Nothing strange with that, as everything I write is more or less deficient as far as reason goes. But this one was so ill done it doesn’t even bring my original flawed argument out in true light. In the search of brevity, I cut away steps of reason, and left was a mess. So I figured that to repair this mess I would have to spend some posts clearing my mumbling up.

As for the first point, which was the most cogently argued; the ease of finding oughts, this post shall attend to. To anyone familiar with Searle or Wittgenstein, this move would be very unsurprising. It is quite evident that our common language is full of normative statements; “anyone with the powers of reason should not concede that…”, “and now Brokowski should pass the ball to Hulot”, “I shouldn’t have done that”, and so on. One can find them in affluence in most any text, and they make perfect sense. For the meaning of words are their usages. It is unnecessary and wrong to assume there must be a – in Wittgenstein’s words – Augustinian image, an object which a word refers to. That is not how language works. (Some nouns do.)

One might ask then what the use of ‘should’ is. It is a tricky question since it is used in so many situations, surely there is a plena of such uses and thus meanings. But one can perhaps subsume them all under the vategory of conditionals involving conforming to a (language) game. If crude, still many meanings work under this heading, and those are the pertinent ones. In other words, should works to establish an if… then… situation, where the matter at hand is following rules of conduct and assumptions. In a chess game, one assumes in the spirit of game theory that both sides wish to win, and there are rules at place for arriving at that – and thus it makes sense, “he should move the queen to d3″.

One may also call this satisfying a goal.

Tsuduku.

A: “I want to eat pie.”

B: “Then you ought to earn some money so you can buy pie!”

C: “I promise to find you a cheap pie.”

A: “Then you should do that!”

One might contend that this is entirely a matter of non-moral ought, and not what Hume argued. Well, promises sure seem moral to me, but that is not the main problem I’d have with that. The main problem is simply that this is false. We use “should” et al in a very specific family of ways, and they can well be sufficiently described by the words satisfying a goal – moral ones as second-degree wants. As in, wanting something about a wanting, or about another person’s acting (and thus sufficient wanting for such an act) – when we say “to steal is wrong”, we mean that we do not want to want to steal, nor do we want other people to steal. This may or may not be all that there is to it, I do not think that is all, realists may be inclined to disagree.

While morality does seem to me impossible to ground in universal objective truth, it is likewise impossible not to have a moral system. We cannot escape that. What we ought to question ourselves here – look, another ought, they are quite usable in rational inquiry too, eh? – is what moral system we then should have. Look, there’s an ought again! They’re fornicating all over the article. (I could say that we must have morals, too.)

The first obvious answer is “none”. But that one is obviously wrong, for it is necessary to have one. Even not to act is to have a moral system. So the second would be, “the one we want”. This seems vaguely satisfying, but which grounds to desire them from? “Whichever”, some may ask. That may be so. But can we truly wish for others to follow our moral system if we do not wish for our system to be universalised? It seems contradictory to do so.

So John has an idea. He formulates his beautiful moral system. “You should all obey John.” No problem here, as John just has to obey himself. However. No one would ever agree to it. Not even John’s creepy stalker ex-wife. It’s thus a rather useless morality, he can stick to it, but it seems equally weird to have a moral system not geared towards convincing people to want it. So what morality seems to grow up to here, is a matter of society. What kind of society do we want? Not one where John calls the shots. A moral system must thus, to a degree, serve what people desire.

Wait wait wait. Here roams monsters illogical. Whence this jump from a very specific example to a very broad statement? The matter at hand is merely the universalised parts of morality. What one limits oneself to, by all means, cannot be required to be universalised. The Sufi mystic who lives poor may think it good for people to be so, but he would not require anyone. He only requires of himself to be poor. This is not problematic in the same manner. Can we, then, create a moral system entirely requiring things of oneself, and saying nothing of what others should and should not? It seems hard, and irrelevant to this matter at hand – that universalised morality is politics.

There cannot be a final moral system. There will likely never be one everyone agree upon. So how about this:

Everyone shall be free to do whatever they want, as long as this does not impede someone else to exercise her own free will equally.

It won’t work alone, but it is a good ground for a society.

Alla som har haft med barn att göra vet att de är nyfikna och kreativa. De vill utforska saker och komma underfund med vad som händer.  Mycket av skolans verksamhet går ut på att driva ut detta ur dem och få dem att passa i en form, få dem att uppföra sig väl, sluta tänka, inte ställa till besvär.

