Fine, fine, I'll check it out. Although neither you nor Lord Mar addressed the point I made about the sinking ship. Why not?
Not sure if it's me being the you here?
Or change it to a gun. Even if someone believes/perceives the gun to be unloaded, it can still shoot somebody if it is, in reality, loaded.
The perception that the gun is unloaded does not alter the reality that it is loaded. Perception is not reality, and I'll bet you Swami Buttmuncher doesn't make his argument nearly as directly.
Very good problem. Sorry that I haven't got any good answers to it as of right now, though my first thought was that
the brain in the vat scenario might give a reasonable explanation. I will have to think about this one nevertheless
I could try to clarify what I mean though.
I think it was you who mentioned it earlier,
@The Human Q-Tip , the irony in that two persons can have access to the exact same factual basis of a given issue, but at the same time take a complete opposite stance of each other.
Where's the truth in a situation like this? Obviously not in the facts, because then they would have to agree, right?
In you being a lawyer, let's take a look into the court room scene of a horrifying murder case, where some poor woman has been slain in cold blood.
There are two opposing sides in court, the accuser and the accused. They have opposing notions about the exact circumstances of the situation of interest, obviously since the alleged murderer, the husband of the murdered woman, claims innocence. Therefore we need a third party, a judge and a jury, the more neutral the better, to listen out both sides and also the witnesses and then use this information to establish a time lime of the happenings. Based on this they will try to make the correct judgement of what
really happened that day.
The truth came out. The evidence spoke for itself. There was no doubt in anyone's mind that the husband was in fact guilty. So he's being put to jail, sentenced to life because of the brutality of the murder.
When he was in fact innocent. He was just a poor victim of being at all the wrong places to the wrong times, felled by witnesses who, because of their lacking understanding of the context, didn't really knew the actual meaning of what they saw and heard.
The husband continues to claim his innocence, but as we know:
So, because of the attention the case gets in the media, the husband becomes some kind of a official interest and he is thereby rewarded with his own Wikipedia page. Here his early years are described in a couple of paragraphs, about his problematic child hood, the lack of a father figure, the poor grades and the following drop out, his teenage loneliness and frustration etc etc. There will also be some paragraphs about the happenings that fateful night as concluded by the judiciary, followed by some information about the trial, with an overview of all the evidence pointing in the obvious direction of him being guilty. At last there will be just one single sentence, describing how the man died while still in prison, claiming innocence until he took his last breath of air.
So the man dies and the truth dies with him, as the actual murderer also dies with his secret. All that stands are the conclusions of the legal system and the references to it on Wikipedia; the official epistemological truth according to law and history.
But again, assuming that we don't know about the man's innocence either, what is the truth exactly?
I believe that this stand in connection with the point McKenna's making. He is talking about how epistemological reality is just an illusion, a common confusion about what the world really is. We confuse words with reality and tend to forget that words are only symbols, they are nothing but concepts of reality.
Perhaps a personal anecdote can explain this: I was in the woods once and there I saw a fallen tree. Its trunk was split open by a lightning and inside it crawled all sorts of colourful little insects. Then I saw this tree fungi, clinging itself to the side of the stump. It seemed to me that it was trying to suck out the last drops of life left in the hardwood. I stood there for awhile, watching this symbiosis, when I suddenly got the realisation that I couldn't make the distinction anymore between the tree and all its different parts, the fungi, nor the busy little insects. I couldn't separate them. To me they were all representing the same thing. It was as if I had forgotten the words
tree, fungi and
insects, which then made them in some way to disappear before my eyes in becoming one and the same.
What is
really happening in the discussions on this message boards? What are we exactly doing when we're discussing racism and police violence as in threads like these, or religion as has been discussed in others? Or what about a discussion about TTs actual worth in dollars?
To me, it is all a contention about truth. We have all our different viewpoints, our different perceptions of a given situation, and we are in some way or another, be it civil or not, trying to find out about what the truth really is. We are arguing about the nature of reality.
You can see this happen everywhere around us and that these strifes can be of consequence. Religious conflicts are about whose world view is the right one. Political conflict are about which stances and meanings are correct. Two neighbouring countries, who have been engaged in a decade long, seemingly never-ending war with each other, are having a childish fight about who
really started, whose fault the current conflict
really is. It also on a micro level: The disagreement between two siblings, which in the long run leads to the whole family to fall apart over the question: What was it dad
really did say about the inheritance just before he passed away?
But as you've said yourself: Even though we have access to the exact same factual basis, we can still end up being strong opposers to each other. In the end, life remains a mystery. No one's really got a clue about anything. We can take more or less educated guesses of course, but that's it. There exist no single reality other than what's happening NOW.