In Search of Truth And The Knowledge That Lets Us Find It.

As life passed eventfully today, as I am almost too tired to write this entry, I continue because I have to get this out before I can do things that I am late on. Late. Time. Whoosh. But in the middle of life, at odd times, we have moments of sentience that the most profound words do not describe. Understanding. Comprehension. Further illusion removed, that sort of thing. I am fortunate in that they are coming with increased frequency, but the intensity is somewhat distracting.

This will be a long read, it seems. A lot of things just came together today, and I promise a quirky and perhaps funny read. I am not on medication. :-)

Of course, this could just be another sign of impending mental disaster, but I prefer my version of sanity to your version of insanity - so we can just call it even. Or odd.

Influenza, Hatred and Pastries

I woke late; I'm working off a flu. A virus has propagated itself in my system. Why did it do that? Because it wishes to survive, just like the rest of us. It isn't evil.

We can't invade it's country, and we can't smite it physically. It's not a war. My body is just working on making the little virus have no relevance. There's a lesson in there. I do not accept the virus, I reject the virus. I do not fight the virus, my body rejects the virus. There's no war, no soldiers - my body, as a whole, simply doesn't like the virus and is working it all out. The virus is trying to survive. My body is trying to survive. There is no hatred, no need for hatred, no need for global media to get inside my body and talk about the 'War Against Evil'.

Michelle Malkin doesn't need to write about how the borders around my body need less immigration. If she had her way, my body would starve of tocopherol in an opaque body suit to avoid melanoma. If she had her way, my stomach would eat itself while everything that entered my oral cavity was poked and prodded by more customs agents than you could shake a speculum at. The pyloric sphincter would have a check for 'dirty bombs' of viruses, nevermind the healthy hydrochloric acid that would begin digesting me from the inside.

So let's get that out plainly. Everything isn't Boolean, it doesn't derive from some sort of need to hate. It is, quite simply, what it is - injecting and inflaming hatred with things like Danish cartoons doesn't make things better. Besides, the Danish have wonderful pastries and cheeses. What do they call a cheese danish in Denmark? What do they call a cheese danish in Malaysia?

Pastries are part of the answer. Don't apologize. Send pastries. Crazy? Ludicrous? Take a look around, and you can see that I'm probably the only sane one here. Of course, that makes me insane. Mentally insane by reason of not being guilty.

But Seriously

It's been a busy day. The Ethical Dilemma still hasn't paid up. No responses from them. Incommunicado. At least when you talk to a brick wall and demand your payment, you have the echo to keep you company. So... this would make 3 times I have been lied to, though I am giving it until the 15th of February before it reaches the next level.

What amazes me most about this particular situation is that nobody has actually stood up and said, "I am responsible, and I will deal with this". Nope. It's been kicked up and down, and all over the place, and everyone has distanced themselves from anything related to a semblance of accountability. "The check is in the mail". And then, someone completely separate is sent to ask me about passwords. Umm. Hello. No money, no passwords.

Thus, on Wednesday, the interest starts. Maybe then they will start paying attention. I don't know. I don't understand this mindset where people think that they can get something for nothing. It's beyond me. Perhaps it's above me. If that's how people get ahead in life, then I will be happy being the rung they only get to step on once. So, where's the truth here? I have my truth, and nobody has presented another truth.

Communication is important for truth to be discovered. Some people don't like the truth. They spend a lot of time looking away from it. Covering it up. Like cockroaches. Scurry, scurry, scurry. How does that help progress? It doesn't. That helps the status quo. Truth and progress, therefore, are the same thing. No truth, no progress. Know truth, know progress.

The Quest For Truth

One of the things I have been tossing about of late (and with a few book reviews coming) is the relation of Fuzzy Logic, the Theory of Relativity and Quantum mechanics to a lot of things. This, of course, could be hubris but if one is going to fail - fail big. If you're going to look stupid, look stupid failing at something that revolves around finding out the truth.

As it happens, a discussion on The World Wide Web in Education List related to Social constructionism and Social constructivism gained my interest by having some aspects similar to that of Relativity. This, related to education, was not something I was considering. I had been considering perspectives; I had not been considering growing those perspectives which is actually a failure because perspectives grow. They shape, they change.

Here's where I get a little bleeding edge on some of the things I have been thinking about with respect to Relativity - a lot of problems exist because of a Boolean 'either-or' philosophy. Specific examples abound, but I'll use a more classical example: Light shows that it travels in straight lines, yet exhibits a tendency to behave like waves. Thus, a duality. It's both. But to what degree is it one or the other?

