Saturday, May 23, 2009

up in the middle of the night

People do not know what is going on, but think they do.

The problem is that we trust what we think about the world. Each and every individual is inundated with too much information to process so their brains filter out information that is not useful for survival, sounds, lights, movements and all sorts of other input. but it gets formatted in such a way that it all makes sense.

We each think that our world view is the real world view

Basically I think the we are all always deceived in little and big ways but we do not notice it because our brain protects us from things that damage our world view.

By about age three or four children children lose the ability to hear and differentiate between sounds that their parents do not make, there is too much information that is not necessary for communication. We've all had the experience looking for things. This same kind of filtering takes place on many levels, combine that with the ability to hold give mutually exclusive ideas equal weight in the reasoning balance... can you see where this is going?

Just listen to someone with a different ideological stance then you have. And it becomes clear that they think their ideas are logical, even if they are clearly nuts (or so we think) and the opposite is true too.

A friend of mine takes the unorthodox position that every philosophical and religious position is equally correct because they each make internal sense... This seems true and silly... more later

1 comment:

djinn said...

You just described the need for science and the scientific method. Even people who claim, let's euphemistically call them, uh, other beliefs, when push comes to shove step on that airplane.

Science, it works, beyotches. Everything else, wishful thinking.