Title: The Split in Human Cognition

Abstract

Human cognition is not a continuous, transparent, or honest system. On the contrary, humans frequently maintain mutually conflicting principles within the same civilizational discourse: on the one hand, they proclaim that "seeing is believing," that "practice is the criterion of truth," and that "facts must be respected"; on the other hand, when certain phenomena impact established theories, institutional interests, or world-view security, they downgrade facts that have already been observed, recorded, and repeatedly manifested into objects that "should not be discussed," "cannot be discussed," or "are not worth studying." This paper terms this structure "the split in human cognition." This paper argues that the core problem of modern science is not that it contains unknowns, but that it often divides the unknown into two categories: one category is allowed to be researched, funded, and established as disciplines; the other category, because it threatens the existing paradigm, is labeled as "superstition," "pseudoscience," "conspiracy theory," or "not serious," and is excluded from the scientific community. UFO/UAP, placebo and nocebo effects, near-death experiences, the problem of consciousness, anomalous experiments, folk empirical medicine, psycho-physiological coupling phenomena, replication crises, dark matter and dark energy, the interpretive splits in quantum measurement, and many other areas all reveal the existence of numerous cognitive fissures within the human knowledge system. This paper does not claim that all anomalous phenomena are real, nor that folk explanations are naturally superior to scientific explanations. Its core claim is that a phenomenon may be doubted, tested, and falsified, but should not be prohibited from entering serious discussion merely because it does not fit existing theories. If science only accepts facts that its theories allow it to see, while refusing facts that its theories cannot accommodate, it ceases to be an open truth-seeking method and partially degenerates into a dogmatic system that maintains paradigm security. Finally, this paper proposes a "Cognitive Split Checklist" and a "Falsification Table" to determine whether the paper itself holds. If it can be proven that the scientific community does not systematically exclude anomalous phenomena, or that all excluded phenomena lack any stable evidence, or that theoretical frameworks have the a priori right to determine which facts may be acknowledged, then the core propositions of this paper will be weakened or falsified.