Recap: yesterday’s post prepared the soil for more soil we’re about to dump on you concerning the first Axiom of cosmotheandrism, which involves identifying those truths we may know with absolute certainty, and denial of which lands us in absurdity or even tenure. In their absence there can be no Cosmic Area Rug, so yeah, I guess you could say things are getting pretty serious. It’s a lengthy subsection, so it may take a week of posts to unspool it all. I’ll edit what I can, but perhaps the best I can do is try to make it entertaining.
The Absolute Certitudes
We are weak, watery beings standing in the midst of unrealities; therefore let us turn our minds to the things that are everlasting. —Seneca
Each particular knowledge is derived from some completely certain knowledge, which is not subject to error. —Thomas
There are some certainties about the “real world,” certainties whose epistemic justification is founded on the immediate evidence of existing beings that necessarily and always are present in everyone’s experience. —William J. Slattery
We are living in such divisive times, one wonders: is there anything on which we can all agree?
To disagree?
We disagree: note the characteristics mentioned in the quips cited above: certain, everlasting, necessary, always, and not subject to error. Supposing these don’t exist, then we are essentially reduced to monkeys flinging excrement back and forth on cable TV. Not to say this doesn’t happen, but must it happen?
If so, you’ve identified the first principle of metaphysics: that poo must be flung.
We’ll let the reader decide if that is what we’re doing here. For each principle we will be discussing presupposes no prior principle above but has innumerable entailments below. Put another way, everything in existence leads up to them, while they in turn lead down to everything else. Moreover, it is impossible to deny these without falling into paradox, self-refutation, absurdity, or philosophical beclownment in general
Perhaps the world is absurd.
Don’t worry, we’re not ruling that out. However, supposing there are no principles of certitude, then this does indeed confine us to an absurd existential monkey house from which there is no escape.
The common sense principles we will be discussing “can in no way be subject to doubt,” which means”their non-truth is absolutely unthinkable: one can only pretend to doubt them, such that “any affirmations to the contrary are merely verbal posturing.” They are immediately present on the ground floor of any act of cognition, and indeed necessary for the existence of truth itself.
You get the idea. At this point we will hand the wheel of the cosmotheandric bus over to the philosopher Antonio Livi, who wrote a concise book on the subject called A Philosophy of Common Sense: The Modern Discovery of the Epistemic Foundations of Science and Belief. In it he reviews the few-in-number but great-in-reach principles that are impossible to refute without eliminating both the refuted and refuter, for they are the incontrovertible certainties possessed — whether we like it or not — by every human being.
What’s not to like?
You’d be surprised. Nevertheless, any certitude in any field may be reverse-engineered and traced back to the necessary and universal Certitudes which are the foundation of our knowledge. This includes scientific knowledge, for they are the pre-scientific conditions that must be assumed in order for science to get off the ground, but can never be proven by science itself. There are some things we simply must know before claiming an ability to know anything at all.
And as we know, a modest error in the beginning leads to grandiose ones in the end, so there is no error more consequential than a faulty principle, since a principle is that from which everything else flows. So, a bad principle ensures an endless flow of abject nonsense.
For supposing our certitudes are not certain, then the thing we call “knowledge” isn’t even possible, and the only truth is that we are sealed in opinions with no way to adjudicate between them because there is no objective standard. But for cosmotheandrism, reality is the disinterested umpire without which the game cannot be played. Or at least there will be a great deal of cheating, human nature being what it is.
Cheaters never win.
Perhaps in the ultimate sense, but people never stop devising ways to cheat and beat the cosmotheandric house.
Interestingly, these necessary truths must entail not just the possibility of discovering them, but the existence of possibility itself. Necessity and possibility are in one sense opposites: if, say, the laws of physics are universal and necessary, it is not possible to defy or avoid them. And yet, here we are, talking about necessity giving rise to possibility, which is another name for freedom. Which brings us back to Gödel, who proves that the human intellect cannot be confined to necessity, because it escapes the necessary entailments of any formal system.
Put it this way: anthropic consciousness is a meta-system that ceaselessly participates in transcendence. If we were merely biological machines (a formal system), we would be trapped in a loop of deterministic necessity.
