KNOWLEDGE MUSINGS

While knowledge is a recorded memory of something we have learned, epistemology is the examination of the nature and validity of knowledge itself (not just of what we know).
Most of what we believe has been said before.
The door with the sign “Knowledge Conundrum” doesn’t open .
Behind the door is the answer.
Would we understand the revealed answer?
To what?
Is that the conundrum?
It has always been.
The mere perception of something is not yet epistemic (validated by epistemology’s evaluation of knowledge’s itself).
That may be why Buddha, Confucius, Socrates and Jesus (and all those who remained and remain unknown) never wrote anything for posterity.
Then, why did they teach?
Did they want to reveal the path or the goal, and: not both?.
The remainder would then enlighten the searcher through personal effort.
The mystery is more powerful than the unknown we may seek.
Opening Pandora’s vase was first forbidden to us mortals.
Pandora opened it before she and we could understand.
Therefore hidden knowledge emerged as contaminated evil.
Only hope was left inside.

Eve plucked a fruit from the forbidden “tree of knowledge”, before she could understand.
Thus dark (not enlightened) opinions brought discord and destruction.
We need faith and reason together. Reason must first learn to believe; and faith needs to reason.
Alone, faith or reason are faulty.
When we believe in something together, we can progress together in harmony, not against each other.
But whereto?
When we “know” something, we may end up arguing and struggling,
ultimately against each other.
It mostly starts with philosophizing.
Philosophy is articulated love and search of knowledge and truth.
Philosophy education needs history, not just descriptions, which often tends to be merely opinions.
Recorded Greek and Western philosophy started with Thales of Miletus' (625?-547? B.C.).
He taught that everything came from water.
Fascinating enough to opine that he had the cosmologic answers.
But then came Anaximander (ca. 610-547 b. c.), of the same Greek Miletus school, developer of the “Apeiron” concept, as a sophisticated initial combination of thermal, material, atmospheric , quasi energy, time, and astronomic factors.
This converts the belief in Thales' philosophy into Anaximander's…
That began a continuous series of “final theories" in which the last theory generally prevails against the previous.
Thus new philosophers kept coming up, and successively overriding each other for thousands of years until now, and will go on.
Once accustomed to these continuous conversions from one conviction to the subsequent, we become reluctant to accept any idea or doctrine as final.
We learn that everything changes ("panta reis"), even change itself (which is one of our present problems).
The opposite happens with religions, which normally purport to give us an “eternal truth”, because the god we like to believe in gives us the answers that settle everything once and for ever within our mental reach.
We expect no less from a god.
Then, people get confused.
They expect a philosophy (or its equivalent in sociology, politics, psychology, economics, pedagogy, epistemology, cybernetics, morality, civilization and so on) to be as reliably permanent as an immutable religion.
People fight, die, kill, destroy entire populations and nations for it.
Also if “Love” is "it".
This proves by itself that what we believe may be not worth unshakeable faith, now or ever.
We forget that philosophy itself faces a continuous flow of changes.
Reason is expected to create philosophy and all theories.
Yet reason itself wants to dwell and remain on the chosen system, and makes a religion out of it, even if it doesn’t intend to.
The French Revolution (ca.1789-179.9.. a. d..) tried to substitute religion with “Goddess Reason”, and failed miserably.
That didn't help religion either.
Take democracy, socialism and Islamism (=politicized Islam).
They are handled by their believers like religions
worth dying and killing for.
(Cynics and many others say that religions can use “love” as a pretext to satisfy our craving for killing, oppressing and destroying).
And dying and killing goes on unabated, still now.
If we have any wisdom left (what is happening to it?), we just relegate it to the roles of merely intellectual disputes searching for a solution that will create more disputes.
Without end.
About 200 years ago, Hegel (1770-1831 a. d.) described historical cycles as consisting of “thesis, antithesis, and synthesis”. Thesis proposed, antithesis countered as a balancing opposition, and synthesis is the resulting combination of thesis plus antithesis.
Later, the synthesis would become the thesis of a new cycle, and so on.
