You're describing something real: the return to local knowledge, trusted relationships, and revelation as the basis for knowing. Most people writing about the epistemological crisis are trying to fix the internet. You're asking whether the internet was ever the right tool for knowing in the first place.
The tradition I work from has maintained the architecture you're reaching for. It distinguishes kabbala (received knowledge through a chain of transmission - you know X because your teacher taught you, and their teacher taught them) from sevara (reasoned argument - you know X because Y and Z imply it). Each has different rules. A broken chain invalidates kabbala. Bad logic invalidates sevara. And every claim is marked so the reader knows which kind of knowledge is being invoked. AI generates a third thing: synthetic testimony. It has no chain of transmission and no logical derivation. It has pattern completion that mimics both. The crisis isn't that AI can lie. It's that AI produces claims in the form of knowledge without any of the mechanisms that make knowledge claims examinable. The architecture for marking the source type exists. It's three thousand years old.
It seems like you are establishing a link between skepticism, a recognition of the limits of our reason, to faith, as a way out of an abyss of confusion and ignorance. I believe this recommendation was also made by a French essayist Montaigne.
Yes, something like that. To be clear, I do think reason works and can be a reliable source of truth. It's powerful, but it also has limits, and sometimes we need Divine assistance even for our natural faculty of reason to work properly (partly because of original sin). I also think that our reason is more reliable when it's operating off of direct contact with tangible reality and books, rather than the intangible digital world.
You're describing something real: the return to local knowledge, trusted relationships, and revelation as the basis for knowing. Most people writing about the epistemological crisis are trying to fix the internet. You're asking whether the internet was ever the right tool for knowing in the first place.
The tradition I work from has maintained the architecture you're reaching for. It distinguishes kabbala (received knowledge through a chain of transmission - you know X because your teacher taught you, and their teacher taught them) from sevara (reasoned argument - you know X because Y and Z imply it). Each has different rules. A broken chain invalidates kabbala. Bad logic invalidates sevara. And every claim is marked so the reader knows which kind of knowledge is being invoked. AI generates a third thing: synthetic testimony. It has no chain of transmission and no logical derivation. It has pattern completion that mimics both. The crisis isn't that AI can lie. It's that AI produces claims in the form of knowledge without any of the mechanisms that make knowledge claims examinable. The architecture for marking the source type exists. It's three thousand years old.
It seems like you are establishing a link between skepticism, a recognition of the limits of our reason, to faith, as a way out of an abyss of confusion and ignorance. I believe this recommendation was also made by a French essayist Montaigne.
Yes, something like that. To be clear, I do think reason works and can be a reliable source of truth. It's powerful, but it also has limits, and sometimes we need Divine assistance even for our natural faculty of reason to work properly (partly because of original sin). I also think that our reason is more reliable when it's operating off of direct contact with tangible reality and books, rather than the intangible digital world.