Noam Chomsky, samtal med David Barsamian (Propagandans makt, Ordfront 2002)

Jag har i alla fall anekdotiskt, personligt bevis för denna tes. Skulle vara förvånad om det inte fanns några studier om det.

Barnasinnet är mjukt. Det är så lätt att bringa det till underkastelse med hjälp av skrämseln. Det är det de [härskande] göra. De göra det ängslig och tala till det om helvetets pina; de omtala för det de fördömda själarnas lidande, en oförsonlig gudoms hämnd. Nästa ögonblick tala de till det om revolutionens fasor; de använda revolutionens spöke för att göra barnet till en “vän av ordningen”.

Peter Kropotkin (Anarkismens moral, Tragus 2004)

…Men nu är spökena mer subtila idag. Man kan så klart imponeras av Kropotkins fina prosa, men som alltid är det nog Lord Russell som gör det bäst:

Men are born ignorant, not stupid. They are made stupid by education.

But just because we cannot be absolutely certain about anything, it does not follow that we can only be equally certain about everything. And furthermore, radical skepticism is a very unproductive position, one which we cannot really take seriously. It is paper doubt, not real and living doubt.

But from a position of absolute agnosticism, how do we proceed?

I would suggest to make a few tentative assumptions about how we can gain knowledge. However, care must be taken at this stage. There are several kinds of assumptions – there are working assumptions, methodological assumptions, axiomata, et cetera. Here I mean a methodological one. We can test a working assumption (“I assume that there is vacuum in this tube now”), but we cannot test a methodological one (“I assume my perceptions not to be systematically misleading”). We might always reach a point where a methodological assumption may become testable; nothing is not open for future revision.

Once we have a sufficiently strong groundwork of assumptions, we can from them deduce new truths, which will hold given the assumptions. We can construct arguments. The strength and necessity of arguments lies in that we can only be wrong in the concluson if we are wrong in an assumption. Certainity becomes inherent in the system.

For each assumption we make, there is a risk, even if likely vanishingly small, we may be wrong. This is true for all assumptions. What we then need to do is be parsimonious, that is, raze with Occam’s razor. Never assume more things than you need to make your model, explanation or theory work.

Which assumptions we initially make may fall as it does; with any luck they prove themselves fruitful or not. To assume logic, to assume we are not systematically misled in thought and perception, to assume that we need the ability to transfer knowledge and not acquiesce in mystic epistemic individualism, and to assume some kind of coherency in the reports we give and the reports people think they hear or read from us are examples of good starting points. Now, what is important are a few assumptions we should not make:

1. Realism

Realism is the position that our theories describe real things. In many ways, this may seem as if it is the natural conclusion via Occam’s razor, but in fact it is not. To assume that our theories describe real things is positing a new set of entities. We do not need them to make our theory work. To posit that strings exist when this is an untestable proposition, when we can just as well say that the maths perfectly describe the real observable events, is to make an unjustified, uneconomical assumption. They could exist or they could not. We do not need them, however.

As Sokal and Bricmont wrote in Intellectual Impostures:

This is rather like asking whether, given a finite set of points, there is a unique curve that passes through these points. Clearly the answer is no: there are infinitely many curves passing through any given finite set of points. Similarly, there is always a large (even infinite) number of theories compatible with the data – and this, whatever the data and whatever the number. (p.80)

This is not to say that realism is useless. Having a realist interpretation has often been very useful for experimenters, made theories more relatable and easy to understand, and perhaps more beautiful. One can perhaps argue about them at a level of very low, but still present, certainity. Materialism and dualism both do seem like bigger stretches than does neutral monism. But it is important to be aware that strictly speaking, they are all less rigorous and solid positions than antirealism.

2. Common Sense

Common sense is a very common method of estimating truth. It’s, er, in the name. Regardless, it is not good to utilise this, for the simple reason it is not common enough, and often at odds with fact even when it is. I doubt it is common sense that the denial of the antecedent in implicature means the implicature is true regardless if the consequent is (that is,  the sentence “If bananas are a type of worm, then the Prime Minister of Sweden is Fredrik Reinfeldt” is true). Nor would it be common sense to say that 0.999… = 1, when in fact it is. Many more examples may be shown of common sense erring.

Merely for the fact it feels right or it is common people think it right, it does not follow it is sensible to believe it.

