In today’s world of philosophy there are those who profess deterministic truth as though they themselves have apprehended it fully. Perhaps it’s the case that they have found a sliver, that they are scratching at something associated with truth. Still, a claim to such awareness can be as like a drug; it can take hold firmly, out of material revelation, only to devolve into delusion.
This is the great paradox of our observations of reality; all qualitative descriptions of being we tend to engage are necessarily abstractions of an underlying logical process. We have to use observations and measurements of those abstractions to even deduce the framework or substrate that is being operated on. And for the next substrate, we must do the same, “elephants all the way down,” if you will, and so we can extrapolate deterministic qualities of reality from that reasoning.
The problem is, however, upon closer examination of layer on layer, there MUST be a foundational component from which all being and potential has sprung. But as we observe these substrates, it is not obvious that they become more solid, more foundational. In fact it seems more so that our qualitative distinctions break down, they vanish under the scrutiny of these lesser known substrates. To the point where we actually can not predict the most basic particular forces. Such as the double slit experiment which indicates that observation alone can change what is observed. In many ways, this experiment has opened the door to mysteries we have yet to explain, much less with material confidence. The point is, there must be, by nature of following this logic all the way down to its natural conclusion, a foundational component resting on a substrate outside of itself.
The human mind is not capable of reflecting reality in its true nature. Our “truth” is the battle against entropy, folded into a neat little interface over which we can perform beautiful, horrific, or miraculous things. We aren’t attuned with reality, we’re attuned with survival. The foundational tenet of our progression is that of evolution and not truth, and to seek the latter is an uphill stream; it is almost opposed to nature itself.
And so, defining meaning with truth becomes dangerous if one does not have abstraction to account for the gap in his awareness. This is what people discovered a long, long time ago, and such a recognition of those individuals’ own awareness (or lack thereof) has been responsibly vested in God, eternally and without any other possibility. We are glad to map out reality using tools of measurement and deduction in effort to create a clearer image of our situation. Science is good, it should supplement being and catalyze curiosity. Still, those who claim to observe an acute grasp on the nature of our fundamental reality, and take the liberty of overfitting their observations ontologically as a claim of truth, are possessed by the recursive demon.
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