Archives for posts with tag: fact

On the ‘hows’ of the matter

November 14, 2024 //
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“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.

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Categories 1989, alternative ways of acquring knowledge, Bounded rationality, collective identity, effective communication, In English, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Information, facts, sentiment.

August 7, 2020 //
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Existence takes place ‘inside’ while things happen in-between.

Survival is a matter of preserving, ‘as is’, what already exists while evolution is about change and might involve ‘dismissal’.

Everything may survive while only ‘living’ things are capable of evolving on their own.

At some point, evolving organisms became complex enough to ‘feel’.
Not only complicated enough to react in an orderly – a.k.a. pre-programmed, manner but also to generate emotional reactions – which can be remembered, when certain things happen in their vicinity. Things which are important for the survival of the feeling organisms. As a consequence of the ‘feeling’ process, data regarding the happened occurrences are stored by the feeling organisms as information. Which information may help the organism in its struggle to survive. Using that information, that organism might become a ‘better version’ of itself.

At a further point in the evolution of ‘things’, organisms have added another layer of complexity.
They have become complex enough to ‘think’. As in complex enough to attempt to maximize the effects of the information they have at their disposal.

That was when ‘facts’ had been identified as being ‘things’ which had had consequences, when data had been identified as being information and when the thinkers had discovered that thinking was driven by sentiment.

Which sentiment is nothing but an evolution of the ‘survival instinct’.
Present in any living organism.
Which survival instinct is nothing but the living equivalent of something the physicists have identified as inertia.

Go figure….

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Categories awareness, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperare, effective communication, evolution, In English, limited rationality, man as a measure for all things, skin in the game

Fact versus gut feeling

August 14, 2018 //
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As much as we’d like it to be unique, reality is a spectrum.

Varying from factual to ‘seat of the pants’. And everything in between.

But what is this thing we call ‘reality’?

The key word here being “we”, of course!

First of all, reality is a concept. Which covers everything we know it exists ‘out there’.
Mind you, not everything ’which exists out there’, only ‘what we know about’.

We know about how?
Here’s where things become really interesting.

Maturana says that we, humans, are the first animals able to ‘observe themselves observing’ – his definition of ‘self-awareness’.
We not only observe things, we’ve developed the ability to set them apart from us. To understand that ‘things’ are both separated from us and still connected to us.
Even this understanding of ours comes in various degrees.
Some of us behave as if there is no tomorrow while others have developed intricate thought systems which connect our past actions (a.k.a. ‘sins’) with our future (a.k.a. ‘redemption’).

‘But most of the religious people base their faith on myths rather than facts!’

Well… myths are facts too.
Not in the sense that all the content of all myths had necessarily happened!
My point being that a story becomes a myth/fact as soon as enough people believe in it. Regardless of that story being a factual description of a real incident, an interpretation thereof or even the figment of somebody’s imagination.

Too much confusion… facts are no longer factual, reality is no longer real… everything is in a sort of limbo…

Yep. You’ve got the gist of it.
Our own consciousness has thrown us in limbo. Which, obviously, is yet another of our own inventions…
The funniest thing being that our consciousness hates being in limbo. And tries to explain everything it comes in contact with. Which explains why we have so many myths.

Now, if we want to explain the difference between the factual and the seat of the pants realities, we need to retrace the whole argument.

We have the ‘real’ reality – everything that exists out there, and the conceptual one. Everything that actually exists versus what we know it exists. Or it may exist.
What we know it exists can be further divided into things we think we have completely understood, things we ‘know’ but we still cannot fully explain and things which continue to baffle us.
For instance, we think we know everything there is to be known about internal combustion engines, we know when we are in love but we cannot explain ‘love’ and we are completely baffled by the callousness of some of our brethren.

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Categories Bounded rationality, Choices we make, collective identity, cooperation, effective communication, evolution, Frames of mind, limited rationality, manipulation, Mutual Respect