The average man doesn’t have the intellectual and moral strength or interest for it.
Knowledge and Truth may be such that only a sufficiently refined elite could understand them.
That is a virtually dogmatic taboo in a democratic society.
Pythagoras (ca. 580-500 B.C.) created a school ln southern Italy, where his teachings (mainly about mathematics, geometry, and astronomy, with some unavoidable "magic") were protected by secrecy, to defend them from contaminating popularization.
Elitism,like Indian and other castes, were created to protect the knowledge and power of more knowledgeable people from others on lower educational and social levels.
Islam, India, China and other oriental societies believe that their authoritarian systems between democracy, socialism, capitalism and patriarchate are more reliable in principle.
Buddha introduced a behavioral system that educated the body and mind into a step-by-step fusion of life and cosmos which tended to reach a point where living and dying would make no difference.
Modern physics seems to reach toward that point with the second principle of thermodynamics, which indirectly suggests that the universe tends toward chaos.
The word "chaos" has a terrifying meaning, but the concept can be eminently relaxing and fascinating:
Accordingly, every physical process in the Universe happens with an irreversible loss of energy quanrum, defined as “entropy” , as said above.
This -properly understood- explains the tendency toward chaos: a sort of universal relaxing into a motionless zero that takes
God only knows how many thousands of years or centuries.
Buddha offers fascinating shortcuts.
Life is the opposite: it (de)composes order in the confusing opposite direction from chaos.
Simple, ain’t it?
But life is the infinitesimal exception in the lifeless universe.
Thus, atoms, rocks, stars and carcasses are more realistic than anything alive.
Since also life ends in chaos (death and beyond), one could state that life is normally an anti-normal normality.
Nonsense? Why must it make any "sense"?
Since we are only an anomaly in the universe, at least as long as we live, why worry about knowledge, virtue, good and evil, or life and death?
Because of reason.
Reason is so abnormal, that, in human psychological terms, it could induce humans to go to a rock for psychological tests or psychoanalytical therapy (humans see a difference between the two that rocks would not even consider).
Crazy? Not if we use the appropriate logical premises and logical/ill0g9cal consequences.
Logic was tried in the service of justice.
The trouble started with defining justice.
Its very definition was faulty, because no one has ever been able to show a consistent system of justice in practice, let alone as a concept.
Justice is like God: we falsely believe we can define or “deny” it.
We know, now, that we have neither knowledge, nor definable and logically enforceable justice, rights and laws.
Some self-confident experts (not philosophically, but in reality, in spite of their frequent humility and loftier learning) announce they can.
In practice, however, there are no “courts of “JUSTICE:”only “courts of LAW”.
Nor permanent rights and laws.
Therefore, we make laws to correct laws to correct laws to correct laws, UNTIL THEY SUBMERGE US.
And to correct democracy, and to correct dictatorship.
Anything man does needs corrections sooner or later. Including our Bill of Rights and the Constitution.
Religions have fallen into the same trap: update, fail, update…
New denominations of Christian and other religion, sprout virtually every month or week...
And we fight, go to war, kill and get killed for “justice”, “love” and more presumptuous rights and laws.
Whether we win or lose, the short- or long-range results are disastrous for all involved.
The tree of knowledge should have been left alone before an introductory evolution with the recognition that we cannot have it immediately, just because we want it NOW.
Back to square one?
We have no choice. But it is futile if we don’t re-learn from scratch.
We could go back to Plato’s (428-347 b. c.) academic style, deliberately remote from practice..., and a subsequent method of translating something into practice, only after finding and using a foolproof testing method.
That is where the wise and futile seem to meet in glorious insignificance. That is merely because we don’t pay attention to what deserves our focus.
For thousands of years, the unchallenged coexistence of the Chinese “Yin” (female -or male, if you prefer- or passive, evil, or wet, cold, dark...) and “Yang” (all Yin’s opposite attributes) seems to have offered an existentialistic or ontological formula to satisfy most intellectual and emotional tastes.
