Challenge to the Improvers of Reason

I, like you, inhabit this lonely planet during the brief interlude of rational animal existence, exercising my reason with a Homo sapiens body, residing in a modern nation, conversing in a written alphabetic language. I have framed my thoughts using pencil and pen, manual and electric typewriters, and a parade of quickly obsolescent word processors, and now I waft upon a cloud of internet connectivity as my body begins to wear out and my memory declines. Like you, I have been barraged by the assassins of reason, declaiming how my thought is limited by my species being and historical milieu, while others dangle artificial intelligence, cyborg enhancement, future evolution, genetic engineering, or encounter with more powerful extraterrestrial minds as offering escape from the enfeeblement of my conditioned rationality.

I cannot deny that my thinking depends upon contingent astrophysical conditions that allow for the evolution of intelligent life, upon a certain level of physical and psychological health, upon due upbringing in a culture within which language has developed, and upon sufficient peace and affluence to have leisure to speculate. Nonetheless, I am certain that my reason cannot be improved upon. No life-form, whether it arises in galaxies far, far away or emerges on earth through future evolution or genetic engineering, can possibly be more capable of thinking the truth. Nor can any machine or cyborg augmentation increase my ability to reason, nor can acquisition of a different language or cultural upbringing supply me with an improved rationality. Not even any divinity could surpass the prowess of my reasoning.

Why is my reason, and yours, so powerful that no matter how much it rests upon enabling conditions, it cannot be subject to any modification that would bring us closer to the truth?

It is easy to deflect the assault on reason that points to thought's enabling conditions and claims that they block our access to truth by rendering reason relative to what grounds its exercise. Whether these conditions are identified as the contingent inorganic properties of our earthly abode, the particular biology that natural evolution has produced, or the linguistic conventions, mores, and power relations fostered by history, the problem is the same.