This is part of my report on our education system. I am not providing evidence for it right now (it's long and in my report), but our entire education system (as well as all books, movies, research journals, and all other sources of media) come from a single source, and they have for over 100 years (multiple generations). I like to call that source The Trust, but you can call them the Rockefellers. It's not entirely accurate, but for now it's close enough.
I am making this post because people often don't understand what "trust" is. Nor do they understand what "critical thinking" is. The reason they don't understand these things is because they have been taught that they are something different than what they actually are. These confusions give the PTB control over our beliefs and our actions. They are fundamental control mechanisms for The Matrix. Here I will discuss these concepts a little bit.
This is part of a longer report, so forgive the flow, as it may relate to other content, and forgive some of the normie centric stuff. The report is intended for an audience that still thinks vaccines are God's gift to mankind.
What is critical thinking?
Looking up the definitions I am very unsatisfied with what I find. In addition to a lack of agreement, the definitions seem nebulous, even circular. You would think something so fundamental would not be that difficult to explain. Stanford’s philosophical encyclopedia says this about it:
Critical thinking is a widely accepted educational goal. Its definition is contested, but the competing definitions can be understood as differing conceptions of the same basic concept: careful thinking directed to a goal. Conceptions differ with respect to the scope of such thinking, the type of goal, the criteria and norms for thinking carefully, and the thinking components on which they focus.
So its an “educational goal” that has apparently completely failed since it can’t even be defined in a satisfactory manner. What else?
John Dewey (1910), who more commonly called it ‘reflective thinking’. He defined it as:
active, persistent and careful consideration of any belief or supposed form of knowledge in the light of the grounds that support it, and the further conclusions to which it tends.
Mmkay… I find when something seems difficult to define, its best to look at the roots. The etymological dictionary is quite nice for this, though we have to… think critically about what it says to piece it all together:
critical: critic + -al "involving judgment as to the truth or merit of something"
-al: relating to
critic: from Greek kritikos "able to make judgments," from krinein "to separate, decide" (from PIE root *krei-"to sieve," thus "discriminate, distinguish"
So to be critical means to judge the truth or merit of something. An important implied statement is that if you are being critical, it is you being critical, i.e. you are the “critic” in “critical thinking”. It is you applying judgment as to the truth or merit of something. It is you that is being discriminating (discerning). It is you that is deciding for yourself after consideration.
think: "imagine, conceive in the mind; consider, meditate, remember; intend, wish, desire"
To think means (according to this) to conceive in the mind. It’s perhaps a bit narrow of a definition, but for this purpose I think (conceive in my mind) that it will suffice. This suggests it is possible to “think” without being critical, but it is not possible to be critical without thinking. Thus, using the etymological dictionary, my conclusion is:
critical thinking: to be discerning and think for yourself, applying your own judgment, after consideration, as to the truth or merit of something.
(Emphasis because these ideas are so often skipped in our teaching.)
That wasn’t so hard. I like mine a lot better than any of the other “competing definitions” I’ve seen, though I had to use some critical thinking to get to it.
What would be the opposite of critical thinking? It could be “any thinking that is not applying your own judgment as to the truth or merit of something” (not being critical). It could also be “not thinking at all” (not thinking).
On an unrelated note (but totally not unrelated at all), what does it mean to trust?
trust: reliance on the veracity, integrity, or other virtues of someone or something
belief that someone or something is reliable, good, honest, effective
To “trust” means to rely on someone else (e.g. to make judgments, or decide what is truth) for us. To be “critical” means to rely on yourself to make judgments, or decide what is truth. To trust means to assign your critical thinking over to someone else. Trust, in this context, is the opposite of critical thinking since you are giving up the “you” part of the critic and giving it to someone (or something) else.
Why would we trust? Sometimes there just isn’t enough time to do a whole lot of critical thinking or to be skeptical. Imagine couples figure skating without trust. It isn’t that I think there is never an appropriate time for trust. What I mean to say is, most of the time we are trusting, we aren’t realizing we are doing so. We are instead doing what we were trained to do (trust) instead of critical thinking, which is what we should be doing.
For example; we are told:
- Listen to your mother (but we really mean trust).
