I wouldn’t be surprised either, for radical combative skepticism is indeed serviceable to certain hidden agendas. I think there is a further dark side to it too, but one the skeptics are probably not conscious of in any depth. This comes from their allying themselves rigidly with the presuppositions of modern materialist science, presuppositions that have diminished the mental landscape of a majority of people in the West. The reductive materialist paradigm has approached the world as an object, to be measured and understood exclusively in objective and increasingly mathematical terms. If describing nature could have been accomplished without the participation of subjectively conscious practitioners, all the better from the materialist viewpoint. For information available directly to consciousness in its embodied relationship with -- its expression of -- nature is suspect, and has long been ruled out as significant for science. Thus consciousness is only now beginning to be considered a subject of necessary investigation by the hard sciences, and this would not have happened if computer science and AI had not found themselves confronting the complexity of consciousness and mind in their attempts to duplicate them.
I am not saying that scepticism isn't a necessary tool for scientists and nonscientists, but in our time it's often been used presuppositionally and dogmatically to close off other paths of thinking and theorizing the nature of reality that are based in human experience.
I am not saying that scepticism isn't a necessary tool for scientists and nonscientists, but in our time it's often been used presuppositionally and dogmatically to close off other paths of thinking and theorizing the nature of reality that are based in human experience.