That coexistence may be harmonious or not, but it must be there.
The trouble was -and is- that it requires no priests, bureaucrats, pundits, politicians, monarchs, highfalutin authorities, temples, titles, no sin and virtue, reward and punishment with their hierarchies and impressive pomp.
Furthermore, as I have stated, sin in religion (and in law) is like the zero in mathematics: it makes its operations possible.
080214

We are so busy glorifying   our limited knowledge, that we have lost the awareness of how little we know.
We live in a universe whose size, shape, age, origin, composition, and other basic characteristics we don't know.
We don't know whether and where there are other forms of life outside of Earth. kkk
Some geologists swear our atmosphere's temperature tends to increase, others predict the return of the ice‑age.
I thought we are still trying to get out of the third ice age.
Just as we discovered that the Earth is not flat, we will soon debunk many of our present scientific certainties.
We have a superstitious conception of our ecology. We are more afraid than knowledgeable about it.
Worse yet, politicians and hippies are taking the subject over.
As we have no understanding which changes or species extinctions are evolutionary, we oppose all we are aware of and end up hindering evolution.
A fact is scientific: from the beginning, Nature alone has already extinguished 99.9% of all forms of life on Earth.
We cannot agree whether there is such a thing as the God we describe, or which God.
Those who believe in God have been killing each other since the beginning of known history in disputes about the nature or purpose of whichever god they believe in.
Judging from that pattern, we would probably be better off believing in no god.
It is hard to believe, but the ones most filled with hatred for their opponents are those who believe in a god of love.
We rely on reason for our knowledge and wisdom. Yet, virtually any conclusion reached by reason can be (and mostly is) disputed by an opposite reason‑based conclusion, each claiming to be correct.
The only reliable lesson of philosophy is that every theory is going to be superseded by a next one.
Which lesson invalidates itself too.
Ironically, even this statement about the un -reliability reason bases its (un)reliability on our reason...
So, to be a true believer is to snare oneself into a sure trap: we consign ourselves to an idea that started as progress and then becomes cause for a lethal fall.
One fallacy is the emotional need to believe in something that is unchangeable: an absolute.
It contains the seeds of self contradiction.
Again: an absolute like "there is no absolute", or "everything changes" is only apparently worthy of belief, for it contradicts itself. "There is no absolute" can not be an absolute...
"Everything changes" and change itself becomes non‑change....                      The search for knowledge is the search for something to believe in, but we frustrate it when we conclude with relativism.
Relativism even denies happiness, since search for happiness is the believer's search.
So, we always need to fall back into the believer's faith that what we do is right, true and dependable, as said before.
The case of medicine is sobering...
The incredibly complicated expensive equipment and methods to perform surgery and other remedies on the human body inspire admiring awe and pride about our knowledge.
They should humiliate us instead, when we consider that we are as awkward as using a bulldozer to spread butter on a 4x4 inch soft bread slice
We should not be surprised that the medical supply industry is most lucrative.
The “miracles” of medical science are unable to go far beyond Aspirin for common cold, arthritis and other common diseases.
What medical science knows about diet, overweight, aging, common cold, AIDS, cancer and countless other ailments (and their similar “whatevers”) ring little more than a tentative description of symptoms.
Armies of experts spend billions of dollars and generations of research to reach the little knowledge that they describe in thousands of volumes of reports, treaties, texts and dissertations.
Psychoanalysis is like a believable voodoo brought to the high peaks rationalization can reach with the help of specialized reasoning.
The Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud, (1856-1939), discoverer of our subconscious “complexes” and founder of modern psychoanalysis, has been [wrongly discredited for using an unorthodox fictitious evidence to prove a successful case in a way similar to his inspiring Russian novelist
Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1821-1881)].
Philosophy cannot free itself from its dilemma between logics and rationalization.
Its creativity is now mired in pedantic analysis with short attention span.
History keeps being adulterated by endemic chauvinism.
Economics cannot go beyond measures that are convincing today and invalidated tomorrow.
Politics doesn't know how to tread on the philosophy, history, psychology, law and economics it trries to understand.
