Epistemology – Anthropic Relativism
Epistemology is a central component of philosophy. It not only influences philosophical and scientific thinking, but also has a formative effect on the general worldview.However, there are countless directions and just as many of them that only a few manage to reach the light of day, and often those who are most successful are those that best meet the spirit of the times.
I’m trying to develop my own approach here, which has some similarities with others, but is not identical to them.
The initial question is, what can we recognize and how do we do it? Undoubtedly, we do not perceive the world as a camera obscura, but we transform reality into a sensory neural reality.
Let’s take a virtual meta-perspective for a moment, pretending to be something similar to God. Then we see a world that is transformed into a second world. World 1 is the world that exists independently of man, world 2 is the anthropic world. World 2 is a different, separate world for every living being. If a neutrino could perceive, there would also be a neutrino world.
For us humans, however, only world 2 exists, a world 1, which Kant would call a thing in itself, does not exist for us. Therefore, there is no objective truth that we can know that can be located in World 1. Between world 1 and 2 there is an epistemological boundary that is insurmountable, because we have no code for our mental transformation with which we could infer world 1.
All our philosophical concepts, cognition, rationality, reason, but also all sciences, including mathematics, refer exclusively to world 2.Although world 1
does not exist for us, our anthropic world 2 is of course based on it, not as an image, but as a specific Transformation.So of how a computer transforms a numerical code from 0 and 1 into an executable program with which one can draw pictures. The logic of world 1 is thus translated into a logic of world 2. Every species and — if this were possible — every inanimate particle has its own world 2.
This means that there is a relationship between world 1 and world 2, even if world 1 does not exist for us. Non-existence refers mainly to cognition.
Since our world 2 exists only for us, i.e. it is relative, I call this view anthropic relativism.
If we delete world 1 from our world view, since it does not exist for us anyway, world 2 appears to us as the one world to be known.
From this point of view, this idea resembles instrumentalism combined with constructivism. Both assume that although the world is not absolutely knowable, we can achieve an ever better approximation of truth through our epistemologies and technologies, whereby truth is also to be understood relativistically.
Instrumentalism, for example, argues that epistemologies do not serve to describe the world in its absolute truth, but to make it comprehensible and manageable for us. Epistemologies are therefore to be understood as tools that we can use to understand and shape our environment. This position was mainly held by Pierre Duhem.
Constructivism argues that we do not passively perceive the world, but actively construct it. Our epistemologies are therefore not simply representations of the world, but they determine how we perceive and understand the world. These ideas can also be found in the works of Jean Piaget.
Both instrumentalism and constructivism are forms of relative realism. They assume that the world does exist, but that we can only know it insofar as we imagine it.
This view is also held by many scientists.
The difference between both theories of science and my approach is a metaphysical gap that cannot be filled in either. In both, the unknowability of an objective truth lies in a lack, whereas I justify the unknowability of a world 1 (which exists only from the point of view of a virtual meta-perspective) in a transformation whose code we do not know. The metaphysical gap is in tautology, what we cannot know, we cannot know. A reason is not given or lies in itself. This gap can only be closed by providing a reason, i.e. by introducing a third logical element, in the form of a quasi-reality.
Hypothetical realism, as it exists in the context of evolutionary epistemology and is advocated by Gehard Vollmer, for example, is closer here. According to this, reality has a structure according to which causal relations (cause-and-effect relationships) exist objectively and can be partially recognized.
However, the question also remains why reality can only be partially recognized. The gap remains.
In my approach, there is no objective reality — unless it exists only from a meta-perspective, only by means of an auxiliary construction. Reality exists only as World 2, i.e. as a transformed reality, as a neural transformat.
Although we transform 2 objects and relations into our world, we do not know whether they will be linearly and completely transformed.
The main difference, however, is that we not only transform world 1 into world 2, but also conversely change world 1 through our actions, even though it does not exist (for us). This retransformation is purely material and has no epistemological consequences. Consequences of our actions exist (for us) only in world 2. What impact it will have on World 1, we will never know.
