TRUTH
THE NATURE OF TRUTH
Truth & Memory
Be discriminating
Treat everything you see and hear with a healthy scepticism
Truth is something we are all convinced we know. As a student, and even if you read this and are not a student, I want to counsel you against just accepting everything you see, or read, or hear as true without challenging it in your mind – this is a key factor in learning and understanding.
If you go to page 21 of this web, ‘News Archive’, you’ll see a recommendation under the title ‘Media overload’ about judging the truthfulness of the media, by asking five key questions.
But there is a lot more to understanding truth than asking five questions, no matter how penetrating they may be. Think about the Introduction to my eight lectures on The Evolution of Scientific Thought. (see below)
Each of us takes what we read, see, or hear and interprets and judges it according to the information and ideas we have already stored in our memories, but which are not necessarily true. Sometimes we accept it as true because it suits us, or perhaps we don't know any better,or because we are more comfortable with it than with genuine truth that can sometimes be upsetting.
Physics tells us, these days, that the world we look out on with our eyes, is not really like that at all – we create what we see using our minds – our consciousness. What you are taught in school, or are being told by those who honestly think they are telling you the truth, may turn out to be quite limited or even incorrect. Not all, but many things I learned in school have changed dramatically over the years as new knowledge has become available.
Many personal problems, and the world's problems, arise because people adopt and act on beliefs that are untrue, that are only partly true, or that are misinterpreted. So, within reason, treat everything, even what you believe to be the Truth, with a healthy scepticism, with discrimination.
Scroll to the bottom of this page for the index and link to all the other pages in this web.
THE EVOLUTION OF SCIENTIFIC THOUGHT
What is Science? To understand scientific thought we need a definition of science. The word comes from the Latin word scientia, ‘to know’
We generally think of science as organized or systematized knowledge – at least that’s the impression given by scientific textbooks. But textbooks don’t spell out all the contentious arguments, and bitter battles that have gone on over the years between protagonists for alternative theories, and that still go on today. It is only when one theory becomes dominant for a time, or appears to be true, that it becomes enshrined in a textbook – but much of the material in textbooks becomes superseded and eventually out of date. There was a time when Newton’s theory of gravitation was the accepted norm in textbooks – now it is Einstein’s theory of General Relativity, of which Newton’s theory is only a special case – although still essential. Even today there are aspects of Einstein’s Relativity Theory that are under debate – and the great physicist himself did not accept some interpretations of Quantum Theory.
I want to provide some background thinking first, before we launch into science proper, and I’ll do this by asking the question that Pontius Pilate asked 2000 years ago, ‘What is Truth?’ How do we judge what is true? The answer to this question is very important to scientists, as well as you and me, who continually try to distinguish truth from falsehood.
Everyone looks at the same World, or Universe, the same central truth, but only sees and interprets it through his or her own very limited experience. A man who sees the outside of a box from above might dispute the description of a woman who sees the inside of the same box from below, but it is still the same box. Of course, he may be just chauvinistic. Looking at a bubble-chamber photograph in a physics laboratory, a student may see confused and broken lines, but the experienced physicist will see the familiar tracks of elementary particles as they collide, or are deflected by a magnetic field. Only after a sufficient period of experience will the student develop a personal mental kaleidoscope - see footnote - that is common with that of the physicist, and be able to inhabit and understand his world, and see what he sees. It is possible to drive to work over the same route, or travel by bus or train, for weeks, even months, and not notice, until it is pointed out by a fellow commuter, a sign, or a house, or a tree which is quite a feature of the landscape. While we look, most of us do not see many of the things around us, because we view the world through our personal kaleidoscope, and project our own patterns or paradigm, onto the world.
We only see what our kaleidoscope permits us to see. We filter out what is not immediately and personally relevant to us. It is this walling off from reality, and the projection of illusion, that separates people, cultures, religions, and nations – and scientists.
