Science Forums 2

[ldsoftwaresteve]

Hmm. I think DoctorDick has something important that he's trying to get across. We can have all kinds of rhetoric to the contrary but it won't change my mind.

I've had a gut feeling about what he's trying to get across long before I heard him trying to get it across (assuming my gut feeling is in line with his understanding).

The point of the whole thing, I suspect, is to define what it means to be conscious and rational and capable of comprehending the nature of existence, which I fear is so different than our concept of it that we aren't even in the right ballpark with our maps. But that idea is not comforting in the least so we blind ourselves to it.

But we get by. If existence is the ocean, our understanding deals with the top layer of molecules, the ones that come in contact with the air and we are clueless about what drives it underneath or even how deep the water is.

But we pretend.

In the movie "Patch Adams", the old genius in the Sanitarium holds up four fingers to every person he meets and asks, "How many fingers do you see". I loved that guy and he wasn't agreeable on any level. But he had something important to get across, a different way of looking at things and of the blindspots that we can induce into ourselves.

At the base of any discussion about anything we have perception. If we have a blindspot about the nature of perception, we're blind to the most fundamental tool we use to relate to existence, and to the efficacy of our maps.

And that strikes at the term, 'rational'. If our perception is faulty, how rational are we?