3. Intuition

Intuition is hard to account for. It’s hard to give any reason it should be right; it merely feels that way. It may be – but it constitutes a poor argument for the matter. It varies among people and certain types of it may be said to be common sense of one variant or another. The veracity of an intuition is not good to judge on basis of it being one, but rather on its own merits. Some intuitions may be useful, but as a general area of source of knowledge, it seems to be poor rationality to accept it. After all, intuition is not transferable and it only makes sense to the person who has it.

Again. Merely for the fact it feels right or it is common people think it right, it does not follow it is sensible to believe it.

A note about procedure of knowledge: One must make a distinction between a source of knowledge and a justification of it. What I am concerned about here is justification. As far as reaching new facts goes, any method could and should be used. One can never know from where we may get new facts to incorporate. A mathematician may very well intuitively feel that a certain answer to whether the Riemann hypothesis is correct; then the intuition would be the source of that knowledge. But it would not be justified until he produced a proof.

1. An omnipotent being (let us call it “god”) can do anything; this includes violating logic and possibility.
2. Even if it was impossible for a god to exist, that would not matter to it (if it would, it would not be omnipotent).
3. No need to worry about causality, it’s omnipotent.
4. No need to worry about existing or not, it’s omnipotent.
5. No need to worry about being omnipotent or not; it can retroactively make itself so.
6. Therefore, a god could create itself.
7. Conclusion: There is a god, or several gods, possibly an uncountably infinite number of them.
8. Bonus: We can turn ourselves into gods.

(So, what is wrong about this one?)

Richard Dawkins formulated a scale in his The God Delusion which I believe serves only to further confound matters. Basically, it went like this:

Strong theist. 100 per cent probability of God. In the words of C.G. Jung, ‘I do not believe, I know.’

Very high probability but short of 100 per cent. De facto theist. ‘I cannot know for certain, but I strongly believe in God and live my life on the assumption that he is there.’

Higher than 50 per cent but not very high. Technically agnostic but leaning towards theism. ‘I am very uncertain, but I am inclined to believe in God.’

Exactly 50 per cent. Completely impartial agnostic. ‘God’s existence and non-existence are exactly equiprobable.’

Lower than 50 per cent but not very low. Technically agnostic but leaning towards atheism. ‘I do not know whether God exists but I’m inclined to be sceptical.’

Very low probability, but short of zero. De facto atheist. ‘I cannot know for certain but I think God is very improbable, and I live my life on the assumption that he is not there.’

Strong atheist. ‘I know there is no God, with the same conviction as Jung “knows” there is one.’

This is quite insufficient, and he ignores several possible positions which are possible. Most of all; how do we judge these probabilities? It’s likely he meant them as pure approximations or metaphora, but still. I do not see any way by which I could estimate how likely it is that there is a god; out of the set of all possible worlds, I cannot quite ascertain how many should have a god. There’s just no data to make that judgment… Unless one holds that it is logically necessary or impossible that there is a god. At least positions 1 and 7 are thus clear in meaning.

Now to the position I think he ignores, or just is not really aware of or concerned with: actual agnosticism. “I do not know,” even as to the extent of likelihood and whatever else.

It’s often charged that agnosticism is really just atheism. That is easy to show wrong. Let B be the modal operator of belief, and γ the proposition “there is a god” (∃x(God(x)), for you pedants).

Agnosticism:

I do not believe there is a god and I do not believe there is no god.

(¬Bγ & ¬B¬γ)

Atheism:

I believe there is no god.

(B¬γ)

As is evident, the propositions are different and irreconcilable. The set of atheistic beliefs will be different from the set of agnostic, {¬∃x(God(x)} versus ∅.

As for me, I usually call myself atheist, but I recently abandoned it in favour of agnosticism. “God” is such a loose term, and so many possible hypotheses about one or more of them have never been thought up, much less tested. I am atheist as regards to some gods (many forms of the Abrahamic one, Thor, Cthulhu). But on the whole there are so many I have not yet considered, and some which may even be impossible to say much about, and some which I have considered but were simply impossible to say much about (deistic thought is full of that, and then we have the Cartesian demon, and so on).

(ohoho, I can use formal logic, that means I are clevers!)

What does that mean?

