Index 
Human Nature Souls Epistemology
Rules and Snowflakes: “I don’t like the rules sometimes, but if I have to follow them, I’ll make damn sure everyone else does too. If they don’t, my fellow believers and I will kill them, or maybe just throw them in prison and ruin their lives, or fine them, or excommunicate them, or shun them, or hang-up on them, or raise an eyebrow at them. Anyway I get to punish them is at least one pleasure I can extract from the rules” (paraphrase of typical citizen) I keep coming to the conclusion that it is all so complex that our understanding is like a snowflake on the tip of an iceberg, I’ll let you chose how big the iceberg is. But even a snowflake can be beautiful. Perhaps our snowflake, the mind, opens a door to a path that truly lead to “understanding” of the complexity without generalization. Generalization (making “general, common, or lumped together") describes nothing but boundaries sometimes fuzzy between defined classes (usually expressed by word or math distinctions). Subclasses upon subclasses can be defined to approach an “understanding” in a specialized area, never reaching it; always adding other layers of subclasses in the approach. This creates complexity on its own, the plethora of classes created in pursuit of “knowledge” and “understanding” make impossible to include even a small part “all human knowledge” in the ken of one mind. Despite accepting notions of “collective understanding” which no one individual can attain, "individual understanding” is limited by heredity and experience and processing of experience by tools of heredity, such as "mind" and ATP production just outside mitochondria. Each person is but that snowflake on the iceberg of total human “understanding”. Thus each specialty, including philosophy is only one of 1000’s, no 10,000’s of classes of inquiry into only one facet of “understanding”. The course of human history, especially in the past few hundred years, has been to lead each individual to ever greater things he can’t understand. A long time ago I called it the “ignorance explosion”. We all agree “science” created “it”, whatever “it” is, even though we don’t understand “it” i.e. “it all”. For complex things like a high-speed, heavy-truck roadbed, no individual has the ken to complete it (from design to equipment driving to shoveling). It appears the “collective” mind can cause things, unless each individual learns what is needed to translate his "product" to the "buyer" down the line, including learning how from writing (systems engineering interfaces). |