Nobody has really asked that, at least that I know of - and that's really the thing that establishes what I call 'Central Truth'. This is where I apply fuzzy logic (and proponents of Bayesian probability start kicking fuzzy logic like an old can). Fuzzy Logic allows for things to have weighted values of Truth for two or more dimensions. So light as a duality exists as 1 - True - and the truth of light moving in a straight line could be given a value x, and a the truth of light behaving like waves could be seen as y.

x+y=1

Can it be possible that something that is true would have a basis on something that is false? Yes, but with more perspectives it balances out. If it has no other perspectives to balance it, it would be more False, and perhaps completely False. Eastern philosophy deals with these grey areas well, but Western science... doesn't. There have been stabs at it, but nothing that seems to have stuck. I don't know why. I look back at the world before Albert Einstein, and I can't understand how people couldn't intuitively understand the theory of relativity. But then, many people now don't truly understand it. So I apply this to that - the world before Einstein as x, the world after Einstein as y, and the fact that we still don't have the truth - the missing parts - grouped together as z:

x+y+z= 1

We know x. We know y. But we don't know what z is. And maybe there's something to multiply by too. It's all rather simple like this, but it could easily be more complicated - even with Ockham's razor.

It gets more complicated, though, when

x+y+z=a+b+c=1

And so on. Because '1' is True. And when everything works out, a greater truth is found. Some people are out there working extra hard on z, some on c, but when they're arguing that c is more true than z (or vice versa), progress is halted when things that are segregated aren't put into the larger context. And people with their heads down don't see things that way.

The *weight* of the truth depends on the perspective. Imagining or drawing a triangle might be good for this... If I am at point A and do not value other perspectives, the only weight that I am interested in is the truth of Point A. If you introduce point
B, you've added another aspect of Truth which a person in point A who is interested will incorporate as best as possible. The 'truth' dithers in between. Introduce point C, the same will happen. The center of truth begins to spiral as negotiation happens between 3 points. Finding the 'sweet spot' is what the grand unifying theory of physics is supposed to be, I think - but sciences didn't separate until after Newton united them by betraying his alchemist roots. Many people, including Richard Feynman, believed that there was a need for generalists instead of all these new specialists...

Add more dimensions... well, it's an interesting thing to consider, very fractal in it's own way.

Weblogs

Now if you consider something like the blogosphere, and social aspects of the use of technology in similar contexts - well, you get an idea of people negotiating meaning. Sort of like the Quaker concept of the Meeting For Learning. But some people don't want to meet, they don't want to learn. They want to collect hyperlinks instead of earn hyperlinks, which is something for the blogosphere to continue because it's easy to perpetuate a truth, but it seems like human nature to drag falsehood in with it as well. Why? Greed, fame, whatever... pick one. The degree varies, but we all do it. Why? Why is it that someone always has to win, someone always has to lose? Why can't everyone winning be a goal? Greed, fame, whatever... that's why.

Bah. Too Philosophical

What do I know, anyway? It's all loose theory, and integrating where everyone is segregating has always interested me. It may even be my doom. Integrating knowledge for Truth, though, is something that many people try to do. There's supposed to be wisdom mixed in there somewhere.

It's easier to divide things up into separate things, and avert the eyes from sunlight. I've always liked staring at the sun, finding where the light comes from instead of cowering in the dark waiting for someone to leave some knowledge crumbs behind.

Tomorrow hopefully I feel better so I can resynchronize work schedule with time. Mondays are always bad because of dealing with legal issues these days, it seems. I agree with Lessig. We need some laws that allow us to fire a lot of lawyers, which means more intelligent laws that integrate instead of segregate. But then we have the global economy, we have nation's economies, and we have all varieties of corruption all over the world.

The world confuses me, which is good. It makes me realize that every day, I do not understand it. So every day, sick or well, I try to integrate what I know into something closer to the truth. The people I like to read, the people I like to talk to, the people I like to discuss things with - they too want the same thing, and in exchanging thoughts and ideas... we learn.

We never learn the truth until it costs us something. The question is... what price are we willing to pay? I don't know. I ask that question every day. That some people avoid the truth so that they don't have to pay a price... well, there's something there to think about. Are we collectively afraid of success at finding the truth?

The more stuff I try to make sense of, the more I study things, read, write, the less I know. I have to convince a virus that it doesn't belong in my body.