- Listen to your teacher (but we really mean trust).
- Trust your doctor.
- Respect your elders (but we really mean trust).
- Trust the experts.
- Trust the science (which is the opposite of what scientists are taught about science).
- Trust what you see on the news, they can’t lie because you are being shown the truth.
Other than what we are told, we trust certain institutions as well. For example:
- We trust government institutions, even though almost no one trusts any politicians.
- We trust large corporate institutions even though they are basically conflict of interest machines.
- We trust books if they are old.
- We trust what someone says, if someone we trust also trusts them. Trust is like a virus, it spreads unabated within whatever echo chambers we belong.
- We trust leaders, because they are more important than us, and there must be a reason they are more important than us.
In other words, we give up our own critical thinking in all of these circumstances.
All our lives, from cradle to grave, this is what we are taught; to trust these sources. I do not mean to suggest we should not be listening to our mothers, or teachers, or doctors, or experts, etc. On the contrary, I think that listening is an excellent path to understanding Reality. What I am trying to say is, listening to someone's argument and then thinking critically on it, and trusting someone are not the same thing. In fact they are, at least sometimes, at odds.
Give ol' Slyvee some doots. He worked hard on this excellent write up!
I really enjoyed my English 101 class in College. He didn't teach English, instead used reading to teach critical thinking. He would often lay traps out for his students, like give a reading on not always agreeing with what you read just because its in a book.. then he would give a reading which was clearly sexist, but from a women's point of view and would have the class discuss it, before getting to me. He knew I was going to disagree with the class. So they would say how she was right and had great points and I would talk about how sexist her assumptions were, and he would agree and go off on the class for ignoring the first reading. It was a fun class especially since it was a rare experience where I could stand up for my views without wondering if my grade would be impacted.
I had very few teachers in my scholastic career that allowed critical thinking. I had only 3 that encouraged it. I remember more about what they had to teach than any other courses.
Same, I had an English teacher who taught me to read between the lines of what being said in a book or poem. Made use use that part of our brain "what do you see" instead of "what is the answer the teacher wants to hear" literally the difference between a reguitiator, and a free man
I trust almost nothing in this life. I've been that way since I was a child. People at school, work and in my family sometimes groan to see me coming because I had a thousand questions that never seemed to be answered or could be answered. I stopped trusting these people.
It wouldn't surprise me that most of us here whether or not we critically think well are open to other ideas because we have a hard time with trust.
An excellent write up OP
Exactly... I always been told my "trust issues" were a flaw.
unbreakable you are not alone i was same always asking what if? how come? what about? and now what a time to be alive so many of us on the forums and i see so much of it on Truth Social.
Trust is something smooth brains do. For example "Trust The Science".
Smart people question everything.
Same for me. Never fit in and asked way too many questions. People (adults) said I was annoying. Drained me of all trust in the people around me.
An absolutely excellent post.
Question Everything. Always.
Hey think for yourself!
Are you being disagreeable? Why can’t you just “get along”? 😂
Excellent comment. I came here to criticize CRT but I can’t add to that. “Criticize”; (my Def) to disagree with another’s judgement of what they view as fact. Further…to dissolve one’s trust in another’s view.
Hey, GREAT!! I truly appreciate this, and will dig-in. I’ve found some excellent nuggets perusing goodreads too. I like the statement “ because marxist ideas are filled with garbage word salads on purpose”. I HAD a friend who worked for a while in Moscow in a joint NASA project…we worked together on some engineering projects. Problem was he became a full-blown commie and I just couldn’t stand his empty rhetoric to the point of anger. It was interesting debating him on occasion but it was a tiresome effort as he wasn’t objective and I basically told him to FO. Those who believe in even the most basic tenets of that failed ideology are like a parasitic virus. Infuriating.
Brilliant post! I could do with another on lateral thinking too. I'm on the intuitive side of 'thinking' a lot of the time. That's what awakened me mostly to these shenanigans. I'm loving the logic of all the anons and the hard won research you've all done. It cements my dreaming.
Definitely worth a re-read and so apropos. 👍🏼
A lot of people here have lost that skill over the past 2 years and it's time they relearn it.
