Errors and Progress

errors and progress:

"i think generally history is put across as this catalogue of progress, as a grand accretion of knowledge, but there's something lacking, a recognition of error, or even that we could be wrong somewhat. it's all a little one sided."

"you think historians won't admit to mistakes made? it's all a glorification of the past?"

"something more insidious than that. it's like we make errors in our thinking, and we follow on from that, we build the craziness up until it almost consumes us, for decades or hundreds of years even, and then finally we recognize we were wrong and then it's wiped out, and we don't really talk about it again. it's not like it's a cover up. it's just this vacant time that's been lost."

"right, what were we thinking? so life is like the game of snakes and ladders? we make mistakes and back we go?"

"exactly. it's like, the truth is immortality. the very thought that you could be fundamentally crazy about reality or something in life is really frightening at some point for everyone, i think. and all the time you were crazy you were on the path to mortality. but i mean, even the thought that you might never know the truth about something important is pretty disturbing to anyone, right? and no one wants to really die, right? all this time spent being crazy isn't just not desirable, it's dangerous. it's hazardous to your health."

"but someone might say, we may never know the truth, that we cannot know anything for certain?"

"yes, and i think that's reasonable, but my theory is the truth fits better than a falsity. it's like it's ultimately easier to think about the truth than something that's false is the best i can put it."

"that makes sense. the truth works."

"like i have problems with belief about modern science. because i don't believe that people are powerless beings in a universe with fixed unchanging physical laws as it's put, that these scientific laws exist without the human element, so to speak, forever unchanging. i believe people are creative, sometimes very powerful beings. i wouldn't be shocked if it were put that great scientists were actually gods who created science not men who merely discovered it, that they had theories which they made real. they actually changed the way things work."

"so the world is more mental than physical. it's malleable by thought."

"yes. and that's why thought errors are dangerous."

"and Isaac Newton is the god of mechanics?"

"right, something like that. where science can't resolve something only says to me that something is false in the argument. it's like someone who has teleported knows the whole mechanical motion argument is false, but that's what the world seems. actually, nothing really moves as it seems, it's only the image that makes it seem so. that's the only explanation that works."

"i suppose it's one thing to teleport all the time in your dreams, i mean you move from one place to another in an instant, but another, quite shocking, to do it while you're awake. but how could it work, if physical laws have no original basis, that they were, in a sense, created later?"

"if it were true, you would have to imagine an earlier world, where things like these physical laws simply didn't hold, where objects behaved differently."

"so it's like the popular notion that magic existed hundreds of years ago to be replaced by modern science, that the world was a very different place a long time ago?"

"like that. the essence is that science really didn't exist hundreds of years ago."

"what else?"

"so i've thought about time and how a movie projector is supposed to work, and it's along the lines of best fit. the argument is that time and change are discrete, like the frames of the film passing through the movie projector at 24 frames per second. just as you couldn't show a infinite number of frames in the projector, time cannot be continuous, it cannot have infinitesimal change, change is discrete. it merely seems continuous like a movie does."

"but if change is discrete, are the states of real matter finite therefore?"

"well if they are finite, i guess that means repetition seems inevitable, but there is still the question of time how long states last and does that vary? but i guess it's still too early to tell. but discrete change doesn't necessarily mean there are finite states, does it?"

"i guess there still could be an infinite number of states. i'm going on like infinite is a good thing, aren't i?"

"yeah. nobody wants everything to happen, right?"

CLEARCHARGE