Subjective Insanity
Don’t trust your own thoughts, become a paradox.
We all have flaws in whatever mechanism creates our thoughts (interpret this statement wherever you like on the zen-philosophical-psychological-neuroscientific-physical spectrum of perspectives) and some of these flaws might, in a beautifully circular sense, prevent us from ever generating thoughts that reveal the existence of these flaws in the first place. Even worse, if you think you’ve discovered one of these flaws, congratulations, that might just be another flawed thought, the result of another flaw your mind.
So what the hell do you do when you can’t trust your own thoughts? Your first inclination might be to appeal to the “objective” outside world — you see things that confirm the validity of your thoughts, and therefore you know that they are not flawed. But this really just moves the issue around. First, maybe these flaws only apply to things you haven’t thought about yet (e.g. you can only verify that your system of creating thoughts is truly valid if you can show that the infinite set of thoughts it could create contains only valid thoughts. Sadly we don’t have that much time), and second, maybe your interpretation that the outside world confirms your thoughts is wrong, because that interpretation is based on a flaw in your own thought creation that you can’t see.