@ u/slyver .... this is a post after my own heart!
thank you!
As a wordnerd I wish I could upvote this more than once
Well done, anon
Super important. Science is never "settled". It's never forbidden to question, analyze, or contradict what scientists have said. To do so is the definition of totalitarianism. [They] are seeking to control the TOTALITY of human existence, right down to our understanding of male and female as genetic distinctions.
Yes, I expand that concept in another section. It is very important that people understand that to a scientist (a real one), and by its founding principles, "the science" is completely untrustworthy. In fact it must be proven wrong. We don't "prove the null hypothesis" for nothing.
Critical thinking separates wheat from chaff.
At least 80% of people do not want to have to think. They want to party and be told what to think.
I have a feeling the GA is intended to show people that they must think for themselves. They don't want to, because they have been trained to not want to. People have been trained (intentionally) to pursue pleasure, empty enjoyment, sensationalism, the accumulation of things (consume), and inanities. We have been taught that that is "what is best in life."
I think the GA is going to force people to think for themselves; those that survive the lesson anyways. "Only at the precipice will people find the will to change."
It's gonna be rough. The vast majority are not yet driven to change. Too many still trust.
On the plus side, it used to be far less people willing to think for themselves, so we've come a long way. We just still have a ways to go yet.
I ❤️ yer 🧠
Your absolutely, fundamental missing piece is that God's Word is the source of all Truth, and Jesus is both the "way, the truth, and the light." In John we learned, " In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word WAS God...He was with God in the beginning."
I would encourage you to also include the trivium: the biblical trivium is knowledge, wisdom, and understanding. The classical (Greek, Roman) trivium was grammar, logic, and rhetoric. An excellent book is Teaching the Trivium: Christian Homeschooling in a Classical Style. Edit: typo
Wisdom comes from healthy discernment in all things. Always question “knowledge” unless it’s of God. (The only trust that doesn’t require being earned). Understanding requires empathy; to temporarily place one’s analysis of another’s view or situation as your own.
Who wrote the bible? Who really wrote the bible?
You believe the bible is absolute truth. You believe that no fuckery can have possibly happened within that body of work because it says so itself. For two thousand years people have been taught to believe that one thing.
Yet we know that the bible, as we know it today, received a final edit by a self proclaimed worshiper of the Sun God (known as Moloch in some circles), one Emperor Constantine who performed this act of Religion Creation for the sole purpose of uniting the disparate kingdoms of Europe back under one Roman Empire. He performed this act of Religion creation over three centuries after the death of Christ (imagine how much we have gotten wrong, or otherwise lost from three hundred years ago in our history). The Christian Religion took hold over all Europe because the beliefs were codified into law by that same Emperor. It solidified his rule as absolute, and even Divine. Prior to that codification certain topics were not believed as Truth, including the Trinity (as espoused in Christian canon). On the contrary, the Trinity is a concept of other religions, and it's inclusion was not only by force, but to appease the other religions (what you would call "Pagan") at the time in this forced joining and Religion codification.
This looks at the idea of the Trinity having its origins going back many thousands of years all across the world, It does not talk about the exact same Trinity as the foundational tenet of Christianity, but rather a triune idea of God (the father in Christianity), God the Word (Jesus aka The Messiah in Christianity), and God Sophia (wisdom aka The Holy Spirit in Christianity). In this historical reference, and if one takes out the Nicene doctrine and rereads Jesus' teachings, one finds the Trinity more as the trinity (lower case), and that God is one God (the creator). God's word is all of us and God's wisdom is also all of us. Part of the whole, but not the same. Not the same level (because we are trapped on Earth, or we believe that we are).
Many books that were otherwise cannon at the time were left out. Many books (Revelations specifically, but not exclusively) have questionable authorship. It is this very book, whose authorship is so controversial that "closes the loop" on the beliefs, and says "everything is in here, don't question it, don't think critically about its contents" (paraphrased). Many translations are highly questionable, and indeed, many of the sects of Christianity (the Religion) are based on completely different interpretations of key sections of the bible. Of course the Religion you belong to got it right, and to say otherwise is heresy.
