Epistemology is a central part of philosophy. It not only influences philosophical and scientific thinking, but also has a formative effect on the general worldview. However, there are countless directions and just as many of them, only a few of which manage to reach the light of day, and often the most successful are those that best match the spirit of the times.

I'm trying to develop my own approach here, which has some similarities to others, but is not identical to them.

The initial question is: What can we recognize and how do we do it? Undoubtedly, we do not perceive the world as a camera obscura, but rather we transform reality into a sensory neural reality.

Let's take a virtual meta perspective for a moment and pretend that we are something similar to God. Then we see a world that turns into a second world. World 1 is the world that exists independently of humans, World 2 is the anthropic world. World 2 is a different, separate world for every living creature. If a neutrino could sense, there would also be a neutrino world.

For us humans, however, only World 2 exists; a World 1, which Kant would call a thing in itself, does not exist for us. Therefore, there is no objective truth that we can know that can be located in World 1. There is an epistemological boundary between World 1 and World 2 that is insurmountable because we have no code for our mental transformation with which to infer World 1.

All our philosophical concepts, knowledge, rationality, reason, but also all sciences, including mathematics, refer exclusively to World 2. Although World 1 does not exist for us, our anthropic World 2 is of course based on it, not as an image, but as a specific one Transformation. How a computer converts a numerical code made up of 0s and 1s into an executable program that can be used to draw pictures. The logic of World 1 is thus translated into a logic of World 2. Every species and - if this were possible - every inanimate particle has its own world 2.

This means that there is a connection between World 1 and World 2, even if World 1 does not exist for us. Non-existence refers primarily to knowledge.

Since our world 2 only exists for us and is relative, I call this view anthropic relativism.

If we delete World 1 from our world view, since it doesn't exist for us anyway, World 2 appears to us as the one world we need to know.

From this point of view, this idea resembles instrumentalism combined with constructivism. Both assume that the world is not absolutely knowable, but that we can achieve an ever better approximation to the truth through our epistemologies and technologies, although truth can also be understood in a relativistic way.

Instrumentalism, for example, argues that epistemologies do not serve to describe the world in its absolute truth, but to make it comprehensible and manageable for us. Epistemologies are therefore to be understood as tools that we can use to understand and shape our environment. This position was mainly held by Pierre Duhem.

Constructivism argues that we do not passively perceive the world, but actively construct it. Our epistemologies are therefore not simply representations of the world, but they determine how we perceive and understand the world. These ideas can also be found in the works of Jean Piaget.

Both instrumentalism and constructivism are forms of relative realism. They assume that the world does exist, but that we can only know it insofar as we imagine it.

This view is also held by many scientists.

The difference between both theories of science and my approach is a metaphysical gap that cannot be filled in either. In both, the unknowability of an objective truth lies in a lack, whereas I justify the unknowability of a world 1 (which exists only from the point of view of a virtual meta-perspective) in a transformation whose code we do not know. The metaphysical gap is in tautology, what we cannot know, we cannot know. A reason is not given or lies in itself. This gap can only be closed by providing a reason, i.e. by introducing a third logical element, in the form of a quasi-reality.

Hypothetical realism, as it exists in the context of evolutionary epistemology and is advocated by Gehard Vollmer, for example, is closer here. According to this, reality has a structure according to which causal relations (cause-and-effect relationships) exist objectively and can be partially recognized.

However, the question also remains why reality can only be partially recognized. The gap remains.

In my approach, there is no such thing as objective reality — unless it exists only from a meta-perspective, only by means of an auxiliary construction. Reality exists only as World 2, i.e. as a transformed reality, , as a neural transformat.

Although we transform objects and relations into our world, we do not know whether they will be linearly and completely transformed.


Transformation and retransformation
The main difference, however, is that we not only transform World 1 into World 2, but also conversely change world 1 through our actions, even though it does not exist (for us). This retransformation is purely material and has no epistemological consequences. Consequences of our actions exist (for us) only in World 2. What impact it will have on World 1, we will never know.

So the big transformer is our sensory and neural system. It is not really a system of realization, but a system of arousal. When we speak of realization in the philosophical sense, we really mean the logical and operational adaptation of our organism to an environment that presents itself to us as World 2.

The transformation of the logic of World 1 results in our logic of World 2 and thus also that of mathematics. In this respect, mathematics indirectly represents a logic inherent in World 1. It therefore follows a phenomenal logic whose ontology we do not know.

Epistemologically, we move on a surface whose “depth” we do not know, cannot know and do not have to know.

And which philosophical school does this anthropic relativism belong to? There can be no doubt about the materialism of World 2, because it shows itself exclusively as a material world, without any metaphysical media being assumed. Since there is no World 1 for us, there is no reason for such speculation.

As a consequence of this anthropic relativism it follows that the world is relativistic, not just our World 2 itself, but this world can be divided into different worlds, as is true for different species. Accordingly, there is no universal morality and ethics, but each culture has the right to its own identity.

Excluding all metaphysical and transcendental ideas means focusing on this one world of ours and ensuring that it is preserved.

The dilemma with epistemology is the concept of epistemology itself, because it suggests that there is a cognition machine in our head that is capable of knowing the world, and that in a transcendent sense.

In reality, in our head there is a kilo and a half of flesh and blood interspersed with nerve cells. These have developed over the course of millions of years as a result of the influence of the environment and in confrontation with it and serve as orientation in the world.

The fact that this nervous tissue has reached a level of complexity that allows us to think about transcendent things with the help of language is not synonymous with a knowledge in this regard.

The concept of cognition, which, by the way, is a metatheoretical one here, omits the fact that the world in our head or our organism receives a neuronal modality by means of our nerves, i.e. is neuronally instantiated from the outset.

Thus, the world that exists independently of us does not exist for us as such. It exists only as an abstract reality that we transform into a concrete world through our sensors.

This metatheoretical concept of knowledge is all too often confused with a scientific, technical or everyday concept, which is about establishing rules that are conducive to the direct confrontation with the world.

This also gives rise to the idea that one can gain transcendent knowledge with the help of science. Epistemology, however, is pure interpretation and is based only on findings from science and everyday life, but is not identical with them.

This interpretation has been made by man in his own way in every epoch. Plato, Aristotle, Kant or Hegel interpreted the world as they were able to interpret it in their time.
Neural instantiation not only brings with it a limit of knowledge for humans, but also for each individual. This is the reason why the individual cannot experience his neighbor in it. He can only observe it from the outside. And each individual spans his or her own, species-specific space-time. Space is created as a multidimensional space by fanning out by means of a highly complex neuronal structure, time is created by the organismic rhythm, especially by the heartbeat and, of course, triggered by environmental rhythms.
This results in the relativity not only of individuals among themselves, but also of cultures and their political actions.