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Bosnia-Herzegovina114 Posts
Over the years, I studied as many topics as I could reasonably handle. My favorite subject is logic and critical thinking i.e. asking provocative questions.
What is logic? It is a tool for combining simple, everyday observations, with the end result being the truth. In this way, we can pierce through the unknown and find out the truth about things that we have very little information on. Not only can a little child do it, the result (truth) is always so beautifully simple and elegant that it can be understood by a little child.
What is truth? Truth is what actually is. Ok, that definition doesn't really help us. So lets for a moment stop trying to brute-force the definition of truth and try to ask it like this: "When I do find out the truth, how will I feel?" Because there is no impersonal truth.
Remember the saying "truth will set you free"? When you find out something truthful, you will inevitably become more free - free of fear, anxiety, pain, everything negative you could possibly imagine is all just the end result of being misinformed.
Truth in itself is relative to the observer's clarity of perspective. Imagine a house. I am looking at it from one side and I see a wall. If I am far away, individual bricks may be hardly distinguishable from one another, but they are still there. If I were to approach that wall, I would start seeing more details, but I'd temporarily lose the sight of the big picture (the entire house). Yet, the house is still there. If I were to examine one of those bricks with a microscope, I'd see fine nuances of its structure, yet I would no longer see the wall, let alone the house. But both are still there.
Now lets add a twist. Say I am wearing glasses and I am totally used to them to the point I no longer feel they are there. But they in some way slightly distort what I see when I look at the house, the wall and the brick under the microscope. Again, since I wear these glasses all the time, I do not notice these changes. If someone were to tell me, hey that's not what this house really looks like, I wouldn't believe him. How about another twist? The other person is wearing their own glasses that distort what they see as well. Whatever I am seeing looks legitimate to me, yet it doesn't necessarily have to be what really is, because of these glasses I am wearing.
Becoming aware of habitual errors in thinking is the most important thing I ever did for myself. Adding "I could be wrong..." to my vocabulary and by that, to my attitude. That's it. No false pride, no false humility, just the realization that my perception could be distorted in some way and it is reasonable to account for it at all times.
That's why I also value every opinion, again, with acute awareness that people use prearranged forms of thinking without any discernment.
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Yeah, perception is a cool thing 
When I was young I always wondered what it would be like to be another person. Not in the sense of "What is the other person thinking", but in a sense of how would the world look like through the senses of another person. Would it be different? It would probably be, but how different can it get?
I mean that question gets very obvious if you think about how it would be to be an animal. The world would be totally different, because you'd have a different brain and a different set of senses, so your body wouldn't even be capable of logic etc. Depending on the animal it would probably be a completely magical world and wouldn't feel like our world at all.
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The biggest thing to avoid when searching for the truth is identifying with a position, or becoming attached to it. Just as long as you are always open to being proven wrong, and open to changing your opinion, you're okay. There are lots of sad cases of otherwise intelligent people who become progressively more extreme because their bias overcomes their rational honesty and critical thinking.
Once that is overcome, life becomes clearer and you are more at peace with your beliefs. I find that its harder to get offended as well, because you are not personally invested in anything. I guess those are the hallmarks of being a good scientist.
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On March 24 2013 01:42 radscorpion9 wrote:
The biggest thing to avoid when searching for the truth is identifying with a position, or becoming attached to it. Just as long as you are always open to being proven wrong, and open to changing your opinion, you're okay. There are lots of sad cases of otherwise intelligent people who become progressively more extreme because their bias overcomes their rational honesty and critical thinking.
Once that is overcome, life becomes clearer and you are more at peace with your beliefs. I find that its harder to get offended as well, because you are not personally invested in anything. I guess those are the hallmarks of being a good scientist.
I disagree. I think maybe one can be an average scientist by 'not being invested in anything.' To be a GOOD scientist requires passion. Sure you can't be blinded by every single disagreement that pops up, but I doubt there has been any scientist that has made a major discovery without having huge passion and emotional investment in his work.
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u should look up the "list of cognitive biases" on wikipedia
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Remember the saying "truth will set you free"? When you find out something truthful, you will inevitably become more free - free of fear, anxiety, pain, everything negative you could possibly imagine is all just the end result of being misinformed.
let's assume after death we're gone forever. would it make you less afraid of dying?
in a sense, i dont think truth can be known logically. truth is what is. can you logically "know" consciousness? your house? you can try to approximate what a house is by science, or how consciousness is formed. but still, how would you "know" consciousness? or your house?
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Great OP, I have several blogs on this subject as well.
I think one of the biggest things you mentioned was when you added "I could be wrong...". I think that simple understanding leads to tolerance of others, because you realize that it's possible they are right and you are wrong.
When everyone realizes that, then they will not only be more tolerant of others, but more openness between people will exist. You'd fell more comfortable sharing your unique views, and more comfortable hearing other people's views because of the mutual understanding that no one really knows if it's right or not, it's just a possibility.
I take a different view on how truth makes you feel though. Instead of a happy liberated feeling, I've observed that the truth typically is unacceptable to us when we find out about it. Mother nature, and true reality in general, is very harsh. Our first reaction is to deny truth at first, so we create buffers to separate ourselves from it. The freedom and peace comes from not knowing the truth, but in accepting it.
Critical thinking is a pretty important topic, but I think truth acceptance is usually the bottleneck as far as our understanding goes. If you just can't accept something, what you should do is not deny it exists, but rather accept that you can't accept it. In this way you will know that you have biases, which is natural. Becoming aware of them is the first step to tearing down the buffers.
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Here's another perspective talking about the glasses/goggles thing showing how they not only make truth hard to see, but another thing they do is actually make finding it a personal experience which can't necessarily be communicated to others. Yes there is an absolute truth, but since we all have different distortions/biases, it can only be a personal discovery:
On February 21 2013 15:10 fight_or_flight wrote:
Absolute truth exists, but to actually find it is a personal accomplishment, and it can't necessarily be communicated. For example, lets say each person has goggles made of uniquely distorted glass - shape, color, polarization, diffusion, and they change over time - you name it, these are some f*cked up goggles (they represent our biases). Furthermore, we all stand in different fixed positions and see different perspectives of each shape (that represents our personal experiences).
We all look at a real object object (absolute truth). One person, an authority figure, says the object is a perfect cube with circles drawn on each face. I see a pyramid, you see a sphere, and someone else sees a prism. Well, if each person uses flawed deductive reasoning, they will define what they see as a cube with circular faces. Everyone agrees that's what it is. But then when the next object comes along, he says it's something else. Well, then you find an authority figure that has similar distortions in his goggles as yours, and join him and his group of people.
In reality, you have to equally listen to everyone's account of what they see. It's all wrong (relative) but over time it can potentially be integrated into something that's actually pretty close to the truth. But this truth you discover on your own is only applicable to you: they give you the transfer function of your goggles, and is dependent on the people around you, their physical positions, how well they account for their own goggles, etc.
http://www.teamliquid.net/blogs/viewblog.php?topic_id=399324
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Here's a way of looking at this: The more you know, the more you realize there is even more you don't know. That can be very off-putting. Ernest Hemingway famously said, "Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know." So does the truth really set you free, or does simply let you realize how trapped you are by your own limitations?
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EPT