So the big transformer is our sensory and neural system. It is not really a system of cognition, but a system of arousal. When we speak of cognition in the philosophical sense, we really mean the logical and operational adaptation of our organism to an environment that presents itself to us as World 2.
The transformation of the logic of world 1 results in our logic of world 2, and thus also that of mathematics. In this respect, mathematics indirectly represents a logic inherent in World 1. It thus follows a phenomenal logic, the ontology of which we do not know.
In terms of epistemology, therefore, we are moving on a surface whose ‘depth’ we do not know, cannot know and do not need to know.
And to which school can this anthropic relativism be assigned? There can be no doubt about the materialism of world 2, for it shows itself exclusively as a material world, without any metaphysical media to be assumed. Since there is no such thing as a world 1 for us, there is no need for such speculation. There is no such thing as metaphysics.
The dilemma with epistemology is the concept of cognition itself, because it suggests that there is a cognition machine in our head that is capable of knowing the world, and that in a transcendent sense.
In reality, there is a biological system of nerve cells in our brain. These have developed over the course of millions of years as a result of the influence of the environment and in confrontation with it and serve as orientation in the world.
The fact that this nervous tissue has reached a level of complexity that allows us to think about transcendent things with the help of language is not synonymous with a knowledge in this regard.
This biological system is neuronally instantiated from the outset.
Thus, the world that exists independently of us does not exist for us as such. It exists only as an abstract reality that we transform into a concrete world through our sensors.
The metatheoretical concept of knowledge is all too often confused with a scientific, technical or everyday concept, which is concerned with establishing rules that are conducive to the direct confrontation with the world.
This also gives rise to the idea that one can gain transcendent knowledge with the help of science. Epistemology, however, is pure interpretation and is based only on findings from science and everyday life, but is not identical with them.
This interpretation has been made by man in his own way in every epoch. Plato, Aristotle, Kant or Hegel interpreted the world as they were able to interpret it in their time.
Neural instantiation not only brings with it a limit of knowledge for humans, but also for each individual.
The core message of anthropic relativism is that we transform the world into a neural modality, the world exists for us only in this form. In doing so, the world affects us in all its structures and causalities, even with those that we cannot perceive because they lie outside our perceptual modality. As a rule, we cannot distinguish between modal and amodal influences, because we are evolutionarily adapted to the world in such a way that it seems familiar to us. One example is gravity, which we describe well but cannot explain. Where we leave the mesoscopic world to which we are adapted, the amodal structures appear incomprehensible to us, both in the microcosm and in the macrocosm.The problem here is that we cannot distinguish between those things that are not perceptible to us in principle, i.e. cannot be transformed into a neuronal form, and those that we have just not yet discovered or deciphered. One possible example is virtual particles that appear and disappear again, or that are used to make equations plausible, such as those that appear in the Feynman diagrams. Either they are real in the sense that they appear both in our world and in the virtual world that I have referred to as World 1. Or our observations, as well as the equations, do not match reality.
If we assume that our modal perceptions and cognitions based on them are consistent in our world, which I have referred to as World 2, then everything would indicate that the structures in our World 2 that are not recognizable to us are at work and are thus part of our natural laws. In this case, they would be plausible ‘gaps’ in our cognition, which as such would be part of our reality.
If we assume that the laws of nature that we formulate are the result of what we can perceive, we must conclude that this is only the part of natural laws that we can observe, i.e. that it is only a phenomenology that we have formulated as ontology in the form of our classical physics.
Examples would be dark energy or matter, the effects of which we notice, but which are not part of our cognitive world 2.
From a metatheoretical point of view, we can only ask “how” questions in our world 2, but not “why” questions. We know how gravity works, but not why.
So we are dealing with two epistemological levels, on the one hand with the unknowability of world 1, and on the other hand with the micro- and macro-world, which can only be described phenomenologically, for which we cannot develop an ontology.
