No you don’t, LT. Don’t go being a troll now.
Thank you for indulging me. Here’s my rebuttal. A little lengthy, my apologies - see what you think:
The above quote relies on some major assumptions:
- Our senses sense some external world that we can sense a sensory picture of - once it has been transformed into an internal interpretation.
- Given “1”, these senses provide sufficient information of this external world as opposed to a very limited interpretation of it, such that we are “actually” mostly misled relative to a more complete sensory picture.
- The communicability of this sensory information shows everyone to have the same, or similar “enough” sensory picture - and people with sensory “deficiencies/anomalies” have an incomplete picture as opposed to a more complete picture. i.e. the general consensus is reliable.
- The consistencies that our senses indicate as reliably recurrent are “laws”/“truths” rather than simply what is most useful in terms of prediction.
With regard to assumptions 1 and 2, I am inclined to reject the notion of “an external world” that we have no immediate information about - only mediate information, mediated through our senses. It is only one’s own internal sensory picture that every person is witness to - the “external world” is only implied by the apparent general consensus mentioned in assumption 3. There is no Knox’s “God in the Quad”, privy to immediate information of everything in order to verify the accuracy of each individual’s mediate information.
With regard to assumption 3, just because most people find they can communicate about their individual interpretations does not make any collective agreement necessarily “true”. Although it is certainly useful to treat it as though it were. The word “truth” actually derives from loyalty - in this case, loyalty to the group consensus. Not surprising due to the social nature of humans, particularly concerning their reproduction being sexual.
These 3 assumptions reveal that “Objective Truth” is merely implied, subject to a social consensus that is assumed to be accurate due to agreement between not-necessarily-related subjective interpretations, and that this - along with the apparent use of this implication (as covered in assumption 4) - can amount to something we can call Objective Truth.
Obviously none of this directly implies there is necessarily no Objective Truth, though it shows that any conception at all of Objective Truth is reliant on Subjective Truths. To then claim that Objective Truth preceded Subjective Truths is to mistake cause for consequence. And any higher valuation of Objective Truth over Subjective truth is based on the social tendency of valuing consensus over direct individual knowledge - which is, of course, useful.
So all this, if accepted, has crushing implications on your paragraphs subsequent to the above quote.
With what I have to say in mind, Psychology’s “higher” emergence from the more fundamental Chemistry and Biology, and the even more fundamental Mathematics and Physics, is actually inverted.
Philosophically, it is necessary to question why would one want to think mathematically or scientifically - or even philosophically at all. This is a Psychological question, placing Psychology at the base, followed by Philosophy, followed by Mathematics and then the Sciences.
Subjective truths such as Culture, attitudes to war and love are moved further down with it - though it is in my opinion that Economics may in fact precede each of these things and all Psychology, Philosophy, Mathematics and Science etc. However, it is possibly necessary to question this with the Psychological question “why Economics?” And further, it may be necessary to equate Psychology with Philosophy as the love/value/wisdom in questioning intentional origins - and possibly to even equate Economics with Philosophy too, since neither the reliance of Philosophy and Psychology on Economic circumstance nor the question “why Economics” seems to be more fundamental than the other.
Cultural matters, and biases toward assumptions based on Social circumstances are each subject to Economic circumstance, as in the following quotes:
I have bolded the key words that betray Social bias in terms of value. The “importance”, “interestingness” and “usefulness” are predicated on utilitarian belief - that is there is an inherent bias toward what effects most people in the widest social sense. This explains your bias toward “objective” truth.
I have “degraded” Science to Psychology etc. (and I would do the same for religion) - Psychology in the sense of subjective valuation (rather than “truth”).
Economics fits into all this with the comment about those who live in luxury denigrating Science.
I have begun to discuss this point in another thread (about photons of all things). I correlate the predictive, more widely social use of Science with those who value control and the elimination of unpredictability more than excitement and lack of grounding. It is in fact in the interests of those who value excitement and lack of grounding to reject Science and the general belief in the “external world” that operates independently of anyone’s perception of it. And it is an Economic observation that the challenge for people is increasingly becoming to avert boredom rather than to merely survive at all. Comfort and predictability are coming to be taken for granted because of the sheer richness that historically preceding scientific movements of control and predictability has afforded us.
Science is becoming increasingly directed toward entertainment, and your average consumers are increasingly uninterested in the Science of any of this - only in the excitement and danger that scientifically manufactured technologies can offer them. So Science becomes revealed as Economically dependent, rather than objectively eternally “more important”. Though the valuation of excitement and danger would in all probability quickly disappear if scientifically created comforts disappeared. But rather than jumping to the conclusion that Science is therefore more fundamental than Economics, it must be noted that Science was only ever able to get off the ground at all due to certain Economic conditions being satisfied. So they are each related, with Science as a symptom of a certain Economic situation.
Likewise, the increasing decadence in Philosophy is also apparently proportional to the Economic richness that we know today.
Are we banging our heads against the walls yet?