Monday, May 19, 2025

No One Can Be Legitimately Trusted

I do not want anyone to trust me even if I tell them something relatively trivial such as that I remember that I ate a certain food a week ago or that I feel a certain way.  I cannot even know if my memories of such events are accurate, only that I have them, and it would require a literal telepath/omniscient being to know that what I say about my own mental states is true.  I know my own mind directly and with absolute certainty.  Whatever I am thinking, feeling, or otherwise perceiving, it is right there for me to experience.  This would not be the case for me with other people or for other people for me unless they are telepathic or omniscient as mentioned above.  If they lack these characteristics, they would be irrational to believe anything another person says that is not an articulation of a strictly logical truth, which would be true in itself and not be subject to epistemological uncertainty.

The difference between what I can know of myself and other minds, as well as the other way around, is distinct.  My perceptions of something like the sensory world, for instance, are uncertain as to whether they accurately represent the external world, though the perceptions absolutely exist as my mental experiences.  Someone else would have to actually be me or have their mind metaphysically bridged with mine in order to know if I am telling the truth about what my senses report to me, however, despite how I know for sure.  This absolute certainty does not extend to hearsay, and it is utterly, inescapably hearsay when another person tells me what they are thinking or feeling.  Whether they are my wife or my closest friends, it would be irrational for me to trust them or for them to trust me--and if they truly knew the interior of my mind, they would not even need to or be able to trust me, and vice versa.  We would know.

No, I do not and trust anyone else and no one else should trust me.  This is not because I am hoping to mistreat them or anything similar.  It is because there could not possibly be any basis for trust in any direction from any person.  If something has to be trusted in the sense of belief in the unprovable, rather than committed to on the basis of evidence (this can be done without fallacious beliefs like confusing perception/probability for logical proof), then it is irrational to believe it no matter what it is.  If something can be known, then it does not have to be trusted.  The existence of an uncaused cause is something that does not have to be assumed [1] or even partially trusted in.  In contrast, if someone was to actually believe that God loves them, as opposed to even believing that it seems likely based upon evidence for Christianity that God loves them, they have gone beyond what is verifiable.

Non-rationalists often seem to confuse trust for certainty and certainty for anything that seems true or that they want to be true.  They believe that trust in science or a religion or other people could possibly be justified by any amount of mere evidence, when many of them do not even begin to base beliefs on evidence, much less the metaphysically intrinsic, epistemologically infallible proof of logical necessity.  I of course do not want anyone to trust me.  This is for the same reason why I would never trust anyone or anything: it is unjustifiable because trust in the sense of belief is irrational.  Words mean whatever they are intended to, so someone could use the word trust to refer to commitment, but not everyone does.  It frequently has a positive connotation of belief when one has no absolute proof even though this could never be positive in a pragmatic or ideological way.


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