Posted on 08/19/2016 7:59:16 AM PDT by Leaning Right
Hindsight is 20/20, right? That’s the premise of a new book that poses the question: What if we were wrong?
Chuck Klosterman’s “But What If We’re Wrong?” (Blue Rider Press, 2016) deals with the fact that the great march of history shows us that, well … we’re always wrong. Aristotle had his run as the smartest man on the planet, but he got disproved by Galileo, who was trumped by Newton, until Einstein ruled the roost. And while there have been some hints of “proving Einstein wrong,” nothing has really stuck. But even so, scientific “fact” is a fact only until it’s proved wrong.
(Excerpt) Read more at cbsnews.com ...
This is toxic irrational skepticism. Arbitrary beliefs and pseudoscience are falsifiable, but objective knowledge acquired by the process of reason is not invalidated or overthrown, but supplemented and expanded by new discoveries. New discoveries make knowledge more precise and accurate and knowledge becomes more certain. If new discoveries constantly refuted previous discoveries as the skeptics claimed, progress of any kind would be impossible.
But I'll bet he is profoundly uncomfortable with the idea of a creator god, because that would be unscientific, and because it opens the possibility that such a god might have purposes that impose obligations on us.
Gd made us all equal to Him. Period. The rest we don’t understand. Some are born in squalid huts, some in fancy hospitals, etc. but to Him we are all equal at the start. Our actions determine the rest.
Kings ruled by declaring they were closer to Gd. So all humans being equal to Gd is a major philosophical point.
Kinda reminds me of the exchange in the Woody Allen movie, “Sleeper”, when two scientists are discussing the revived Allen:
Dr. Melik: Well, he’s fully recovered, except for a few minor kinks.
Dr. Agon: Has he asked for anything special?
Dr. Melik: Yes, this morning for breakfast. He requested something called wheat germ, organic honey and tiger’s milk.
Dr. Agon: [ laughs ] Oh, yes. Those were the charmed substances...That some years ago Were felt to contain life-preserving properties.
Dr. Melik: You mean there was no deep fat? No steak or cream pies? Or hot fudge?
Dr. Agon: Those were thought to be unhealthy, precisely the opposite of what we now know to be true.
Dr. Melik: Incredible.
Intellectual fashions, like food fads, change perpetually.
As in Science, so in History ...
“Gd made us all equal to Him.”
So now we’re all God?
” The rest we don’t understand.”
But you understand that we’re all God?
I think God would appreciate us using the rational brain he gave us and not talk in non-sequiturs.
The “morality play” of today seems to consist of denying reality or that you’re free to create your own reality.
But as Kipling tried to warn us...
” And that after this is accomplished, and the brave new world begins
When all men are paid for existing and no man must pay for his sins,
As surely as Water will wet us, as surely as Fire will burn,
The Gods of the Copybook Headings with terror and slaughter return! “
From “The Gods of the copybook headings”.
That’s a great poem. One of my favorites:
Credo
by Robinson Jeffers
My friend from Asia has powers and magic, he plucks a blue leaf from the young blue-gum
And gazing upon it, gathering and quieting
The God in his mind, creates an ocean more real than the ocean, the salt, the actual
Appalling presence, the power of the waters.
He believes that nothing is real except as we make it. I humbler have found in my blood
Bred west of Caucasus a harder mysticism.
Multitude stands in my mind but I think that the ocean in the bone vault is only
The bone vault’s ocean: out there is the ocean’s;
The water is the water, the cliff is the rock, come shocks and flashes of reality. The mind
Passes, the eye closes, the spirit is a passage;
The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the heartbreaking beauty
Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.
As long as you agree with the assurance that we will never know as much as we don’t know, you can enjoy your life with much less stress and anxiety. #;^)
People have a mistaken notion of what science does. It can never “prove” anything the way mathematicians can because they start with fixed axioms. What science does is empirically gather information from our technically augmented sensory inputs and try to detect “patterns” in the way information changes around us. They then come up with the simplest, more compact story that not only fits the data but allows them to predict as yet undetected changes. If enough people agree on this story it is called a theory. If later data contradicts the theory and a better story can be developed it replaces the old theory. The whole point is not to determine what is “true” but to determine what is “useful” from the standpoint of humanity. The pursuit of ontological truths is a complete dead end and is the domain of metaphysics not science.
It is why no one should ever put absolute trust in anything mankind says. Plenty of all kinds of experts have also succeeded in killing millions over the years.
St Paul quoted the Greeks: We see through a glass darkly. Down here we will never see the full truth. We do the best with what we do see.
“Gd made us all equal to Him.”
I’m really sorry. Sometimes I am creeping while busy and don’t say things correctly. I meant that to Gd, we are all equal. In his “eyes,” I should have said, not equal to Him! Not like the royal days hundreds of years ago when people were told the royal family was closer to Gd.
I don’t think it’s an either/or world.
There are some realities that are external to us, that exist independent of our mind. A bullet hitting you from behind without you knowing it is an example of such a reality. or if you walk into a real ocean you’ll get wet, an imaginary one you won’t.
There are also “realities” that we create. Things like generalization, classifications, concepts, dreams, daydreams, delusions, etc.
Both are important in our survival and success. Whether our “created” realities are useful or dangerous or neutral depend on whether, when they interact with external realities, they respect the actual nature and quality of that external reality.
That is fire will indeed burn you and water will indeed wet you, regardless of what opposing notions you might have created in your head. That’s an example of a dangerous created reality.
But there are useful created “realities” as well, such as concepts or classifications. For example “carnivores”. It’s something we created in our head and we put a bunch of animals in it with a specific quality - they eat meat. So if you encounter an animal in the wild that you know is a carnivore, you’ll give it a wide berth.
(just some stream of consciousness noodling...)
“But I am interested in the possibility that we are going to be wrong in the same way that history has indicated that mankind always is. It seems as though the history of ideas is the history of being wrong. And to me, that is a kind of continuum. It’s a continual path that shows we don’t always know something, but we’re always shifting to a path that makes us feel more comfortable in the moment, even if that shift is wrong, and a new shift is destined to happen again.”
This guy is profoundly stupid. “Always wrong” can be easily achieved for a sufficiently rigorous definition of correctness.
The human mind, indeed knowledge itself is based upon observed patterns and relationships between otherwise abstract entities. We accept gravity and compensate for it when we do many things. Our mind need not extract an unreasonable level of accuracy before we walk across a room. Our mind knows the “right” answer and accomplishes the task before this idiots argument manages to get out of bed.
His thesis would better be described as “everything is impossible” rather than “everything is wrong”.
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