Project Vision 21

About 2300 years ago. the Greek philosopher Aristotle taught that to determine if something was real, three elements were needed: that our senses were functioning properly, that there were no external disturbances or obstacles restricting our senses, and that other people had the same perceptions in the same place and context.
 

Then, back in the 15th century. Nicholas Copernicus proposed that the Earth (and the other planets known at that time) revolved around the sun, or, more specifically, a point close to the sun. But for many people it was difficult to accept heliocentrism due to a great obstacle: Aristotle.
 

After all, if our senses are working properly and it is a clear day, we can see the sun rise in the east and set in the west. Furthermore, every other person in similar circumstances can see the same thing. Therefore, following Aristotle, the only possible conclusion was that Copernicus was wrong.
 

But what the Copernican revolution taught us was not to stop trusting Aristotle, but to stop trusting our senses. In other words, what previously seemed like a guarantee of reality (“seeing is believing”) was no longer so. And there was something else: if Aristotle, the great Greek philosopher highly esteemed during the Middle Ages, was wrong, who else was?
 

Back in 1517, the German monk Martin Luther offered his own answer to that question: everyone. The so-called Protestant Reformation, with Luther as its highest expression, did not only mean changing one doctrine for another, but also leaving aside 15 centuries of religious tradition. In other words, tradition was no longer seen  as a repository of truth and wisdom.
 

Now, if we can no longer trust our senses or tradition, then what can we trust? Oversimplifying, it could be said that, following Luther, each of us can only trust in ourselves (“salvation” is individual) and in our capacity for reasoning.
But back in the 17th century, Descartes, with his methodical doubt, cast doubt on all our knowledge. And in the 19th century and part of the 20th century, Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, each in their own way, taught us to be suspicious of rationality and of the (supposed) truth of modernity, as Paul Ricoeur explained in 1965.
 

As if all of this were not already enough for our entire understanding of reality and ourselves to collapse, Darwin set in motion the process of dethroning the human being from the pinnacle of creation, and 20th century astronomy removed us from the center of the universe by accepting that the Milky Way is just another galaxy, not the entire universe, as it was thought a century ago.
 

And now AI is rapidly becoming yet another threat to us. 
 

So, is there any solid foundation left? No.  But that does not mean falling into a trivial nihilism, but rather the current situation should be seen an invitation to develop a new (quantum) narrative, understood as a shared history of transmissible and meaningful experiences. Why? Because narrative elevates us above disorientation and superficiality.