Sociology takes an analytical approach of a multitude of phenomena sociologists still don't know how to correlate or focus on. They cannot extricate a prognosis from their diagnosis.
Jurisprudence looks fascinating and brilliant when it starts to develop.
Then, it becomes exasperatingly pedantic when it refines its own tools.
It ends up killing opinions, principles, feelings, values and justice itself for the sake of artificial rules of justice (now called “game”).
Justice itself loses the original meaning and becomes a concept the justice professionals learn to discard in favor of the impasses of the "adversary system".
In this, the ritual "you are entitled to your own opinion" reeks of a cynicism we pretend not to notice.
The "triumph of justice" becomes no more than the play of the competing skills.
Which onfirms what the Hollywood westerns have shown us all along: justice is the triumph of the faster gun.
Justice is now a game played by hired fighters called attorneys.
The rules of the justice game are contrived in the politics game, where the hired (by election) politicians play according to the electoral and campaigning rules.
"Justice" is still sacred, but only as a claim or symbol, like an idol.
Chemistry, physics, and other "material sciences" plug along valiantly, but they are very defensive in their trial‑and‑error knowledge. They have become more the sciences of the methods of recording observations than the clarification of whatever we really want to know.
Their hindsight is called “research and development”, which goes very little beyond showing the result of what they have tried.
Biology is a humiliating and fascinating challenge.
We procreate our offspring without the faintest idea of what exactly creates life.
We have learned to associate lack of food with starvation, or one comestible with some probable concomitant effect, and pretend to know about nourishment.
Our brain distinguishes us from other species, and we still know very little more than nothing about it.
The targets of real knowledge have always been beyond the grasp of the pompous pundits who announce their having achieved them.
What about epistemology?

The fallacy of evidence support: they depend so much on perspective and other factors, that intuition is often more reliable as a basis for our knowledge. Evidence‑research is supposed to have taken the place of intuition or "gutsy feeling".
It is simply not true.
We still have countless inventions and innovations every year, everywhere, which are not based on researched evidence.
Our polls show.
Even in the analysis of merely statistical data, the personal creative spark can offer the original interpretation that sheds the light no one ever saw before.
Inventions, discovery, composition, creation, formulation, trail‑blazing, music, poetry are expressions of creativity and intuition, not of statistical analysis.
Goethe was not exaggerating when he said that the scholar is an objective reasoner and the poet a subjective creator.
Any dullard can spend plenty of time and money to "research" ‑ that is, rationalize‑ a predetermined posture, such as: "money needed for...", "obstacles to racial quotas", "funds to improve education", "achieving equal employment", "improved bombers"...

Consider the correspond-dingly opposite positions: "let's waste no money for...", "racial quotas are evil to fight evil", "funds are no cure for our educational incompetence", "equal employment damages work quality", "let's replace bombers with guided missiles".
They need no research to be formulated and accepted as goals.
There are too many frivolous convictions glorified with the glitter of dignified research.
Any student can conduct a flawlessly scientific project that proves the superiority of woman over man.
Any student can conduct a flawlessly scientific project that proves the superiority of man over woman.
Reliable research can prove either that the death penalty is necessary, or that it is useless. Take your pick.
Research proved abundantly that the insecticide DDT was an ecologic godsend.
Subsequent research, inspired by a book, proved that DDT was an ecologic disaster, although it virtually eliminated malaria.
So, DDT was outlawed, and certain birds and insects were allowed to prosper.
Since then, untold millions of people have fallen back into the patterns of dying of malaria every year, to save a few birds and mosquitoes.
Research proves that homosexuality is abnormal. Research proves that homosexuality is normal.
Psychologists and physicians are intimidated by selective evidence by a homosexual zoologist (Dr. Alfred C. Kinsey) into declaring homosexuality sane.

Medical and psychiatric research to overcome homosexuality are therefore brought to an embarrassed dilemma.
We must simply wait while the number of protected homosexuals increases beyond an unmentionable level.