But you trust these people, because the bible says you must. It self-proclaims itself as the absolute Truth, and nothing can be added or subtracted, AKA it can't be questioned. You MUST NOT THINK CRITICALLY ABOUT THE BIBLE.
Yet it was created exactly and precisely in the form that it was, leaving out many gospels and other historical books purely to unite an empire under one divine right of rule.
Many of the teachings of Jesus can be found in other gospels left out of the bible. They are quite enlightening, and I suggest you read them. Give up on the "the bible is complete, with no possible fuckery" idea and think critically about it.
I've never looked at Constantine's supposed involvement in an edit, only his pagan influence on the church in general. However, being married to a man who enjoys researching the texts, the resurrection, creationism, and evolution... I'd have to say that influence never has come up. I can ask him or research it, but to address your main concern... yes my husband and I have both read C.S. Lewis and many other authors. All examine the evidence for Christ. That's how Lewis started his journey. My strongest source is my personal relationship with Jesus Christ, who I've known for a very long time now. He's real and has rescued me from myself more times than I can count. Through practical experience I've found the Word of God to be true, reliable, and trustworthy. It's why, though the enemy has tried to destroy me many times, God just works it all for my good. I've had my share of trouble, but how many women can claim what I can claim... by the measures that matter to me I'm incredibly blessed. God is good. His Word is true. I know nothing in life to be more true than God's love and faithfulness. His mercy to me is boundless...I could never describe his love adequately. He's done everything from leading me to a warehouse sale with the very thing I desperately wanted in it... to binding up my wounds and giving me joy in my darkest moments. Jesus IS the Word. The Word is living and it heals people.
outstanding post yet again. Blind trust and the abandonment of critical thinking is simple laziness, yet another pitfall that evil draws us all towards.
As to earlier posts here talking about the few good classes in school they had, I had a high school psych class that did nothing but teach the different forms of marketing- bandwagon, appeal to authority, etc. Excellent primer on the basics of human control. it was my second best class after typing hahah.
Saved.
Great post!
"Nobody loves me but my mother and she might be jiving too." Trust yourself.
BB King RIP.
I don't know how or when this happened, I think probably real early on, but I don't trust ANYONE that doesn't gain my respect by their actions.
It's been going on for a very long time, though it has waxed and waned in effectiveness depending on the time and place. This particular iteration of The Matrix (the control of beliefs through schools, books, media, etc.) has been going on since the early 1900's.
There is no reason to "trust" anyone ever. Listening and trusting are not the same thing. Listen and then think for yourself, never trust. Or at least recognize that you are not thinking for yourself.
I suppose that's the more important thing. I "trust" other people all the time, but only for shit I don't care about. If it's important, I trust absolutely no one. Not even a smidge, no matter who they are, how many times in the past they have been right, how much I care about them. No one gets my critical thinking if its important.
Critical thinking = common sense + analytical thinking in the application of being aware of problems and able to solve them.
Common sense is social situational awareness, aka people or soft skills with the goal of being aware of problems.
Analytical thinking is in depth knowledge of a particular subject, aka book/technical or hard skills to know and understand the complexity of a problem needing to be solved.
Please read the OP. The title was not a question in earnest but one of rhetoric.
Critical Thinking is neither "common sense," nor "analytical thinking," nor any combination thereof. I suggest you read the OP to understand not only what it is, but why it is most certainly not either of those things. Those are separate things from critical thinking, which is judging for yourself the validity of things.
"Common sense" is in a way also the opposite of Critical Thinking. Common sense, both by definition, and by common application is "thinking by consensus." It is the "Sense" (thinking, thoughts) that are common (consensus). That is not thinking for yourself, that is thinking like everyone else.
"Analytical Thinking" is not depth knowledge, and it is not critical thinking. It is applying the skill of analytics to thinking. It is problem solving. That has nothing to do with "judging the validity of things for yourself". You can think analytically and not think critically, you can think critically and not think analytically, you can do both at the same time. They are not the same thing at all.
You might consider analysis as a portal into critical thinking, as the question of:
Who does what, when, where in what manner with which methods and means in furtherance of what goal at which costs and benefit to whom by which evidence?
