Sound and Nihilism

[Neo-Scholastic]

I'm not trying to write a proof with carefully picked out dialog that needs to be parsed line by line…My bad for being a shoddy communicator.

I didn’t mean to be critical in a nasty way. If it came across that way I’ll try to be less curt. My own experience has been that in order to think clearly I must take extra care to use the right word. I have no intention of exploiting ambiguities for the sake of argument. I’m only looking for clarity so we don’t have a conversation wherein I’m talking about one thing and you another.

…if we operated under the assumption that everything we know could be wrong to the point that we can't count on the 'known' laws of the universe, then we're not going to get very far thinking about anything.

For everyday living people can generally rely on folk physics, e.g. you can’t push a chain, to get by. Folk laws of physics may hold most of the time, but everyone knows that reality rests on more fundamental physical laws that get refined, overthrown, and refined again as scientific scrutiny gets more intense. Rules and theories based on empirical confirmation allow educated people to adduce [/i]contingent[/i] truths. I believe application of these contingent truths do indeed take people quite far, literally all the way to the moon and figuratively into the infinitesimally small world of quantum effects. In the end however, people must accept some uncertainty about contingent truths since further. The question you seem to ask is this: are there necessary truths or absolutes knowable by applying reason to experience? I say that in order for there to be knowledge*, there must be necessary truths that are certain from which other necessary truths may be deduced.

Are you trying to say ideas and categorizations aren't tangible?

That is exactly what I am saying. Any word, like ‘apple’, or number, like ‘13’, that has a corresponding meaning is an arbitrary sign. The signs themselves have no essential properties in common with the things they signify.** Likewise, neural processes share no essential properties  with the concepts they represent. For this reason, computational analogies simply do not hold up to scrutiny. The beads of an abacus have no meaning apart from a knowing subject, even though used for calculation. Similarly, the outputs of an electronic computation, whether in the form of a printout or patterns on an LED display have no inherent meaning. The signs are tangible; the concepts that they represent are not.

*I added the phrase ‘in order for there to be knowledge’ because some smarty pants always comes along and says something like ‘your axioms only appear to be self-evident because we have evolved to think of them as such.’ To this I reply, ‘Then you are ignorant and don’t know anything.’

**Images are different in this respect and deserve special consideration.