[musage]

> If we collectively decide we can't trust our own individual senses, what do you think happens to our chances for survival?

What does "collectively" trusting our "individual" senses even mean? Anyway,

> The modern astrophysical world view, which began with Galileo, and its challenge to the adequacy of the senses to reveal reality, have left us a universe of whose qualities we know no more than the way they affect our measuring instruments, and — in the words of Eddington — "the former have as much resemblance to the latter as a telephone number has to a subscriber." Instead of objective qualities, in other words, we find instruments, and instead of nature or the universe — in the words of Heisenberg — man encounters only himself.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Vita Activa"

Before you brush someone like Heisenberg aside, read him first. Everything you wrote before that last rhetoric question is perfectly technically true, and yet also perfectly orthogonal to Heisenberg et al. "having a point".

Even the idea of "objective" truth that everybody ought to accept is so new, that in regardless whether you consider humankind to be 100 000 or 10 000 years old, it's nothing. We survived perfectly fine without it. So unless you're claiming that going forward that would change, I don't even understand the question.

We can't "collectively" trust our senses because collectively we can't do or think or be anything. That's an abstraction, not a real thinking entity. It's an idea that damages, not one that is useful. The actually existing entities have to continue the hard work with communicating and sussing it out as individuals, instead of fleeing into abstractions from moral responsibilities, from the things that cannot easily be measured or counted or voted on.

How often do you hear the excuse that action X is permitted because the "world" (as if the person they are speaking to is not a part of the world) "changed" (it's always passive voice) in way Y? As if to say "I didn't make the rules"... this will continue to lead us to ever darker places. Dehumanizing others is one thing, but we're already at the point of people gladly dehumanizing themselves. It's not more objective, it's not more rational, it's more cowardly, as it just excludes* parts of the human experience that are hard to deal with and agree on.

> From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.*

> As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth.

-- Hannah Arendt, "Men in Dark Times"