The Nature Of Online Information

There are no shortcuts to knowledge that bypass the need for reliance on first principles and deduction.  If a person seeks after such a shortcut, they ignore the very thing that lets them know before they even embark on their quest that they will be searching for a destination that cannot exist.  Simple rationality can avert the wasting of a great amount of time in pursuit of the impossible.

Some comment in puzzlement at the fact that a deep skepticism is so prevalent in a generation that has the internet available at almost any time.  There is no cognitive dissonance in a generation simply because some of its members often remain skeptical of many claims despite the presence of online tools that connect people with enormous amounts of data.  To be legitimate, skepticism must be the stance towards a thing that cannot be proven by either self-evident necessity or deduction from established premises, and the internet has no ability to convert the unprovable into the provable, and vice versa.

Despite a reputation for the contrary in some circles, the internet is not an epistemological savior.  Of course, it can provide assistance in some matters.  There is no logical or philosophical truth, however, that is accessible only through the internet.  Additionally, there is a paucity of online claims that are sound, valid, and demonstrable.  I have been also astonished by the number of details regarding metaphysics and epistemology that people seem to scarcely acknowledge or discuss online in any form whatsoever [1]!  It is not that the internet cannot be used to discuss these details of reality, but that many do not ever get so precise because originality and intelligence are scarce; it is not that the internet is useless, but that it can never be anything more than secondary to the intellectual originality that accompanies rationalism.

The truth about online information is evident to all who search for it.  After all, if the internet is a resource with which humans can share information, and humans have epistemological and metaphysical limitations that prevent them from accessing certain articles of knowledge, then the internet does nothing to lift the barriers to that knowledge.  All it can do is permit people to communicate more frequently and directly; it does not widen the range of knowledge available to human beings.

The internet can be a helpful place to collect information from, but even this will prove futile if a seeker attempts to collect information without consulting reason at every step of the way--the internet cannot alter humanity's epistemological limitations.  Someone who wants to soundly navigate the plethora of online information must not assume that the mere connectedness of human beings will itself erase epistemological constraints, or even that it can.  This assumption, in either case, is not only an assumption, but is also a false one.


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