It does not mean you have indeed come to the point to make a judgement. Judgement is based on your values, i.e. your time preference. So, not your wife's, parent's, employer, or otherwise. Just your time preference. And this judgement will move into wisdom or stupidity.
Common sense may be perceived as that which is common to the majority and representative of a people in general. It does not take a rocket scientist to .... you know the drill.
If someone were to point the receiving end of a gun in your face, you do not need critical thinking to perceive your living daylights are about to be extinguished. And if you put your cat in the magnetron oven to dry it .... common sense .... no, even that is what some people fail to live up to.......
However, if you see ballot stuffing than obviously common sense tells you that the election was secure and honest.
Great post. One lifetime is short, it is impossible to know or learn everything so trust us essential for a functioning society of specialists.
But easily misused & abused.
The old classical education used to be the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) followed by the quadrivium (maths, music, geometry, astronomy).
The trivium would lead to a good grounding of critical thinking and how to recognise means of persuasion & manipulation. The quadrivium… I find a fascinating combination, but sadly the times we live in leave less time to spend diving into that.
You are confusing "listening" with "trust." We should listen, but we should never trust. To "Trust" is to believe that someone is telling you the Truth. You don't have to believe something is Truth to decide to follow someone's advice. The recognition that you don't know what the Truth is, nor does anyone else, is the key here. The Doctor isn't right, he is just giving you an expert opinion. Recognize it for what it is. It is an idea, based on experience, it is not Truth.
Good distinction…
I had an English teacher who opened my mind more than anyone else
He would make us read poems and say, "What is the meaning behind this poem?"
Literally fired up my critical thinking that fay, "Wjat message is actually being conveyed" introduced to hidden meaning. Thank you high school English teacher
First learn logic. Then hear both sides. Then draw a conclusion.
The skills a growing child require for a rich and fulfilling life should be taught early as Critical Thinking 101. How will humanity progress to a Type-1 civilization unless young minds aren’t pushed to their limits? Viewing our current dystopia I see us as a failing race due to the majority of society trusting psychopathic concepts and emulating abject human trash placed on bloody pedestals. I sense a pre-coffee rant coming so I’ll leave it there. I love posts where we’re pushed to utilize our God-given anon skills of critical thinking. Nice job Slyver 💥 Edit; I hijacked a hippie phrase when I was young that has served me well (usually)…”Question Authority”.
Oh but how difficult it is, not to favor those objective morsels, with my subjective desires. ; )
I was somewhat in agreement with most of your post, until you got here.
The objective truth (AKA Truth (upper case)) Is exactly what It Is. I suggest it is not anything you can define in words, It simply Is. To listen is to understand. To attempt to speak it will automatically miss a great deal of it, because our words are limited in capacity. To miss any of it, is to speak not the Truth. At best you may get lucky and elaborate pieces of it.
To suggest that consideration of something is "a waste of mental energy" suggests that to not consider that same thing would be a more efficient use of energy, and I assert there is no way you can know that for certain.
Yes, peoples' focus on Musk is funny, and seems silly, and all sorts of WTFism is going on there, but it is also interesting, and investigations may bear fruit. The gestalt of many minds contemplating a single topic with the intent of uncovering pieces of Truth can bring about all sorts of wonderful discoveries. Who knows what the Musk story is, or what hidden fruits may be on that tree. Do I think there is wasted energy there? Yes, but to say that statement is "objective truth" misses completely what "objective truth" Is, and that it can't be spoken using our limited words. It also misses that that phrase is itself inherently redundant.
What is wrong with bias? Bias guides investigation. Such "bias" is often called "intuition." Bias is not a problem, trusting your biases is. Believing you "know the truth" is a problem, but listening to that guide inside you that we call bias is, I assert, a great thing. It can lead to fantastic discovery. It doesn't always of course, and if you hold on too tightly to your biases that you can't see evidence to the contrary then you lose the capacity to appreciate What Is. But by itself bias is great, and should not be rejected, but embraced. Just don't hold on too tightly.
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
The Truth is whatever It Is. I do not disagree with your assessment on the Musk situation, but I would never call it "the objective truth" because I don't know what the Truth is. Plus, as I said, "objective truth" is a redundant statement. If you are truly "objective" (AKA you have completely lost all capacity to be subjective) then you can only speak the Truth. I suggest that such a thing is impossible, and that humans will only ever be subjective when they speak, at least with any of the tools of language we have available to us today.
