Tumbleweed

The world is a cloudy place, populated by liars, true believers, and those who try to generalize their own truths to everyone else.  Dropped unceremoniously into such a place, deceived for your first decade and disillusioned through all that follow it, pretty much the only thing you can know for certain is that there are no simple and obvious truths to be found; that the world is a maze which the human mind turns into straight lines for the sake of being sane.  Seen like this, one could almost think the game is rigged from the start; if the search for truth must inevitably 1) lead to madness, and 2) fail, why bother trying to know anything at all?  Why not just cling to the first world view you're given and shut out anyone and anything that challenges it?  How else is a world of seven billion conscious perspectives to be survived?

To begin with, an assumption must be made; logic is the internally consistent derivation of facts from beliefs, and so for anything to be accepted as an element of the rational world some initial faith is required.  Unless one's argument is to be tolerated as circular(not so outlandish, but inappropriate for current purposes), a basis for truth must first be accepted; since everything will rest on the validity of this assumption, it should be as general and vague as possible.  The best such foundation I've been able to determine is that there is a truth to be known; a reality external, or at least in addition, to my own mind.  This might seem an obvious prerequisite to any effort at contemplation whatsoever, but philosophers are a finicky lot, so it's good to be explicit with such details.

The next, and significantly harder, step is characterizing this assumed truth as inherently unknowable; accepting, for all practical purposes, that nothing you can ever know will be capital-T True.  As an independent fact, such a perspective can be justified easily enough for humans by citing our own inherent limitations.  Through the application of scientific methods to the natural world, we've already been able to discover a vast majority of reality of which we are necessarily oblivious; the outer edges of research and theory propose that once-concrete particles of matter may in fact traverse apparent distance instantaneously; further, to justify the consistency of our analytic methods and standing assumptions, astrophysicists have been reduced to describing most of the known universe as mysterious and invisible "dark matter," a gargantuan assumption in its own right.

(As a brief aside, and again in concession to my own philosophical idiosyncrasies, I will point out that one may use the assumption of extant facts to describe a perspective that does not; acting on a belief and holding said belief, in this case that of human limitations, are not necessarily mutually inclusive behaviors.)

Still, even without the mental and physical limitations of humanity being a factor, it would nevertheless be advisable for any consciousness that wasn't already omniscient to maintain a reasonable skepticism toward everything it already knew.  If there is to be such a thing as a single Truth which describes the whole of creation, it necessarily follows that any perspective which pretended to do so with anything less than all the facts would be a falsehood; for a fact to apply to a single particle of matter in the universe, it must be consistent with every other law of said universe.  Thus, while theories may be adopted as provisional truths for the sake of continued discovery & contemplation, they can only continue to evolve if they are held but lightly.

Such is my best justification for perpetual failure, but what of madness?  How is a consciousness so very sensitive to cognitive dissonance, to the shaking of mental and emotional foundations, to tolerate the repeated discovery of its lacking?  I admit, this is a problem to which I've not yet found an enduring solution; the best I can offer by way of consolation to the harried mind botanical in nature: that a plant of shallow root structure is the first loosed by erosion, but also transplants much more readily.