It may take 10 or 100 years, or even longer...
Pro‑black anthropologists came up with researched assertions that white men are less evolved from the short‑legged apes than black men because they had found black men with longer legs than white men's.
There is no school district that is unable to prove that it needs more money.
They can back it up beyond the shadow of any doubt with the expensive and undisputable research that can only be paid by the additional money they are requesting to cover the deficit they are contributing to.
There is hardly a government or public‑service organization which cannot provide flawlessly researched evidence that they are entitled to more money, no matter how much they are getting and misusing now.
Especially if they are failing.
Monumental research can prove that divorce is necessary in most cases.
Colossal accumulation of “evidence” shows that divorce could have been avoided in most of the same cases, and the family would have benefited radically.
Hundreds of volumes of data proving the soundness of economic theories are countered by as many volumes proving the opposite.
If evolution had relied on research, we would probably be still some form of tentative unstable unicellular aquatic quasi‑life.

The evidence of multiple realities is abundant, but we are conditioned to not seeing them.
We are so convinced that the truth is one, that the existence of simultaneously diverging‑converging truths sounds as unbelievable as the existence of many gods. Which is also believable.
Our belief in one truth, as well as in one god, would sound just as incredible to polygnostics and polytheists. A polygnostic believes that reality and its knowledge have many aspects, or "truths".
Agnosticism waits just around the corner.
Dual truth is evident in the opposites‑couples: light and darkness, cold and warmth, or the two poles of a magnet.
The ones can neither exist nor be understood without the others.
Dual truth is a reduction of the multiple truth to the black‑and‑ white, good‑and‑evil dualism we have lived with from ancient times.
Multiple truth is more real.
The sky is bright or dark, but also of intermediate brightness and many other properties, depending on our perspectives.
Multiple truths can be considered separate or harmonized in one.
We distinguish Earth, heaven, stars, planets, energy, mass... but Earth is not only part of heaven, but one in mass, energy and other parameters with the rest of the universe...
Including ourselves in this cosmic complex and the whole universe can be reduced to an insignificant or infinite unity: whichever we choose is valid.
Both validities coexist.
We could stop here and conclude that nothing more is worth saying.
True, but the superfluous may be simultaneously as sacred and as worthless as we are.
There is a "truth", but also our variable perception of it.
Some thinkers state that any object only exists in, and during, our perception of it.
What we see ceases to exist when we turn our back to it.
Peace and war are conventionally obvious opposites.
But we would not know peace without the conflict to distinguish it from.
We stop at this simple dualism because the multiple truth is still beyond easy comprehension.
Incompatible concepts could be considered as separate limbs waiting to be united in the same body.
But we don't know how to put the body back together.
If we found portions of a liver in different places, the separate components of an adrenaline gland, or a brain, of a foot.. and so on, of one human body, how could we put all the pieces in place?
And, even if we could, could, we make the reassembled body function?
If that were not enough, our epistemic situation is the same as that of one who finds some of the parts of the body and has no idea what to look for and what a body is.
We keep complicating the same concept in separate "truths" that are closer to our understanding than to reality.
Those "truths" sound more refined or scientific, but they often are more remote from reality than the trite clichés.
As we could not know darkness without light, we could speculate that light and darkness are different only from one optical perspective. With the same validity, light and darkness are only two positions on a scale of thousands of wavelengths, or two components of the same scenery, which is another perspective subject to other perspectives...
We accelerate death in our enjoyment of life.
Life cannot exist without death. Every passing living hour we are one hour closer to death. Really?
The convergence of diverse aspects into one gives us the impression of one truth.
Truth may mean nothing more than one limited image from one perspective.
The optical and the thermal reality of light can be as unrelated as a watermelon and .
Again, a modest effort may enable us to contrive such relationships between watermelon and an infrared spectrophoto-meter (or a brick, if you prefer), that we may combine them as two aspects of the same truth...

On another value‑range, we could feel secure with the statement that scientific or philosophical activities are more valuable than erotic pleasures.
