Principles of argument

## External world scepticism

All of the information we know about reality has been gathered from stimuli we perceive and deduced by training, finding patterns, learning, categorising and applying logic to develop a worldview - a schema about reality and everything we know about it.

The purpose of this process is to use our schemas about reality to predict what will happen in the future, as well as what the consequences of particular actions might be, so that we can guide our autonomy, make decisions and perform actions that will result in optimal, desired consequences.

For example, suppose you're feeling a bit weak, and a bit empty in the stomach. You might recall that you haven't chewed and swallowed something in a while. You'll realise that you're hungry, and by recollection of your previous actions, instinctively get up to grab some food. You'll recall the directions you took to get to wherever you put your food, and you might perform a recipe to prepare it, or you could just locate where it is, grab it, and start chewing at the contents.

More broadly, suppose you're a religious person. You might want to have a relationship with one or more gods, be significantly recognised as a good person (or forgiven for your sins) by entities with a high level of ethos, and be accepted into paradise, or progression on a theological hierarchy once you die.

However, beyond the stimuli we experience and learn to make sense of, we have no direct access to fundamental information about the external world. Sure, we could be skull-encased brains interfacing with organic human bodies in a universe with strict (but not yet fully discovered) laws of physics, as science has shown. Or we could just be brains floating in a vat, being fed stimuli that just happens to cohere in this way. This universe could be a simulation in a much larger universe, or contained in a multiverse, or a completely discrete Altarca, and we would essentially have no way to tell. Heck, we could just be Boltzmann brains, existing by inevitable probabilistic chance in a realm of completely random noise, about to slip back into incoherent chaos at any moment.

This is a principle called external world scepticism, and it leads to the uncertainty principle: no matter what stimuli you've experienced, no matter how consistent any particular entity or concept has been, it is technically impossible to prove that anything about the external world is certain; nothing is completely and absolutely reliable. The only truths we are able to ascertain are purely logical/mathematical ones and incorrigible ones about our subjective experiences, and to know anything about the external world for certain, we essentially have to contain and embody it completely in order to render it incorrigible.

In fact, even if we were conceptually omniscient and had access to every possible permutation of knowledge, we still wouldn't be able to verify which of it would be locally correct about the world we'd happen to inhabit (if any) unless we were, in fact, omnipotent, and essentially exempt from the effects of anything around us. We would have conceptual knowledge about being contained in or having access to any conceivable realm or state of existence, but it's still possible that we could be fed bogus stimuli, which we would likely ignore, and that we could be in any one of them; as long as we remained a subject, everything would still be subjective except for objective knowledge about abstract concepts.

Aside from "external world" scepticism, it's important to consider that even our own minds are susceptible to limitations, flaws, deficiencies and incongruencies. According to psychology, we can only hold around 5-9 chunks of information in our short-term memory at any given moment. We frequently forget information, no matter how important or trifling it is, and we have literally hundreds of instinctive cognitive biases that we constantly have to be wary of, all of which profoundly shape our decisions and worldviews, if not completely, as well as hundreds of formal and informal fallacies to choose from. Humans are very complex, but also very easy to misdirect, exploit and control.

No matter what's real or not, this is the position we're in. We as humans are frequently shocked, surprised, tricked, exploited, scammed, betrayed, incredulous, susceptible to optical and other illusions, introduced to revolutionary inventions and concepts, thrown into situations without our consent and having our entire worldviews turned upside-down, so regardless of whether this universe operates on strict laws of physics, we would do well to be wary about whatever we experience and not take anything for granted.

Having learnt about external world scepticism, you may be wondering: how can we even glean any real knowledge about reality if we can't verify it on a direct, existential level? And what's even the point of it? As mentioned before, we do so in order to gain an understanding of how our apparent surroundings operate, so that we can make plans and perform actions that result in desirable consequences. If there's even a slight chance that the world is anywhere near as predictable and manoeuvrable as it seems like it is, then it's in our best interest to make the most of it and create working models of external phenomena with which to make transactive decisions.

If we can't directly acquire relevant truths about reality, then how close can we get? This is what the scientific method is for.

## The scientific method

The scientific method is a way of analysing and systematically learning about the world (and outer space), phenomena within it, and how they operate and interact with each other. It aims to approximate truth as accurately as possible by creating formal models of what things are and how they work, as well as use working epistemologies to set optimised guidelines about how to do that.

* Observation
* Inquiry
* Research
* Hypothesis
* Experimentation
* Rectification
* Analysis
* Report

* Replicability
* Precision
* Falsifiability
* Consistency
* Parsimony

## Principles of argument

* If something claimed to be completely infallible is definitively proven to have at least one flaw, then it is conclusively proven to be fallible.
* If an opposition has any evidence that is valid, it must be considered.
* All philosophical/speculative standpoints that are compatible with logical, epistemological and mathematical principles and empirical findings are valid.