You seem to be really hung up on subjective and objective. I really don't think you appreciate what it would take to be Truly objective. The best you can do is be less subjective than you were in some other instance. I don't think you can ever actually reach "objective".
One can not cease to be what One is. Like Truth Is what It Is, You are what You are. Don't worry so much about being "objective." Just try to be honest with yourself. This will keep you from holding on to your useful biases too strongly that you can't be honest in your speech, thought, and investigations.
If the objective truth is the distillation of all components into the most fundamental forms, void of subjectively, how can an "objective lie" exist? Is the "objective lie" born tru the qualification process, and is not all qualification subjective? Does the objective truth only exist in the observational state? Is not even the thought process required to observe the "objective truth" a contamination of the "objective truth", as it requires prospective? I don't disagree with you, just wondering where that line exist.
"no way out of the mess that we're in save for mass acceptance of the truth."
The Hegelian hope that the slave can safely evict the master from his mind? It would certainly be the most amicable of all solution.
The rest I'll chew on for a while. :+)
Fact.
Indisputable fact.
What is the difference?
Coloration. i.e. bias. Bias is your conviction, your predetermined position, a preposition. Note the first definition OP used:
careful thinking directed to a goal.
If the goal is to reach a judgement, I would say, yeah, that definition fits. However, a goal can be a great deal of things. The reports written by people in business and government are usually written towards a pre-determined goal. And gone is the critical thinker. And should you, as a critical thinker, pose critical questions to it, you are being derided, cut off, and considered not a teamplayer.
Why? Because teamplayer is the superimposed value, a container word imparting the idea that you cannot and must not step outside the boundaries of the group, lest you want to suffer the consequences. This is a classic example of group-think!
Back to the difference. When we use language we are used to employing this in a social setting. That is why we use a lot of adjectives, or coloration. This serves a perfect objective: to discover commonalities, or shared values. We call it communication. Only after this process we move to the point of contract, i.e. get the girl, make babies.
The difficulty is in the discovery phase, as it presupposes the coming together of equal parties. Mostly it is not. Why, because we tend not to know who we are and how we operate. This favors the strong! the energetic, the easy talker, the smooth talker, the fraud.
Coloration therefor is an emotional process, a process of manipulation.
Consider now title 18: 241, 242. Deprivation of the rights under the color of the law. It is to some extend, amazing such a title should even exist. Unconstitutional is what it is, right? It seems like people even a way of weakening objectivity into subjectivity, and what is set in stone, to consider it as not existing.
There is so much here I disagree with, but instead of going through it all, I am going to try a different approach.
No it is not. There is bias in each and every step of scientific endeavor, and that is unavoidable. When we take measurements, we leave some out. For example, "I bumped the table here, so I will leave this measurement out." If our data is really bad, we will assume we made a mistake in the protocol and do the entire thing again. When we present data we choose how to present it. The data can be presented in many ways, but we choose, in our subjective process, the way we think best represents our thoughts, our conclusions. Someone else repeating the same experiment will come to different conclusions, even if only slightly. They will present their evidence in a way that represents those conclusions. In a body of pictures in biology for example, we will select the one picture that best represents our subjective conclusions. Someone else might pick something completely different.
Our intuition, our biases guide these subjective decisions. And there is nothing wrong with that. It is the debate that leads us closer to the Truth in science. Science itself is designed specifically to never make claims of Truth because that closes the door on future investigation and debate, which is the opposite of the founding principles of science.
I have been trying to explain that to be truly objective (completely distinct from self AKA subjective) is to speak the absolute Truth (AKA they are redundant). But we can't speak the absolute Truth, we don't know what it is and our language is too limited to speak it. Our definitions of things miss most of what a thing is. Science never speaks the Truth, because it can't. That is not its purpose. We never close the door in science, because it is impossible to say anything True using the scientific process. It's goal is to get closer and closer to the truth. Like taking sum(1/2^n) (i.e. always taking a step halfway to your goal), it never reaches 1.