However, life itself, where science and philosophy dwell, can do well without science and philosophy, but not without the life‑creating erotic pleasures.
The above may be more confusing than the black‑and‑white approach..., but also obvious.
We take refuge in rationalizing, which is a means to validate a pre‑conceived conclusion, rather than a way to reach the truth. Rationalizing is a poor way to keep the goddess Reason on her altar.
Yet, too often the distinction between rationalizing and reasoning is lost because we ourselves don't see it anymore. Reason itself is not an adequate means.
We are now rediscovering she is no goddess. It was demonstrated by the sophists 24 centuries ago. And before.
We have gone in circles ever since.
We must undertake, or wait for, the next evolutionary step.
070904

An old saying of traditional wisdom is that learning about ourselves is one of the best human endeavors.
I would rather say that focusing on ourselves is often like throwing a boomerang: it comes back to us only if it doesn't hit a target.
That is, if we focus on something outside of ourselves, we are so busy getting there that we have no interest to stop and waste time on static self‑analysis.

First, looking at ourselves gets us nowhere, as we move in scrambled circles.
Second, even if it were worth it, we are bound to fail in the pursuit, because the "me" I am going to reach ‑when and if I get there‑ has already evolved into something else when I reach it, either because it gained or lost something, or because it just grew older.
So, I start seeking the someone I am, but I can only reach what I will have become at the end of (and as a consequence of) my search.
Thus, I search for what I am, but I only find what I have become when I find it.
I am what I become. So, "I am" should mean "I become".
Freezing myself in a definition is like dying.
Being is a continuous becoming.
The very fact that I learn about myself changes me insofar as I have progressed on a path to acquire that knowledge.
But concentrating on finding myself can be frustrating and sterile, even dangerous, as the path goes in circles that never close.
I think that the best path for progress and psychological equilibrium is an active interest in something outside of ourselves.
It may be an artistic, scientific, scholarly, humanitarian, religious, commercial or any other interest that inspires and keeps us so busy that we have no opportunity to feel unhappy.
Learning about myself has a validity only in the sense of knowing things not subject to knowledge activity and personality evolution, like biologic, genetic or medical factors, or other characteristics that are not influenced by intellectual, emotional or other experiences.
Great, and conventional wisdom agrees…
But There is a “Tower of London” reality full of victims being tortured and kept alive so that they can be tortured longer by those who are the real perpetrators of the crimes the victims have been condemned for…
What happens to those innocent prisoners?
The same as to the fly caught in the spider web and kept alive only for the spider’s pleasure… and for truth suppression in a Sodom/Gomorrah-type society….
And in an ochlocratic society like ours, where the mediocre majority where the reigning rats obliterate the morally superior.
They also make laws and rules to silence for ever
those who can correct cynical degeneration into responsible life.

‑ Knowledge is reputed to be better than ignorance, but ignorance is better than false knowledge.
Unfortunately, false knowledge is remarkably more frequent than “true knowledge”
‑ Learning how to learn is becoming more important than knowledge itself.
Knowledge of most subjects is continuously being obsoleted by new developments.
At that point, what counts is not what we know but what we are able to learn afterwards.
‑ There are things that cannot be corroborated by research. Or, at least, research is typically unreliable on them.
Their number is much larger than the experimental researchers care to admit.
Many conceptual components of our culture could be outlawed by their incompatibility with experimental verification.
Religions could not survive experimental and statistical requirements; nor could most philosophy.
‑ It has been said that science is what we know and philosophy what we don't know, because science is about provable facts and philosophy is mostly about opinions.
It is, however, interesting to remind ourselves that science is essentially a derivative of philosophy.
‑ A sobering eye‑opener about our idols is that they also had ridiculous ideas or convictions. To wit:
Plato stated that men who didn't pursue wisdom in their life would be born again as women.
Aristotle thought that people who married too young would generate daughters rather than sons, and that women had less teeth than men.
‑ Protagoras (485-410 b. c,), the Greek sophist, asserted that he didn't know whether gods existed, but he held that they ought to be worshipped anyhow. Over 2400 years have passed, and it is still difficult to find a better general rule.