Really, it is a simple question, one I cannot divine an answer to. What on Earth would “objective morals” mean? I can think of one thing – moral statements would then somehow get verification/falsification conditions. But really, how would they look like? What would it mean to humans? Or to much anything humans can remotely relate to? Does truth and falsity even mean anything if there is to them connected no possible consequence? That is, what would it mean to say that a moral statement is true?

For let us think about what “moral” means, how it is used in everyday speech – quite basically, it is of an action some agent wishes no one would partake in. “Should”, as Hume contested, does in itself establish no meaningful relation; it cannot be said what “should” means. I hold that “should” means mere approval of a course of action, which gives little leeway for any moral realism to enter.

Ignoring that and hoping to find another sensible meaning of ‘should’ leads to various hypotheses and the real or imaginary objects they reduce should-ness to.

The most popular angle would be the divine explanation of ethics. One or more divinities ensure act X to be morally wrong, and will thus punish you for transgressing it. This approach is the simple one, appealing to our limbic system. One very much like from the fairy tales of olden days - kids, being corrupt critters, needed tales with clear rewards for the good and clear punishment for the evil as to lead them to a righteous life. But I would question how much this could be called “real moral” in the classic sense – the only verification/falsification criteria is whether you are punished or not, and, frankly, that is equivalent with there just being a god who just doesn’t like said action, or otherwise does not want it to be performed, or it is reduced to the next point, platonisms, of which the gods then are a kind of guardians or what have you. Naturally one can well say that “moral” means exactly “god X fancies this”; for such a shift of perspective I would stand questioning, though, given that is not how the word is commonly used. Rather just say that god X fancies cocktail parties than say that it is moral to have cocktail parties if the former is what is to be communicated.

Metaphysical arguments more or less related to Plato will also not be very possible to comprehend how they can at all be humanly comprehended or checked – there being some kind of non-physical . What would it mean, how could we understand something like that? Not very much apart from that some statements would now be true and some false which previously might have been thought to not have been either. This is, as can evidently be seen, quite baroque. For an example; Levinas says we have infinite responsibility to the Other – and I say this means nothing (this apart from the obvious fact that trying to live up to an infinite responsibility is absolutely bonkers, for even a lifetime of doing it would be the very same as a lifetime of not). It establishes no meaningful relations between objects, it serves not to give any practical consequences, there cannot be said much about it, and we could never know whether this was true or not. And we could, of course, just not want to fulfill this infinite responsibility.

Another angle would be (cognitivist) emotivism, where “wrong” means that said action will result in negative emotions. One must take note that whether an act will or will not produce this is entirely dependent on situation and agents involved, so this doesn’t seem to offer any well-grounded moral fact, being a reduction of morality to simple terms of – once again – wanting and not wanting.

No; if morals were subject to truth and falsity, morals would perhaps be in the form of impossibility to perform some acts, or certainity in some, or likewise enforcements. Morality is about how we act; if no intrusions nor special priveleges are made on our ability to act, then whence right or wrong? Of course, this may mean that travelling faster than c is immoral (should we ignore the virtual photons which may actually transgress it in QM; their actual existence may be debatable, being instrumentalities rather than observed phaenomena). This, again, leads to some absurdity. But it is the best sense I can make out of imagining a minimally different world where there was objective moral.

So, it wouldn’t mean anything in particular; incomprehensible gibberish for living by is a bad idea.

So, it wouldn’t be possible to varify or falsify; though do try to prove otherwise.

So, it wouldn’t matter even if such moral truths were to be discovered; why heed them?

While the Japanese government launched a large-scale propaganda offensive during the Second World War, it was severely hampered by their great reluctance to at all handle truth - this despite it being quite humorously ingenious, distributing pornography among Australian soldiers depicting their wives getting it on with the drunken British and American soldiers stationed there. (No, to the best of my knowledge, that was very much ineffective. I imagine it provided relief material and little else).

It is an easy and omnipresent lesson – use truth in propaganda, it makes it more effective.

So, yesterday I saw Ford’s The Searchers. Mediocre movie, though it got very entertaining once it stopped taking itself seriously and delved into subtle farce. However, in the beginning of it, one of those Piracy – It’s a Crime! snippets was shoved into the faces of the audience – and this one was one I had not seen before. Likely because I never watch them, and frequently am spared them. However, it roused my interest, though not at all in a way it is likely intended to. This particular version was a rather pitifully clumsy example of propaganda being better when it is true.

