterly stupid.  As they are self-evident (to deny or doubt them can only be done while relying on them, and they are true independent of recognition), there is no excuse for not discovering them.  This is not so with a great many other miscellaneous truths that are not metaphysically true in themselves or epistemologically self-evident like logical axioms.  For instance, the particular fact that it is logically possible for grass to have naturally been perceived to be burgundy red instead of green is a necessary truth, and it is connected to core metaphysics, but no one is irrational for not having thought of this.  It is not the actual color of grass that is important even then, but that there is no logical necessity in it having to be or have been green.

Likewise, a person could know logical axioms (that their falsity requires the veracity and thus they are true in themselves, even if they have not realized all the ramifications of this) and been a genuine rationalist for years without realizing that a bizarre animal found on Earth might be a stranded extraterrestrial species; we would have no way of proving or disproving this since both options are logically possible.  In this case and the prior one, the person still has not believed in anything that contradicts what is true and they have not assumed anything; whether that concept is true or false or knowable or unknowable, they have not believed anything apart from the basis of logical proof.  They have also grasped logical axioms without confusing them for divine creations or human constructs or scientific laws, accepting them as intrinsic truths that do not depend on anything else.  Their status of not discovering, with or without prompting, certain secondary truths does not make them unintelligent.

Again, this only necessitates that there is some issue or truth that they had not thought about/of at a certain point, but not something it is erroneous or delusional for a person to have not discovered.  Someone who has not realized logical axioms for what they are, with or without prompting by another person and especially if they have been alive for decades, is an intellectual insect that has not recognized the only things that are by necessity inherently true, on which all else in reality and thus their life already hinges on whether they like it or not.  It is not irrationality on its own to not recognize that, up to a point since some things are logically impossible and there is a finite amount of possible permutations of factors, it is possible for people to have wildly different afterlives that scarcely resemble each other's at all as opposed to the standard misconceptions of the binary Christian heaven and hell, or that it is necessarily true that God's existence does not require that he even has any awareness of his creation.

Other than being true and a matter of core metaphysics and epistemology, there is personal gain to be found in discovering what it is and is not irrational to have not realized.  It can indeed be liberating for people who might gravitate towards feeling insecure about their philosophical capacity even though they have both realized the fundamental truth of logical axioms and avoided assumptions.  Even if a rationalistic person was to feel stupid for not having realized a given logical fact (about necessity or possibility) that is not self-evident and is also among the many miscellaneous things that a rationalist might happen to focus on, meaning that it is also one of many miscellaneous things they might not end up focusing on, they are not.  If someone knows axioms and embraces them and makes no assumptions, they are perfectly rational.

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