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Idealism, like cladistics, is consistently contradictory

Saturday, March 9, 2013 15:56

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(Before It's News)

When we look at the world, we divide it into objects (ie, entities) and classes of objects (ie, types) at the same time, eg, plants, birds and humans. All plants we can find in the world do thus compose the set of objects that belong to the class “plants”.

However, the problem with this division is that whereas “objects” belong to reality (ie, what we observe), “classes” instead belongs to our imagination (how we group the objects we observe), because this fact means that the total number of objects of a certain class we can find is finite whereas the total number of classes is infinite, and “finite” can’t equal “infinite”. This our division thus leads us into two possible, orthogonal paths of logical reasoning:

1. assuming as an axiom that objects are real, and

2. assuming as an axiom that classes are real,

which are contradictory.

The division itself does thus exclude the possibility to close it consistently, but instead leaves us with only two possibilities:

1. to divide the world in several equally consistent ways using a an orthogonal system of classification like the Linnean system, or

2. to divide the world contradictory like cladistics.

This fact is thus not a question about whether there is a single true tree of life to be found or not, as cladistics claims, but of whether we can divide the world consistently into such a tree or not.

We can, of course, believe that there is a single true tree of life to be found, but we can’t find what can’t be found. Belief can overcome many problems, but not the problem that “belief” does not equal “knowledge”. We can believe that belief equals knowledge, but we can’t turn belief into knowledge by simply believing it is. Instead, this belief will consistently lure us from one contradictory position to another contradictory position in an endless chase for what actually can’t be found.

Optimization does thus not ultimately lead to the truth, but to Russell’s paradox, ie, the paradox that any division of the world makes a consistent fusion of this division and the world impossible. Instead, every such fusion leads back to the contradiction of the division itself (ie, into our minds). There’s no consistent solution to this problem.

We thus have to acknowledge that we don’t find classes of objects, like neanderthals, denisovans and modern humans, but actually divide reality into them. Confusing “finding” with “dividing”, as cladists (like Svante Pääbo) do, only leads into Russell’s paradox. It means that we have to accept an orthogonal system of classification like Linnean systematics. Idealism, like cladistics, is consistently contradictory.