If I place a cat inside of a box with something potentially deadly inside of it, and I waited for an hour, what becomes of the cat? Is it dead, is it alive? Apparently, it is both dead and alive until the box is opened and the observer can actually see the cat; so goes the classic thought experiment, Schrödinger’s cat. Yet, the thought process of an average human would assume that the cat is probably dead—the keyword here being “probably.” After all, experience would tell us that if we are near anything deadly and with prolonged exposure, the likelihood of death is high. Therein lies the problem of human reasoning; experience is merely one of many pieces of evidence, yet humans will jump to conclusions based solely on experience which may or may not even be sufficient in the context of whatever we may be reasoning with.
I just made a statement there, which is that humans tend to jump to conclusions based on experience. It is a very blanket statement, and it is, ironically, also a conclusion drawn from experience. Am I wrong? Am I correct? Whatever you may answer to those questions do not actually matter, as long as I see myself as correct. You might claim opposition, stating that not all humans would do so, and maybe even give a good amount of evidence as to why you would claim such a thing. Even then, I, as a human, would probably reject your claim, as it is against my belief and therefore “wrong.”
There is a strong tendency among people to be right. Nobody likes to be wrong. After all, being wrong ellicits a negative feeling, and anything that draws negative feelings is bad and should be avoided—much like how touching a hot object brings pain and thus sets in our minds that hot objects should be avoided. This obsession for correctness is a large obstacle in objective reasoning, as it confines us to one perspective and locks away any other contrary perspectives, creating a very close-minded way of thinking. Is this to say that we, as humans, are inherently close-minded?
Let’s address the matter of jumping to conclusions. Humans are creatures that like to follow the path of least resistance, and this includes the path we take in our reasoning. The moment we acquire one piece of evidence—whether it be experience or a single sighting from an article—and this evidence corroborates whatever view we take on whatever we are reasoning with, we then tend to stand with that view. Would one consider this a lazy way of thinking, even if it is the way humans tend to think? If so, does that then make humans inherently lazy? Well, lazy is a strong word that holds a negative connotation. It simply means that humans like to use as little effort as possible to achieve their goals.
If humans are close-minded and lazy when it comes to thinking, does that not create a lot of room to be wrong? What does it mean then to be wrong? Who holds authority to claim whether something is right or wrong? Sure, something may have a million pieces of evidence to prove the correctness of that thing, but even then, how can we say that it is right? I let an apple fall, and this is caused by gravity. Many other things fall, and presumably this is also caused by gravity. Therefore, gravity exists everywhere. There are also tons more laws and theories covered in the field of physics, and they look a lot like the aforementioned statements. Can anyone really dispute them if they’ve proven to be right for so long?
The concept of rights and wrongs fall more on a philosophical realm. What reasoning entails is more in the field of logic. If something is “right,” it is because someone believes it is right. If something is a fact, it is merely something that is “right” to a very large percentage of people, which is no different to what we perceive as common sense. Anything is wrong so long as we believe it is not right. What matters then isn’t our ability to do objective reasoning, but rather, our ability to convince people.
Exegesis 