Unmaking Sense

As responsible language-users we have to be mindful of the shifting sands of meaning and understanding upon which language depends and so how we are heard may very easily not match how we intend to speak. But the matter goes much deeper than that.

This episode should probably have come before 10.41. It is about not conceiving of duality in terms of conventional opposites but in terms of full alternatives that include opposites. The significance of the distinction.

Why educational opposites are all on the same side of the duality, and what is on the other.

We start to explore ways to escape self-reinforcing systems of thought that imprison us by confirming their own assumptions. How and why might we decide to try to break out of them?

We look at questions to do with the personal convictions and passions that drive scientific discovery, and in particular the visionaries who leads scientific progress. We contrast the ways of understanding the universe that are now standard for many physicists with the scepticism of such as Roger Penrose who think that things in physics are nowhere near as settled as some would have us believe. We reiterate the waste-paper-basket principle.

Thinking differently is always hard because old habits constantly return and threaten to take control. These few thoughts are even more random than usual as a result. Think of them as the recovered contents of a waste-paper basket.

Is our habit of looking for the causes of whatever happens, good or bad, and either blaming or praising ourselves for them as a result, occasioned by the realisation that if there is no legitimacy in blame, neither is there legitimacy in praise or credit? Is this blame/credit just another flawed feature of the unreconstructed dual space where things are easy to understand but unfortunately far from optimal, and so wrong?

The unknowable connection between what we read, hear, experience and what we do with our lives works both ways: we cannot predict and we cannot explain; everything is subject to many-layered uncertainty, unpredictability and flux.

Continuing to explore the idea that the relationship between what we take in with our minds may be completely unrelated to how we process it, which is to say why intellectual activity should never be thought predictable or “flat”.

We all legitimately have only as much authority as can arise from the voice of one person. To claim more, in the name of god, the laws of the universe, or the metaphysics of eternity, is to try to steal another person’s space. It is also a form of cowardice.