“I mean by a “fact” something which is there, whether anybody thinks so or not.“
“Facts are what make statements true or false.”
Bertrand Russell

What do you see here?
A ‘fact’ or ‘gravity in action’?
Bertrand Russell? Isaac Newton?

Or both?
After all, Earth pulling down yet another apple is (nothing but) a fact.

Yeah, but ‘Earth pulling down apples’ had become a fact only after Newton had figured it out.
And received this name, “fact”, only after Russell had coined the concept.

My point being that some things happen in the special place we call ‘conscious mind’.

“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident:”

The United States, currently the most powerful country on Earth, exists because some people had put it in their minds to make it.
Gravity exists, as we know it, because Isaac Newton had noticed it and described it to us.
Facts exist, as we think of them, because Bertrand Russell had introduced them into our thinking process.

‘Do you imply that apples did not fall down before Newton noticed the process? That people didn’t think before Russell told them how? That the US would have remained a colony if not for the Boston Tea Party?’

I believe you’re fully aware that the question above had sprung up in a mind before being put down on paper… before being tapped on a keyboard, actually…

Of course gravity existed before Newton had described it. Of course people had been thinking for a while before Russell let us in on his thoughts on this subject. And of course I have no idea about what would have happened if those guys in Boston had brewed the tea instead of throwing it in the harbor.

But it is very clear for me, “self-evident” as the Founding Fathers had put it, that some things do happen in a certain manner.
That not all of us think in the same way – god forbid, that would be against our very nature – but all of us think according to some ‘rules’. Hence the results of our thinking are not exactly ‘haphazard’.

The point of today’s post being that my method is ‘thinking’.
I use my ‘conscious mind’ as an instrument. As a scalpel-cum-microscope with which I attempt to study how my mind works.

Being fully aware (?!?) that this process takes place ‘inside my head’. Inside my ‘limited’ head. Limited in both space and time.
That ‘that’ head is made of the same matter – atoms – as the rest of the Universe. Hence some of its limitations.
And that ‘that’ head works ‘inside’ the cultural universe created by the aggregated effort of every human that has ever lived on Earth. Hence another set of limitations.