(no subject)

[anotherusedpage]

neonchameleon; I saw this and thought of you. Or rather our ongoing discussion on the nature of reality.

Neil Gaiman puts it better than I ever could (as usual).



"I can believe things that are true and I can believe things that aren't true and I can believe things where nobody knows if they're true or not. I can believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny and Marilyn Monroe and the Beatles and Elvis and Mister Ed. Listen - I believe that people are perfectible, that knowledge is infinite, that the world is run by secret banking cartels and is visited by aliens on a regular basis, nice ones that look like wrinkledy lemurs and bad ones who mutilate cattle and want our water and our women. I believe that the future sucks and I believe that the future rocks and I believe that one day White Buffalo Woman is going to come back and kick everyone's ass. I believe that all men are just overgrown boys with deep problems communicating and that the decline in good sex in America is coincident with the decline in drive-in movie theaters from state to state. I believe that all politicians are unprincipled crooks and I still believe that they are better than the alternative. I believe that California is going to sink into the sea when the big one comes, while Florida is going to dissolve into madness and alligators and toxic waste. I believe that antibacterial soap is destroying our resistance to dirt and disease so that one day we'll all be wiped out by the common cold like the Martians in War of the Worlds. I believe that the greatest poets of the last century were Edith Sitwell and Don Marquis, that jade is dried dragon sperm, and that thousands of years ago in a former life I was a one-armed Siberian shaman. I believe that mankind's destiny lies in the stars. I believe that candy really did taste better when I was a kid, that it's aerodynamically impossible for a bumblebee to fly, that light is a wave and a particle, that there's a cat in a box somewhere who's alive and dead at the same time (although if they don't ever open the box to feed it it'll eventually just be two different kinds of dead), and that there are stars in the universe billions of years older than the universe itself. I believe in a personal god who cares about me and worries and oversees everything I do. I believe in an impersonal god who set the universe in motion and went off to hang with her girlfriends and doesn't even know that I'm alive. I believe in an empty and godless universe of causal chaos, background noise, and sheer blind luck. I believe that anyone who says that sex is overrated just hasn't done it properly. I believe that anyone who claims to know what's going on will lie about the little things too. I believe in absolute honesty and sensible social lies. I believe in a woman's right to choose, a baby's right to live, that while all human life is sacred there's nothing wrong with the death penalty if you can trust the legal system implicitly, and that no one but a moron would ever trust the legal system. I believe that life is a game, that life is a cruel joke, and that life is what happens when you're alive and that you might as well lie back and enjoy it." - Sam, American Gods



I don't agree with every statement, but the gist of it is my impression of the way the universe works.

Comments

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

And you knew it :P

O:-)

I think that being caught within one way of thinking doesn't lead to progress, or at least only to contained progress.

Agreed- but failing to use the most relevant, accurate and precise tool you have available is also bad.

Again I go back to the crystal spheres analogy.

The Crystal Spheres were the best tools the users had available- and were overturned when something else was shown to be better. Your point?

Again, I find this difficult to express, because I know it looks like inconsistancy, but... dammit, it's consistant inconsistancy.

I'd have said you have a hierarchy there.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

The crystal spheres were believed in long after they were known to be inaccurate and unuseful, because they were more in line with the safe and accepted way of viewing the universe. Which of our fundamental ideas are blocking progress in this way? You can tell me that if a theory was found to be inaccurate, it would be discared, but there are countless examples of this not occuring. Again, my mind slips back to the feminist anthropology - it's more conveniant for our society to prevelate the man-the-hunter myth, because it is in line with the gender stereotypes which society wants to perpetuate.

And that one is visible - who knows where the invisible flaws in our logic are? We won't know until they are overturned.

I'd have said you have a hierarchy there.

hierarchy?

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

We won't know until they are overturned.

So keep checking the details both against each other and against external evidence that will not be affected by your theories.

hierarchy

Things that I believe and will get annoyed when someone else doesn't. Things I believe and will argue with someone about. Things I believe but don't care enough about to argue about. Things I don't believe.

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

and against external evidence that will not be affected by your theories.

a) your view of external evidence will be coloured by your theories.

b) I personally don't trust external evidence to actually exist, certainly not in the format I experience it. Consensus reality and all that jazz.

[neonchameleon.livejournal.com]

a) your view of external evidence will be coloured by your theories.

Which is why you need to quantify things and try to be honest. Just because vaccination isn't 100% effective doesn't mean that it isn't highly useful.

b) I personally don't trust external evidence to actually exist, certainly not in the format I experience it.

Again, in Science you quantify. Qualitative evidence is certainly subjective...

Consensus reality

If reality was pure consensus, the theories wouldn't be refined in ways the original proponents would have thought crazy half so often.

P.S. I think there are still a couple of outstanding threads (including one between you and Kat) in my LJ...

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I mean one's view of external evidence, not yours personally.