There are good and bad forms of reductionism: from below, into immanent matter, or above, into the Principles of Certitude. If our minds were nothing more than a formal system, then we would be trapped by the same limitations as any other formal system. We would be unable to recognize the truths that lie outside the system’s axioms. But the Anthropos is free from the constraints of immanent logic, and there’s not a damn thing we can do about it. We just have to resign ourselves to the consequences, no matter how pleasant.
We get it. Can you just cut to the chase?
Dávila says Four or five invulnerable philosophical propositions allow us to make fun of the rest, but it turns out there are exactly five. However, we’ll have plenty of time to make fun of the rest while explicating the fantastic five along the way.
Livi begins, innocently enough, with the existence of things. Note that this is at antipodes to Descartes, who begins at the other end, with the thinking subject: I think, therefore I am. Of course, once you’ve proven this to your own satisfaction, you can never get back to the It Is, rather, you dwell in the comfort and safety of your own subjectivity, and rationalism takes care of the rest. Our seminal solipsist started with his own mind and spent the rest of his life trying to prove there was a world outside it, because you can check into the Hotel Descartes any time you like, but you can never leave.
Rather, things are, and we can think about them. But before thinking about them, they simply are, and who could deny this? This is what we call a “revealed preference,” in that even philosophers vote with their feet, for they too will get out of the way of the moving bus, even if they pretend the bus is just an idea, concept, construct, convention, or transcendental form of their own sensibility.
You can make this elementary principle as complicated as you like. For example, suppose a truck is bearing down on us. I am a simple man, so I say just step out of the way.
Alternatively, one could could provide an Executive Directive on Spatio-Temporal Reorientation & Proximity Management on The Imperative of Non-Catastrophic Kinematic Interfacing, in order to mitigate the high-probability risk of a catastrophic, inelastic collision between the designated Human Subject (HS-1) and the approaching, macro-scale, multi-ton mass-in-motion unit, herein referred to as the Kinetic Transporter (KT-1). The objective here is to achieve a stable state of Euclidean non-intersection before the estimated time zero-displacement-separation. This is not merely a suggestion, but a deterministic mandate for the preservation of the structural and metabolic integrity of HS-1!
Sounds serious.
Yes, in plain English, HS-1 must immediately cease all current tertiary processes and dedicate 100% of cognitive resources to the perception and analysis of the KT-1’s four-dimensional state vector, specifically, its instantaneous position and velocity within the common frame of reference. Please understand that the target vector must be physically realized by the instantaneous, coordinated, and high-torque activation of the quadriceps, gastrocnemius, and gluteal muscle groups. This motor response must be initiated via a gamma-motor neuron cascade, overriding all competing homeostatic reflexes. The resulting kinetic energy generation must be sufficient to radially accelerate the entire HS-1 biomass out of the current High-Risk Proximity Zone (HRPZ). Failure to comply will result in a rapid, non-reversible transformation of the HS-1’s personal reality.
You sound like a David Bentley Hart machine: expressing the minimum via the maximum.
Yes, whom are we trying to impress? And by the time one unpacks the directive, one will be roadkill. It’s like asking the quarterback to calculate spin rate, velocity, the rapid approach of large-mass defenders, and the speed of the wide receiver before heaving the ball. Even Uncle Rico couldn’t do that.
We have to begin with knowing that something is before discovering what it is. Which is the first article of common sense, that “there is immediately known to man as self-evident on the basis of sensations penetrated by the intellect, a world of things, independent of man’s thinking of them” (Slattery).
That’s it? Doesn’t seem like much to go on.
Well, we have to start somewhere, and perhaps this is just the thin edge of a wedge of fledgling knowledge that will bust things wide open. For in knowing that something exists, we also know, by extension, that we exist, for while reflecting on our own existence, we cannot conclude that we do not exist.
So, we are certain that something is and that someone is certain of it. Denying either of these foundational truths — or affirming their non-existence — is a self-refuting auto-absurdity, for this certitude may be denied with words but cannot actually be denied in thought, at least without launching a great deal of excrement.
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