Monday, August 14, 2006
Denying the Truth and Living with Fictions
There are countless examples of wrong beliefs interfering with the pursuit of truth or reality. I will name a few:
1. Heliocentric versus Earthcentric view of the Cosmos. The Church persecuted Galileo over his position over heliocentrism. One could also say that this is a debate over a relative truth versus an absolute truth.
2. Evolutionary Theory of Life as proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
3. The birth of Quantum Physics.
4. The proof that viruses cause some cancers (that some cancers are contagious).
5. The Tree of Life has three banches.
6. The proof that gastric ulcers are due to an infection and not stress.
It took fifty or more years for Rous' work to be recognized, twenty years or so for Woese and his new evolutionary tree to be accepted, and ten years for Marshall and Warren. And, we are talking Science and Medicine here.
Douglas Adams raises several interesting points in his Digital Biota Speech. He points out that religious ideas are treated differently than all other ideas when they likely shouldn't be. He also points out that some collective fictions we live with are for convenience, such as money, or the Bali Temple Calendar for growing rice in Bali. We shouldn't let our egos get in the way of Truth, but we shouldn't throw out ways of living that work because they're irrational or fictional on the surface either. The tone of this entry was about denying truth in the face of proof because of egoic delusion, but it became something else with Adams' perspective. It's about accepting our ignorance, proving ideas instead of blindly accepting them, keeping systems or ways of living that work instead of discarding them as outdated (another form of egoic delusion?), and living with perspectives that are at odds with everything we've been taught. It's about wisdom, using and proliferating useful knowledge and ideas to live better lives.
1. Heliocentric versus Earthcentric view of the Cosmos. The Church persecuted Galileo over his position over heliocentrism. One could also say that this is a debate over a relative truth versus an absolute truth.
2. Evolutionary Theory of Life as proposed by Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace.
3. The birth of Quantum Physics.
4. The proof that viruses cause some cancers (that some cancers are contagious).
5. The Tree of Life has three banches.
6. The proof that gastric ulcers are due to an infection and not stress.
It took fifty or more years for Rous' work to be recognized, twenty years or so for Woese and his new evolutionary tree to be accepted, and ten years for Marshall and Warren. And, we are talking Science and Medicine here.
Douglas Adams raises several interesting points in his Digital Biota Speech. He points out that religious ideas are treated differently than all other ideas when they likely shouldn't be. He also points out that some collective fictions we live with are for convenience, such as money, or the Bali Temple Calendar for growing rice in Bali. We shouldn't let our egos get in the way of Truth, but we shouldn't throw out ways of living that work because they're irrational or fictional on the surface either. The tone of this entry was about denying truth in the face of proof because of egoic delusion, but it became something else with Adams' perspective. It's about accepting our ignorance, proving ideas instead of blindly accepting them, keeping systems or ways of living that work instead of discarding them as outdated (another form of egoic delusion?), and living with perspectives that are at odds with everything we've been taught. It's about wisdom, using and proliferating useful knowledge and ideas to live better lives.
