Page 22 - The Irony Board

Into the Mind

The mind can’t or won’t
Make the distinction

Between can’t and won’t.

Consciousness has blind spots. Some are inevitable areas of
ignorance about internal somatic functions; others result from
emotional blockage. The study of one’s own psychology, therefore,
is limited in objectivity. This piece presents that problem in a strictly
logical fashion, reminiscent of Voltaire’s “strange loop” about all
generalizations—except the self-reference here does not produce a
paradox. The statement is produced by a mind, which, to be
truthful, must qualify itself with the qualification it applies to all
minds.
This ambiguity, it should be noted, applies only to matters of
self-understanding. Another pair of attributes, “must be” and
“cannot be,” are logical evaluations not dependent upon knowledge
of states of the evaluator. Solipsism and psychologism follow from
the mistaken belief that internal imperfections and limitations in the
mechanism of thought invalidate any assertions about the external
world.

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