...or why arguments are always with mind viruses.
We perceive, translate and experience, a fraction of the sensory information that is currently extant in our temporal domain, yet we confuse this semi-fictive fraction with Universe. ‘The map is not the territory’. Cultural paradigms, most typically those concerned with taboo, tend to become ossified, fossilised as dogma, particularly in the minds of those that need to cling desperately to ‘truth’ for security, a truth which can only ever be their own, or that of their local group or time. These notions of ‘truth’ are often blatant falsitudes, but their mental potency self-sustains, often contrary to rational refutation. Such semantics trap us, bound static to outmoded ontologies, and although often harmless, some of these gremlins grow into brutal mythological beasts that cannot be readily slain.
Amalgamations of words, in the form of ideas (memes?), can behave autonomously; insidiously, masquerading as ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, when they are merely a notional ripple in the paradigmatic tide of a noos-spacial sea; a local experiment in the evaluation of Reality. Although knowledge of a model or idea becomes more sophisticated and complete with time (ideally more congruent with the thing in itself), philosophical, scientific and political ideas should not be intended (or accepted) to demonstrate absolute veracity (as some of the most notorious indubitably are), but to elucidate and explore, plausible, useful postulates, ones that can be tested and criticised (at the least enjoyed) by the dialectical exchange of history.
Reality - absolute, unknowable, ineffable - is denigrated on its journey through the prismatic vector of the perceptor, be it that of an individual or a collective. The course of this process manifests apprehension and prejudice, not intentionally, but inevitably. Reality-tunnels auto-constitute, every experience that can be construed confirmational, reinforces, and all evidence that is refutational, or cannot be reconfigured into confirmation, is partitioned off through displacement. Unfortunately, many of these perceptional journeys end in the extreme realm of personal certitude, belief, or other pathologies.
When absolute certitudes of any kind, limit the exploration of potentiality, the evolution of knowledge is inhibited. It is interesting that we tend to define reality on the basis of our ability to 'see' i .e. that which we can observe and measure, capture and dismantle, and our relationship with the sense of scale which this provides. The need to categorise, compartmentalise and reduce, can lead experimentalists too close to their subject, occluding them from the greater wholistic system, one that is often tangibly greater than the sum of its parts. In science, a 'truth' is validated by an accumulation of repeatable experimental results, results that confirm and substantiate the experimental hypothesis, but scientific ‘truth’ can only ever exist as a high probability of 'truth'; a best fit model. A hypothesis can never be proven absolutely 'true', even though it only describes itself in its own vanity, but it can be proven 'untrue', if it fails to account for even the subtlest behaviour of that which it claims to define. Many 'truths' and scientific models are demonstrably useful, in that they are functional, even when approximate (that our mental architectures and civilisations have been built upon such things is testament to that), but they are never ‘true’.
Curiously DADA, it seems that Reality seems to resist our anachronistic attempts to reduce it into symbolic order. The continuum of our perception is rarefying, but as universe stuff is examined to the limits of the looking glass, it ceases to be what we expect, confounding and confusing our very attempts to define it.
(to be extended)
Breathe Easy
We perceive, translate and experience, a fraction of the sensory information that is currently extant in our temporal domain, yet we confuse this semi-fictive fraction with Universe. ‘The map is not the territory’. Cultural paradigms, most typically those concerned with taboo, tend to become ossified, fossilised as dogma, particularly in the minds of those that need to cling desperately to ‘truth’ for security, a truth which can only ever be their own, or that of their local group or time. These notions of ‘truth’ are often blatant falsitudes, but their mental potency self-sustains, often contrary to rational refutation. Such semantics trap us, bound static to outmoded ontologies, and although often harmless, some of these gremlins grow into brutal mythological beasts that cannot be readily slain.
Amalgamations of words, in the form of ideas (memes?), can behave autonomously; insidiously, masquerading as ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, when they are merely a notional ripple in the paradigmatic tide of a noos-spacial sea; a local experiment in the evaluation of Reality. Although knowledge of a model or idea becomes more sophisticated and complete with time (ideally more congruent with the thing in itself), philosophical, scientific and political ideas should not be intended (or accepted) to demonstrate absolute veracity (as some of the most notorious indubitably are), but to elucidate and explore, plausible, useful postulates, ones that can be tested and criticised (at the least enjoyed) by the dialectical exchange of history.
Reality - absolute, unknowable, ineffable - is denigrated on its journey through the prismatic vector of the perceptor, be it that of an individual or a collective. The course of this process manifests apprehension and prejudice, not intentionally, but inevitably. Reality-tunnels auto-constitute, every experience that can be construed confirmational, reinforces, and all evidence that is refutational, or cannot be reconfigured into confirmation, is partitioned off through displacement. Unfortunately, many of these perceptional journeys end in the extreme realm of personal certitude, belief, or other pathologies.
When absolute certitudes of any kind, limit the exploration of potentiality, the evolution of knowledge is inhibited. It is interesting that we tend to define reality on the basis of our ability to 'see' i .e. that which we can observe and measure, capture and dismantle, and our relationship with the sense of scale which this provides. The need to categorise, compartmentalise and reduce, can lead experimentalists too close to their subject, occluding them from the greater wholistic system, one that is often tangibly greater than the sum of its parts. In science, a 'truth' is validated by an accumulation of repeatable experimental results, results that confirm and substantiate the experimental hypothesis, but scientific ‘truth’ can only ever exist as a high probability of 'truth'; a best fit model. A hypothesis can never be proven absolutely 'true', even though it only describes itself in its own vanity, but it can be proven 'untrue', if it fails to account for even the subtlest behaviour of that which it claims to define. Many 'truths' and scientific models are demonstrably useful, in that they are functional, even when approximate (that our mental architectures and civilisations have been built upon such things is testament to that), but they are never ‘true’.
Curiously DADA, it seems that Reality seems to resist our anachronistic attempts to reduce it into symbolic order. The continuum of our perception is rarefying, but as universe stuff is examined to the limits of the looking glass, it ceases to be what we expect, confounding and confusing our very attempts to define it.
(to be extended)
Breathe Easy
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