REALITY, KNOWLEDGE AND TRUTH
The goal of independent thinking is to provide us with the tools we need to understand and estimate reality. We do this by two actions:
- By remove existing errors in our thinking that pass as correct knowledge
- By adding more correct knowledge
Only by having a sufficient amount of correct knowledge can we accurately estimate reality, and draw valid conclusions.
We will always be dependent on our knowledge base, and any unknown errors that it might contain. But as our knowledge base gets broader and deeper, fewer and fewer errors survive and the more relevant our thinking becomes, and the more valid our conclusions will be.
Reality
Reality is what is, what was, and what will be. Their is only one universal reality, and we all share it.
We don't create reality, it already exists. Reality is what is real, not what we wish were real--not what we imagine, project, visualize or hope is real. It is impartial, and doesn't care what we think is good or bad, right or wrong. It is vast, seemingly contradictory and without purpose or meaning. Reality just is.
Reality is everything that mankind has ever conceived of, and what he hasn't, can't, or never will imagine. It is the answers to all the questions on mankind's mind, and all the questions he has yet to think of.
Scientists try to discover reality, philosophers speculate about reality, and religions claim to know reality. We may never be able to prove or disprove what reality is, but that doesn't effect what it actually is.
There are not 6 billion different realities, but there may be six billion different perceptions of reality, each one based on someone's unique collection of experiences and knowledge. All these different perceptions are based on the one universal reality.
Knowledge
Knowledge is what we think we know about reality. But our knowledge is subject to the limitations our senses and our reasoning. We don't live in a binary world where we can prove things right or wrong, good or bad, true or false. We live in a world where we have to deal the limits of our senses. Therefore we have to think in terms of degrees of probability that a our information is "true" or "false."
With this in mind, lets consider 3 types of knowledge:
- Known
- Mis-known (mistakes/errors)
- Unknown
The known
Known information runs in a broad continuum of certainty from individual facts, to logical conclusions, to speculative theories.
- Facts are broadly cross-supported elements of information that closely correlate with other facts. Facts aren't necessarily true, but they have a high degree of certainty and they act like they are true. Or at least they have yet to act like they are untrue.
- Conclusions are knowledge logically derived from a set of facts.
- Theories are unproven conclusions drawn from a set of facts and their logical conclusions, which attempts to estimate unknown facts. A theory is a trial conclusion.
The mis-known (mistakes/errors)
"It's not what folks know that's the problem; it's what they know that ain't so." --Josh Billings
"I believe in general in a dualism between facts and the ideas of those facts in human heads." --George Santayana
The biggest obstacle to understanding reality is what we think we know, the mistakes and faulty logic that masquerade as correct knowledge.
- Errors in facts: Their are 2 types of
factual errors
Type 1 error is when you reject information that is true (consider it to be false)
Type 2 error is when you accept false information as being trueThe truth is when you accept true information, or reject false information
Accept Reject True Truth Type 1 False Type 2 Truth
- Errors in logic: more commonly known as
"Faulty Logic"
The unknown
The unknown falls into 2 categories.
- The anticipated unknown is something we are expecting and looking for
- The un-anticipated unknown
The scope of things still undiscovered is infinitely greater than all the things yet discovered. We suspect it's presence, and we constantly discover new parts of it. But the bulk of reality we simply know nothing about.
Therefore it is necessary to allow for the unknown in all of our thinking.
The truth
The "truth" or validity of any fact or theory, is it's power to produce predictions that are confirmed by observations. However, different facts and theories can produce similar predictions without being able to prove either of them true or false. "True" knowledge is the one that has the best predictive power.
"No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right. A single experiment may at any time prove me wrong." --Albert Einstein
All knowledge is subjective. There is no such thing as objective knowledge or absolute proof. We must think in terms of the degree of probability that our information is correct.