The original trailer is an outright lie. It is always disheartening to hear the laymen decry piracy since “it’s stealing”, but when such a ‘fact’ is espoused even by the organization nominally in charge of  the interests of the involved businesses… Things are wrong. The MPAA – who indeed are the fine chaps who made the movie – know it is not stealing. While Hanlon’s razor is often very applicable, I do not think it is likely that MPAA is unawares that piracy is not, in fact, theft. It’s copyright infringement – a wholly different law. To the best of my knowledge, there’s not a legal system currently in force which considers piracy the same as theft. Not even actual piracy, which would more often be robbery.

Now to the one I found new (of course, it wasn’t, inb4 slowpoke.jpg). Now this is intriguing – I do not know if this replaced the earlier one or not (likely not, it just delves into another supposed problem, which people may be unawares of), but regardless, this one seems to be more sophisticated. Still as sophisticated as using a blunt rock for a hemispherectomy, but still, more sophisticated. For while this one lies, it does try to tone it down, somehow. No, buying pirated movies is not theft either. Even if you wanted to draw along with the piracy is theft equivalence, it would at best be handling stolen goods. Which it isn’t, either. Dowling v. United States said as much about American law; I do not think the matter is different in Swedish, British or Martian.

Nevertheless, it gets a bit more sophisticated. The disjoint between the actual thefts and the downloading in the early one was to jarring – one noticed the falsehood too much. Now there’s more of a break of reason – from theft to, all of a suden, a crime which isn’t theft, but on the other hand is more physical, and thus easier to group with the other ones. Perhaps one day there will be a MPAA trailer which does not even insinuate that copyright infringement is a criminal offence? One day they may even speak the truth (though severely lopsided to their own favour and full of equivocation – as is the way of truly sophisticated propaganda)? Mayhaps.

On a related thought – Does this perhaps mean that the ontogeny of propaganda recaputilates phylogeny?

I could be wrong.

I am not certain that modus ponens is correct.

Look at it! Look how baseless it looks!

p → q

p

∴q

If p then q, p is true, thus we can conclude that q.

How could we ever trust something like that? It is too obviously true to be trusted.

Of course, doubt is at the centre of philosophy. Indeed, the centre of a sizable part of human thought. Without doubt, we’d just accept whatever we were told – and certainly (ah-ha) we’d reach a fatally contradictory mix of beliefs rather quickly. The Father of Modern Philosophy himself, Descartes, founded his whole system on systematic doubt (and deficient logic). Skepticism has always been frowned upon, and more or less facepalm-inducing exit strategies have been devised. I will here argue that the skeptic is always right, and anything we do pretend to know, we can never be sure of.

Primary definition: Certainity is whatever we have the epistemic right to hold as true, and of which we cannot ever be shown to be wrong about. An epistemic right to hold true means that we have an argument in favour of it.

So again, the mystery of modus ponens. We think it’s the most obvious thing in the world, but one of the main purposes of philosophy is exactly to investigate those things we go “it’s obvious you fool” over. Why on Earth do we think it’s obvious? Intuition is not to be trusted, after all, were we born in the middle ages in Europe, the existence of God would probably have been as obvious as modus ponens to us, something I wager is not taken as quite so obvious these days. At least I have, let’s say, strong doubts regarding the existence of said transcedently bearded personage. To take a more neutral example: we likely have the intuition that when in vacuum, hold your breath. Which of course is absolutely wrong. And most of all: we most likely do not share intuitions at all, and as seen many intuitions have been proven wrong. It is a relative, wildcard and therefore weightless argument. It may be right, what do I know, but don’t you try to convince me with it.

Certainly the problem is that modus ponens is not as basic as possible, then. Justification will appear at lower levels, for sure! So let’s look at a rather simple logical fact, which is what modus ponens relies on.

q

∴q

It says, basically, that given q, we can conclude that q. Incredibly obvious, is it not? Now what justification do we have here? Well, denying it would (rather obviously) lead to this:

q

∴ ¬q

(⊥)

Given q is true, we can conclude that q is false. Contradiction. I have heard the current term for it, though, is psychiatry.

It is a direct break against the Law of Noncontradiction. Sadly, all that has going for it is that it is a law of logic. Quite circular to prove logic with logic eh. Again we’re led to the baselessness of even the most fundamental facts – after all, we have no reason to believe reality is logical. We may well argue that logic is based on induction (we have never ever observed a break of any law of logic – of course, induction itself is a branch of logic), or that we cannot understand reality at all without logic (while true, why suppose we could understand it at all?).

