20100708 (J)
Journal: July 8, 2010
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Idea of God                                Epistemology

God is like pick-up-sticks, toss them and they form a geometric pattern by an exact history. Now use the geometry, the evidence, to decipher the history, the “truth”. Sometimes alternative truths are compatible with the evidence, so the “real” truth is not knowable, e.g. the history of pick-up-sticks or “Is there a God?” Logic, reason, rationality must always start with an assertion, so no matter how far back we push the assertions, it still remains unknowable by the logic on which it is based. Knowledge, truth, God, etc. are probability distributions, analogous to the position of an electron.

The pick-up-sticks are is a good one. When two sticks, based on their geometry, could have laid down at the same time, a relative likelihood of which was first of 50% could be assigned, making two histories equally likely. Likewise for 3, 4 ,….. infinite equally likely sequences of events. So knowledge about history becomes a probability distribution of sequences of events.

Other things arise in pursuit of the truth, the actual exact history. What if two sticks could have source events (i.e. falling before the other), but one seems more likely than the other? Infinite probabilities are possible for each event (e.g. could a upper one have fallen before the lower one it covers?) The law of superposition says “before” but it may have slipped under the upper after the upper fell.

So we may exercise some judgments, based perhaps on transitions of these or perhaps on common sense or others, and assign some probability other than 50%. Another problem is considering history to be a sequence of discrete events when it is a continuum at least to the quantum level of time, if that exists. In that the sticks may have rearranged themselves so the oldest is NOT on the bottom. Our perception then, the Law of Superposition, provides a wrong solution to the truth of the matter.

I am going to forget the fact that I may be a butterfly, dreaming I am a human as a very unlikely truth, though that is one among many assumptions I must make in approaching the truth. I find it almost as unlikely that God exists, but I can’t dismiss the possibility. The one paradigm that stretches back to the ancients is that reason, logic, mathematics is the best way to approach truth, a bias I share but a bias nonetheless, so even at that level there is ambiguity.

The truth is like a billowy white cloud on a hot summer’s day. Its beauty overwhelms; focus as you might, it doesn’t change, but look away for a second and look back again and you see a new but different beauty, itself seeming motionless. We will understand the full expression of truth when the clouds stop changing.

We can generalize away these sticky details such as “they were tossed and due to gravity and friction they landed “this” way. But that just pushed the ambiguity up one level to a more abstract statement; one more level removed from “truth” and “reality.” So what is reality? As far as I can tell it’s a lot of little tiny things, currently reduced to quarks and electrons, moving around and bumping into each other, well their force fields at least. Epicurus and Democritus had it about right 2400 years ago. But how do we get from there (tiny, invisible things) to here (thought and ideas)? By random variation that begins at the quantum level and began at the big bang: Eureka, maybe there even was a big bang.

I saw a 14 or 15 year old Hispanic girl today who really attracted me sexually. Bit tits and ass, plump stomach, and that look of a sexually awakening girl. Am I a pervert? Or as I think more likely, a typical sexual male? But we’ve learned to cover (hide) that natural desire behind with several layers of taboo. The taboo serving in part the purpose of permitting the completion of the education of girls.

All citizens are given the obligation of getting an education so that they can contribute to the growth of the engine that disproportionately reward the very, very few (~1%) compared to, say, the other 90%, where the few trick the many out of most of the money. Is this just?

Some pundits have said it’s OK for the rich to have so much, as long as it is achieved by a mutually agreed upon contract. So one buys a car and agrees to pay the contract that he probably didn’t read. So right away there is some trickery, mostly legal protections for the seller. Because both parties are not equally informed about the meaning or content of the contract the contract should be void. Further, the information provided by the manufacturer and his agent, the dealer, is fraught with the trickery of advertising which, mostly at subliminal level, promises for more than can be delivered; e.g. a better sex life or standard of living.