Neither of these values is unchanging. The acceleration due to gravity depends on where you are, and changes from moment to moment, even in a stationary place. The 9.81m/s^2 is an approximation. It changes all the time. The speed of light is exact, but it's exact by definition, and only within a certain context. It is an average speed of light. A photon can travel at any speed it wants (Heisenberg uncertainty principle), but on average it will travel at c. In other words, it is entirely possible to set up an experiment and get variance within that measurement, albeit according to QM, the experimental setup would have to be very small.
Even the word "the speed of light" is a misnomer. It is more appropriately called the speed of information. And yet we have many theories that allow for the possibility that information (or light) can travel at any speed by altering spacetime itself (both QM and GR allow for non-locality, in fact they practically insist on it). The very idea of spacetime, upon which all theories of the movements of the heavens are based (including the speed of light) is an unproven axiom with a great deal of controversy. We have had to make up the ideas of "Dark Energy" and "Dark Matter" just to hold onto those axioms even though there is zero other evidential support for those ideas.
The point is, all of the things you think are "objective truths" are not at all. They are subjective ideas that do not capture the whole of a thing. They are fraught with controversy or subjective interpretation. The greatest breakthroughs in physics (or science in general) come from subjective bias AKA intuition bucking the standard (consensus) view and thinking of things in completely new and subjective ways.
That's not what I said. In fact, I said exactly the opposite. "It Is what It Is" is a clear statement of "Truth". You keep using the phrase "objective truth," and I am trying to show you that "objective truth" and Truth are the same exact statement.
I never stated we couldn't understand Truth, I said we couldn't speak it. Our language is insufficient. Our definitions are incomplete in every possible sense. We say, "here is a spoon," for example. Well, what is a spoon?
Does that really define the Whole of what you hold in your hand and call a spoon? Maybe its a shiny, curved metal thing. Maybe its a bunch of metal ions in a specific mixture (alloy) that is hard and conducts electricity.
Our current best model of Reality (quantum electrodynamics (QED)) suggests the most accurate way to look at things (most likely to agree with measurement) is by writing down the equations of a bunch of waves and adding them up into one wave (even if it’s a little tedious on the scale of a spoon).
Each of the constituent waves are really just the one wave, and there is no way to distinguish the waves of say, any one particular electron. In fact, there is no way to say the resultant waveform is really made up of a bunch of little waveforms, that is instead an idea that we have, and the math works out pretty well. But really, there is only one wave. This wave is connected to all other waves. It is connected to the "waves" that make up the hand holding the spoon for example. They also are completely inseparable except through thought. That separation is not truly appropriate, because the system is described most accurately by the single wave. Extend that out to the whole of the universe, which is, through QM, most accurately described by a single wave. The abstraction of the individual "spoon" wave is an idea that is an approximation of the most accurate form of the equation.
Maybe the Truth is, there is no “spoon.”
There is a Truth, but we can't speak it because our words are insufficient. That doesn't mean we can't understand it. I suggest the best way to understand the Truth is to stop trying to speak it, and learn how to listen. It speaks to us all day long, every day of our lives.
That is the opposite of the truth, as I have explained above. Bias is a fundamental (inseparable) part of the process. Explain what it is to eliminate a suspected bad data point other than bias? Just because we can tie it to an event, does that make it sound decision? Yet we do it all the time. That is our intuition saying, we should remove this because when you bumped the table, the detector went BRRSST.
And it is perfectly sensible to do that. Either that or repeat the whole experiment if necessary. What we would not do is include that data point and go through all the process of explaining why because then we would never get anything done, because these sorts of human errors occur all the time.
Science is not about removing bias. If it were, we wouldn't have to debate the science. It would be the truth. It is DEBATE that is the real strength of science, not "lack of bias" in measurement, presentation, etc. That is a myth and has nothing to do with the reality of how science actually proceeds, and has since its beginning. That is why it is oriented, geared specifically, towards debate, because the complete elimination of bias is impossible.
Excellent post!
People who reject truth can never think at all. Let alone think critically.
Where is anything about the goal being truth?
The pursuit of truth is what it’s all about. But they can’t say that, because God is Truth.
Something you can't find around here!