If you look at a plate and see two apples on it then the testing apparatus is your eye. Anyone else with properly functioning eyes would see the same to Apples.
When people tell you about their experience you are not using their testing apparatus directly. The person might have experienced an illusion. The person's memory might be faulty. When some children were asked about their childhood several falsely accused a parent of abuse. This was not deliberate but memory had constructed a scenario which never existed. A person might also be deliberately deceitful. The whole purpose of 'scientific truth' is to get rid of most of these difficulties and to show that the same tests applied by many different people will produce the same results. What scientists do not always understand is that this validity of testing does not equally apply to the interpretation of the results. The interpretation of results is more individual and relies on individual hypotheses and frameworks which have not themselves being tested. In science, proof is often no more than lack of imagination. We are sure that B must have been caused by A simply because we cannot imagine any other cause. So many errors in science have arisen just from this obvious limitation. With 'general experience' we are we accept as true what most people claim to have experienced. This gets rid of the problem of personal deceit, personal faulty memory and personal illusion. What it does not get rid of is 'selective perception'. The patterns formed in the brain insure that the brain perceives what it is most ready to perceive. This gives rise to prejudice, stereotypes, discrimination etc. If there is an existing prejudice that people from the land of Palia tend to be thieves then you will particularly notice any thieving behaviour by Palians. You will not notice that 98% of Palians are not thieves. You will not notice that thieving among Palians is not higher than among any other ethnic group. It is for these reasons that newspapers in many countries are forbidden to give the ethnic origin of arrested criminals unless this is directly relevant. Belief based on selective perception is one of the most dangerous forms of belief because it is genuinely experienced and genuinely believed to be true. 'Truth' based on selective perception is a particular form of 'belief truth'. Here we set up a framework of beliefs and values. Looking at the world through that framework reinforces the truth of that framework. Belief is that way of looking at the world that reinforces that way of looking at the world. Religious beliefs are of this type. Unfortunately, in order to confirm the truth of your beliefs you may need to show that other belief systems are 'not true'. This has historically meant war, persecution, pog-roms etc. On this list it means the usual childish squabbles and snide remarks, none of which assist the search for the TOE. Muslims accept Christians and Jews as 'people of the book'. They consider that Islam is merely the latest edition of the same book or religion. This may explain why historically, Muslims were much less inclined to persecute Christians or Jews in Muslim cities than the other way around. If you are confident you have much less need to prove yourself right. The need to prove yourself right and be seen to be right by others about something is the first great sin committed by anyone who wishes to learn how to be an effective thinker. There is a much greater need to be able to navigate a large terrain of ideas with a correspondingly large range of possible values. Judgement is always prematurely applied by poor thinkers and this is the source of much fallout, argy-bargy and is an enormous impediment to progress. True explorers have no map to refer to in their quest. Rather, they construct the map. Kim -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Everything List" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/everything-list. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.