However, there’s a very good part here. Namely that, if we define truth as something that follows from an axiomatic system, then we have some kind of justification for being certain about the truth of logic. Yes, really! See, while logic is self-justifying seen from a metalanguage, and therefore mayhaps suspect, it is perfectly natural for it to be “self-justifying” within itself. It is what it does, after all.

However… Let’s look at an even greater uncertainity, again on modus ponens. Because it rocks.

p → q

p

∴q

Given that we know how logic works, given that we have the rules, axioms and logical notations necessary, how do we know we conclude right? There’s namely something missing here. Look at it again. There’s something we are missing. Namely, the white space between characters. The, so to speak, small moment of thought inbetween, “now we have x, now we have y, now we can apply Law L“… There are small, discrete steps inbetween. How can we ever know they have been made correctly, as any investigation of them will probably itself involve discrete steps? There is just a sense of doing right at each step, and as we check we go through the steps to see whether any law was broken or not. But there’s still that small gap, which may as well be an infinite void, between each step of our reasoning. Of course, I may be wrong that there is such a step there, and merely deluded to think so after all talk of “steps” which actually do go about in the teaching of formal logic. The question then is, of course, how we at all can tell whether it is step-based or continuous, but I will for this text presume it is step-based. Even if not, we may look at an equally annoying uncertainity: We may just read them wrong, not comprehend the meaning, or so on.

“Don’t tell, show”, whispers the Muse of Writing in my slightly potato-shaped ear, and I shall heed it. Bear witness to the steps and possible simulacrum of reasoning I utilize:

1. Definition 1: Certainity is whatever we have the epistemic right to hold as true, and of which we cannot ever be shown to be wrong about.
2. Definition 2: An epistemic right to hold true means we have an argument for it.
3. Premise 1: What is baseless cannot be a good source of certainity.
4. Premise 2: What is different among people cannot be a good source of certainity.
5. Premise 3: Intuition is different among people
6. Premise 4: Intuition is essentially baseless.
7. Conclusion 1: Intuition cannot be trusted.
8. Definition: We may call true whatever follows from an axiomatic system.
9. Premise 5: Some kinds of logic (Logic-A) are axiomatic.
10. Premise 6: Some kinds of logic (Logic-B) are self-proving.
11. Premise 7: Some Logic-A are also Logic-B.
12. Conclusion 2: We may be certain about some kinds of logic.
13. Premise 8: In logical reasoning, there are discrete steps.
14. Premise 9: We have no certain-ensuring arguments in favour  for these discrete steps having been taken well as per definitions 1 and 2.
15. Conclusion 3: We may not be certain about logic.
16. Contradiction! Retract Conclusion 2.

Now, you thought about the argument of steps being uncertain in a series of steps. And it (hopefully) seemed to follow. But it says you can’t be certain. So maybe you did not. But then…

So there it problem one with certainity – in the end, we are forced to say “that is just how it is”. “I do not know” is the answer to the foundations of knowledge. But wait! That is not all!

Take an omniscient god. What would his omniscience say about his right to certainity about his knowledge? As we have established, it’s always possible we lack some certain pertinent information. Omniscience is rather problematic in logical context (as are most of those all-encompassing things; they are sets of which there can be no powerset, which leads to contradiction – Russell’s, to be exact). After all, this purported god would know about its own omniscience, but would it be certain of that fact? How would it know whether there was no fact F such that it did not know it, past knowing of its own omniscience? It would, likely know that there was none, being as it is a fact and as thus covered by omniscience. But how could it trust that knowledge?

That would be up to its temper, I think. And moreso for all us humans. We cannot be certain, that is how it is. Even a fully axiomatic system, with strict rules of inference, would loom over us – what if we just make mistakes all the time, but can’t see them lurking there in the void between steps?

This is not a very gloomy world. After all, we cannot even begin to imagine how we could be wrong on matters of truth and fact in an axiomatic system, any attempt to imagine it runs out into situations where laws of logic are broken, and those are impossible – at least for me – to properly imagine. And indeed this vast uncertainity does not preclude that we may know something after all, we just can’t know, and will have to devise strategies for maximizing our likeliness of being right (which of course, will be a self-justifying enterprise, as likeliness likely cannot be judged without a system for judging it in the first place).