Gods may not exist, but relying on reason is much more confusing and dangerous than orderly adherence to rules we believe in unconditionally.
‑ The constant wishful reference we hear by hippie‑type philosophers to reincarnation reveals how they don't want their wishful beliefs to be confused by the facts.
The hippies I know sustain that their darling Oriental philosophies promise reincarnation as a reward to their believers.
False. Buddhists and Hindus ‑which the hippies think they understand‑ describe reincarnation as the punishment for those who have not achieved the liberating developments that frees them of the chains of recurring life.
The vision of reincarnation as a reward puts the hippies on the most primitive philosophical level.
‑ I would like to see conflicting ideas colliding like gigantic stars or messy eggs in chaotic whirlpools. Survive who may...
Reality results from collisions of stars as much as from collisions of eggs.
I should take no sides, for I don't know which stars or eggs should survive.
‑ Documentation of what we think and theorize is mostly a statistic corroboration used to lend credibility to our opinions.
The same documentation can be used to support diametrically opposite interpretations.
The same polls are used to support or oppose anything.
Inquiries like: "Do you want our government to raise the cost of education?" and "Do you want our government to improve education?" beg for opposite answers to the same question about more taxes for education.
This also happens in ***/ science, marketing, finances, business.
Economics, for instance, is seriously devoted to statistical and other factual methods of collecting real‑life evidence for every analysis and theory.
Yet, it doesn't fare any better than philosophy or poetry.
So, what is the fuss against people who don't use statistics to support their convictions?
‑ Our doubts increase with the objects of our knowledge.
‑ Social evolution has resulted from intricate interactions that seem to be typical of commerce and barter, not from plans or structured processes we can understand or control.
‑ An embarrassment of philosophy is to use reason to prove that reason cannot be relied upon.
‑ A disconcerting task for philosophers, from Parmenides (ca. 515 b. c.) to Hume (1711-1776 a. d.) and today's scholars, has been to prove the existence of God and the correctness of our moral ideals.
‑ For some people, their opinions are correct and the facts wrong.
‑ When we experience something new, we try to explain it by drawing from our own memorized patterns.
One who knows nothing but birds as flying objects, will think that an airplane is a bird of some unknown kind, perhaps a divine bird, if he has the concepts of "unknown" and "divine".
It is thus that we explain the new with the old.
In order to face new knowledge from experience, we need at least two of many possible methods:
(1) One is to increase and develop the number and combinations of perception patterns that we keep within ourselves to interpret new experiences.
(2) The second is to adopt the new experience as a new knowledge pattern, without fitting active behavior characteristics and glibly decide that they are right or wrong on the base of faddist preferences.
- We have reached the point that the laws do not allow some people to avoid other people whose behavior they dislike.
The law forces the former to accept, and live with, the latter.
Then, what do we do with freedom?
One of the laws of human nature is that some differences among people are irreconcilable.
When they occur, assimilation or evolution are the proven natural processes that should be left to themselves, without interferences by legislative, religious, moral or psychological processes that have a deplorable history of failures.
These matters are to be left alone, like the free market.
We know what disastrous effects heavy interventions by "economists" and "social engineers" have had and may have, on our economy and society.
We are causing human disasters with our presumption to correct human behavior we don't understand, only because it conflicts with an arbitrary theory.
We can nope for the better only if we positively admit that we still need more knowledge to find a solution.
‑ Saying a concept again and again, each time a little differently, may be necessary to reach sufficient understanding, for each variation of perspective of the same subject sheds more light on the truth. If we understand it.
The "same" thing is called "same" only because we use the same word for pprently “look‑alike variations”.
Different perspectives of the same thing are actually different things in the same perspective...
At the same time, however, those different things are limbs of the same (truth) body.
‑ We should start all over again from things no one disputes: breathing, eating, drinking...
What else is still certain and not yet controversial?
When people are willing to die for an ideal ONLY because it prevails where they were raised, there is more than something wrong.
