Artificial Mechanisms for Knowledge Transcendence

Abstract

The impact of Christianity and the realist Copernican model on the rise of modern science can best be assessed by the sustained “artificial tensions” they created, so were that of Renaissance humanism, the Reformation, the discovery of Americas, and other new discoveries. Collectively, they facilitated independent European thinkers to develop “unnatural” doubts about the validity of existing knowledge claims and seek “artificial” methods for knowledge discovery and justification.

On the contrary, all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe. And the human understanding is like a false mirror, which, receiving rays irregularly, distorts and discolors the nature of things by mingling its own nature with it.

—Francis Bacon, 1620, The New Organon