by Spectrum 19 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
This idea was put forth many centuries ago- it has a name- Occam's Razor. Wikipedia has a good explanation. Not many religiously inclined people would like to adhere to Occam's Razor techniques because followed to their conclusion it all but rules out the existence of a G-d who is actively involved in the affairs of mankind. It all comes down to faith in the belief system you have to explain the universe and it's creation , the purpose of man and belief in an afterlife.
peace,
Moshe
Your post infers that unless we are pure of mind, like a god might be, the truth can never be revealed to man.
Maybe we as humans suffer from the Heisenburg's uncertainty principle.
Yes indeed! But I would argue that the act of perception itself renders the concept of "pure mind" a logical impossibility. Perception, as Kant pointed out, requires the existence of categorical imperatives, we need filters at the sensory and cognitive levels of analysis to extract "meaning" from anything entering the brain. For a hypothetical god to have a "pure mind" (i.e. to be able to perceive reality in and of itself, as it actually is...) would require his/her mind to be beyond perception and most importantly, beyond the reliance on sensory filtering. Neuroscience has established that the human brain filters incoming sensory information on multiple levels, all of which is coloured by background "motivational" influences (we see what we want to see, we hear what we want to hear, etc). This is simply the way the human brain has evolved and cannot work in any other mode.However, given the multiple levels of neural filtering that actually takes place in everyday life, its a miracle we can even form a coherent picture or "idea" of the reality around us. A classic example of when this system breaks down is schizophrenia, where a complete fracture between reality and our "idea" of reality takes place.
Still:
By that reasoning neither you or the world around you exists
Which bring me back round to Poppers point, that we (and the world around us) aren't how we generally perceive ourselves. So many layers of artificiality...
Heat them in the crucible and the molten "truth" distills out.
Woman with big butt: "Baby, does my butt look fat in these jeans? "
Man not hesitating for a second: "No."
He took the path of least resistance. What is truth?
serendipity,
"Woman with big butt: "Baby, does my butt look fat in these jeans? "
Man not hesitating for a second: "No."
He took the path of least resistance. What is truth?"
Are you trying to say that a womans butt is enough to ruin this hypothesis we've carefully elaborated in this thread?!!!
Spectrum:
Surely you know better than to ask that question
~running and ducking~
The Wayfarer
by Stephen Crane
*********************************************
I know when I left the JWs and my parents home at 18 it was a very hard thing to do. I would have been much easier to just live the lie and not rock the boat. Staying home would have been the path of least resistance...yet it was not the path of truth. I know when I want to see the truth of what one of my students is going through, it takes a lot of work and time. It is much easier to just believe the surface explanations......that are not the truth. So, no. As a rule, I don't think the Truth of something is the path of least resistance.
Spectrum, explain to me "...the path of least resistance" when it comes to truth.
Golf
Do a google search on the words PARSIMONY + SCIENCE
Lot to say about simplicity & truth.
Very, very interesting thread.
I have often thought along that way.
Perhaps every kind of "truth" calls for its own form of "stillness"; there is some activity to cease, drop or give up, in order to reach it -- or, rather, to be reached by it.
In many ways understanding is the opposite of doing.
(As Simone Weil put it, attention has nothing to do with knitting one's eyebrows.)
In a somewhat different direction, I wonder if anyone ever does anything else than following the path of least resistance. I mean his or her path of least resistance in a given situation and stage in life. So-called "heroes" and "cowards" alike. Really, could we ever have done anything else than what we have done, step by step, in the same sequence of circumstances?
Maybe there is not much difference between metaphysics and physics. If we knew everybody's moral mass and movement maybe we'd know the course anybody will take -- and "free will" would be nothing but another word for our ignorance of too many parameters.