Christians, Muslims, Jews... are wrong if they are controversial, because all that is disputable should be quarantined for the simple reason that it doesn't possess agreed obvious convincing power.
Probably we should suspend ideas, beliefs and religions.
The very fact that they affect compact areas and populations could raise a similar suspicion as of epidemics, no matter how old and ... respectable.
What is left?
I think that languages stagnate in obtuse devosion to what opposes evolutionary changes for chauvinistic reasons.
- The posture of animals with sheer amorality, awareness instead of convictions, "what is" rather than "what should be", no crime, no merit or guilt; fight rather than punishment... should be examined scientifically and used to inspire our next evolutionary changes, if we still have a chance...
‑ Every story, life, historical event, great or small feat, as complete (start to end) as perceived or defined, is only an incomplete part of history, reality or evolution.
Focusing on it gives us a false idea of an achieved happiness, victory, defeat or completion of any kind that exists only in the unreal freezing of the evolution of events at that particular point.
Afterwards, the happiness, unhappiness, victory or failure disappear to mutate in whatever follows.
‑ The black‑and‑white conception of reality is not only a good/evil, right/wrong dualism, but more encompassing.
A dualistic distortion that hurts us immeasurably is the conviction that our present interpretation is the truth when we have discovered that our past conviction was false.
It would be the same as to assume that any other weight is correct, after we have discovered that, say, 38 Lbs. is not the weight of a particular object.
Our most pervasive pitfall is the conviction that our present philosophy is correct merely because it is used in place of whatever we thought failed in the past. As a matter of fact, the history of philosophy and epistemology show that our present conviction has as much chance of being more correct, as any other guess is more correct than a wrong one.
As if that were not complicated enough, it happens that the rule which was correct for past conditions becomes incorrect for the present conditions.
As it may be, we enforce the present convictions and their consequences as if they were correct.
In so doing, we enforce falsehood, injustice and their consequences.
‑ Knowledge and progress have always been promoted in words, and opposed in deeds, by governments.
‑ The more we learn, the less we tend to believe.
The more we believe, the less we tend to learn.
‑ John H. Duell, Director US Patent Office, 1899: "Everything that can be invented has been invented."
‑ The ignorance of the illiterate is harmful to the illiterate, but the ignorance of the learned is harmful to the whole society.
‑ Scholars and honestly "wise" people have their own sophisticated approach to knowledge: they know they don't "know" enough to know.
This confusion from incomplete and self‑contradictory awareness is called "knowledge".
Doubt is what they have from uncompleted perception, not knowledge.
‑ We must be continuously reminded that absolute reality does not exist. We only know our interpretation of "reality", what we perceive of it.
The fact that opposite views remain unchanged proves the existence of at least 2 opposite interpretations viewed as "reality".
To be aware of it means that we can choose to change views of reality instead of reality itself.
More pragmatically, we can understand that there is not always need to change an unpleasant fact, when a change of our interpretation or perspective can make the unpleasant pleasant.
Two views need not to be opposite like "desirable" and "undesirable".
They only need to be different, like "Liberty" and "Happiness".
In other words, we can accept something that makes us happy on the basis of a belief in its desirability, while others see the same thing as unbearable because it does not give us the "liberty", or "equality", or "dignity", or whatever else we choose to worship as necessary.
‑ Our knowledge is not too deep if we don't know what triggers earthquakes, or how to cure AIDS, cancer, schizophrenia, senility, or even the common cold, how to restore the "Last Supper", or how to make the Sahara fertile. We know it, but we have to be reminded...
‑ When we meet something new, we try to fit it with patterns we have accumulated in our experience. It is onbious, but we must be reminded...
Therefore, instead of learning the new, often we only dig from inside of ourselves.
If we really want to learn the new, we need two of many methods:
1). Decrease the number and combination of patterns that we keep within ourselves to accommodate the new experiences.
2). Perceive the new experiences deliberately as additions to the previous patterns.
It is not easy, when we are not accustomed to it, but it may be an unavoidable necessity.
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