When you begin to doubt your own experience, you are one step inside the madhouse. Dean Radin
I don't know if it's synchronicity or what that I happened to come across that quote the other day, but here it is.
ALL of science, ALL of mathematics, ALL of logic and reason are known to each and every one of us who has any conception of those through our subjective, personal experience. The pretense that any of them can spring from something impersonal and objective is such a ludicrous pretense that it's literally astounding and discrediting of any allegedly educated person who could hold or maintain that there is any such thing as impersonal, objective knowledge.
How such impersonal knowledge is supposed to become a part of our entirely personal mind and self is a greater conundrum than that old atheist standby which I've refuted, definitively, insisting that it is impossible for an immaterial mind to interact with the physical body.*
How can any thought or knowledge be gained except through our experience, our experience is necessary for us to be about to act out of or articulate the content of any idea we have. "We have" or, "I have an idea" is the essential articulation of us having a thought I'd love to hear an atheist-materialist-devote of scientism tell me how you would even lay claim to having an idea without making it personal and subjective, or, rather, stating the obvious truth of that.
Modernism especially as it pertains to science is as full of unstated assumptions and unanalyzed habits of thought as the thinking of any other period. I think in some ways some of the most subtle of medieval thinkers may have been farther along in admitting to such things than scientists and their satellite academic fields would ever admit to because one of the greatest pretenses of scientists is that their knowledge has that mythical characteristic of impersonal objectivity. What they mistake as something which seems to be of universal reliability has, somehow, escaped its origins in human minds. As an aside, mimicking the methods of physics and chemistry, pretending to put numbers to junk has sold loads of unreliable and dishonest crap as science. Look at this weeks Rasmussen polling if you want a particularly glaring example of that.
That comes about when people talk about "science" as if science existed anywhere else in the universe except in the minds of individual scientists. There is no such object as "science" it is a make believe construct, one which is shown to be an illusion through the diversity of opinion and conception of even some rather basic of scientific ideas. And that is not to mention the characteristic of "science" which is supposed to be contained in its foundational rules, that all of it is held to be merely contingent and not absolute knowledge and that much of what it constitutes at any given time will, in the fullness of time, fall to further understandings of science. What IS science at any given minute is entirely contained in the personal understanding of individual minds which are the actual individuals containing science.
Modernism is, due in no small part to the reliability of science in producing products which we like, medical proceedures, technology, etc. about the most arrogantly held ideology in human history. I doubt that other than the most fanatical of organized religious establishments - but only those with the political and military and financial support of secular rulers - could match modernism in arrogance. And that religious arrogance was, in every case I can think of now, based in the secular, especially financial pollution of religion**. That arrogance has its full flower in the English and French language traditions of modern atheism, perhaps in other languages, I'm just limited to my personal knowledge based in what I've read. I suspect German language atheism is pretty arrogant but I wouldn't be surprised if it was more rigorous in some ways. Not to mention that written up in Russian and Chinese under communism.
Well, modernism brought us a lot more in the way of environmental destruction, scientific racism, industrial death than it has brought the success of the most important of all scientific endeavors, environmental science. Commercial science in the employ of the oligarchs is expected to, as I read it put this week, wipe out six millennia of material progress of the human species (if not our species along with hundreds of thousands if not millions of others), likely within the lifetimes of people living, now. End,Times, baby, brought to you by science and technology and 18th century liberal economics. There's your modernism, Bunky. I don't respect your delusional pretense of absolute and objective knowledge.
* An immaterial mind would not be limited to all of the known limits of physical objects, including our bodies and the objects which make up that body. It is entirely reasonable to maintain the possibility of an immaterial mind being able to do just that. The folly is in insisting on applying an analysis of the problem restricted to the qualities and limits of physical objects when the problem, as posed, must exceed those qualities and limits.
** By "religion" here I am limiting myself to a consideration of the despised monotheistic tradition and, perhaps, some parts of Hinduism at some times. Much of pagan European religion was quite materialistic, their gods being material creatures with beginnings and endings and all-too-human personalities. I'm not that well informed about other religions in the world, though I'll bet those associated with large empires could be anything from as corrupt as any in Europe to more corrupt, at times. I don't much respect any of them that practice human sacrifice and am not especially inclined to overlook animal sacrifice, either.
