Maxi's Toolkit Vol.11: The Block Proof

Or "How to Be Sure of What You Will Never Know"

Welcome to another instalment in Maxi’s Toolkit. In the toolkit I outline a number of epistemological techniques — or ‘epitechs’, tools for thinking — that will be of some interest to you, the discerning digital humanist, in navigating a world of ever-increasing complexity.

We live in a world that is, en masse, better educated than it has ever been (wahoo!), but just as the perils of ecological pollution were little known until we had invented enough industry to give birth to them, one of the most fascinating phenomena attending this miraculous increase in education is that it has led to a proportionate increase in the amount of intellectual pollution: that is, bad thinking, and the bad intellectual habits to which we are prone. Wherever you sit (or think you sit) on the spectrum of overall intelligence, you are surrounded daily by substandard thinking and the products of such substandard thinking. You will almost certainly produce a decent volume of such pollutant thinking yourself. And perhaps the most damaging and dangerous attribute of inexact, corrupted, or misinformed thought is that it often goes unnoticed. Such erroneous thought as inhibits our flourishing and cripples our institutions can often be bizarrely convincing, even seductive.

This toolkit is an effort to put more equipment at our disposal for identifying errors in thought — our own and others’ — and correcting them. Each piece devoted to a tool will usually be brief (unless the tool itself is highly complex), containing a definition, notes on application, and a short analysis.

You can find Vol.10 — on two variants of the sublime, tools for mapping, defining and understanding experiences that are impossible to map, define, or understand — here. Today’s volume concerns the Block Proof (a.k.a “The Reasonable Proof of the Block”) — or, the reason why an inert block of lumber understands the existence of God, the universe, and everything better than you do.

The Block Proof