Emmanuel Kant theorized the same way – he called them categories – like seeing things differently through different pairs of spectacles. For example, if you wear a pair of inverting lenses for a few days your world will at first be turned upside down, but given time your mind will turn your perceived world the right way up again, the way you believe it should be – your mind forces a change in your perception so that the world out there again looks the same as your belief about it, not how it really appears through the lenses.
I had a similar experience when a surgeon replaced the cemented bones in one of my ears with a tiny piston to restore the hearing. I heard in that ear for the first time for many years. But every sound I heard was actually in the ear itself where the piston vibrated – a spoon dropped in the sink, an aircraft taking off. It was a number days before my mind reinterpreted the sound as coming from outside the ear and from the appropriate source. So my mind over-road reality and put up a different interpretation that said, the sound isn’t vibrating in the piston but is coming from somewhere else. Our minds are always overriding reality – the truth.
We judge ‘truth’ by a physical process called RESONANCE – new images and patterns compared subconsciously with existing patterns, or memories – either matching and being accepted as true, for us – or not matching and being rejected as false – like congruence in Euclidean geometry. Dr Oliver Sachs has written about someone, blind from birth, whose sight has been restored. The experience can be devastating – all they see is light and blur – and the reason is, I believe, because they have never previously developed subconscious memories or patterns with which their new sight can resonate and therefore recognize and interpret.
But where do these pre-existing patterns, or memories, come from? Teachers, parents, siblings and peers, books, people in authority. And from those with supposed credibility, who are generally believed without challenging what they tell us. This is particularly so when a person is young and impressionable – that’s why so much advertising is aimed at children. They build up a stock of memories that they carry throughout life, and believing them to be true, they influence attitude, emotions, and decisions in future years. These are ‘adopted’ truths.
Let me explain: We can divide truth into three categories – there is contrived truth, then there is adopted truth, finally there is absolute truth. We could add a fourth category called temporary truth.
A lot of Mathematics is a form of contrived truth. Because A=B and B=C then A=C. This is true because we have chosen to make it so by definition. In football and cricket and other games, and our legal system, the contrived or concocted rules lay down what is the truth for umpires and players, and the justice system, to follow. Of course, whether a particular event is inside or outside the rules or truth is always open to interpretation or misinterpretation, as commentators or lawyers are frequently heard to debate.
Adopted truth is the truth that we have adopted from those that went before us, imagining it to be true, and against which we measure truth for ourselves today by comparison with these past memories, using the resonance between similar patterns. (Because of its nature, or properties, energy has the inbuilt ability to exchange energy and information between similar resonating patterns – eg. radio). The system operates by a method something like Euclid developed to prove congruence: we lay the new fact over the old fact in the subconscious memory; if there is a resonating match then we label the new fact with as much truth as we gave to the old memory. There is no way of knowing whether such facts are really true or not – we just adopt them and accept them as true. We seldom if ever test them, and even if we did could we ever be sure we were touching truth?
We can never distinguish and isolate absolute truth, because against what would we measure it, against whose experience, against whose word, and with what tests? Undoubtedly absolute truth surrounds us on every hand but we can never label it as such because we can never prove that it will never change.
So we could add the fourth kind of truth – ‘temporary truth’. For example, the sort of truth surrounding a scientific theory that seems to be true until new data and theorizing overturn it, often against all the efforts of the inventors of the temporary truth to retain the status quo. This is happening all the time in the advancement and evolution of scientific thought.
In a small book, “Science in Search of Truth and reality’, Laszlo Szergo reminds his readers that the theories and models of nature developed by scientists are just that, theories and models. They are true and real only within certain conditions and limits – similar to ‘contrived’ truth. He points out that they should not be confused with absolute physical truth and reality. He also uses the flat earth example; it was supposed flat for most of our history, because a flat earth explained all the observations men were then capable of making, so it gave a useful model of what was seen and therefore believed to be true. And for generations all but a few resisted embracing the greater truth that the earth is round – and later, that it revolved around the sun. Even today many of our scientific theories possibly fit into the flat earth category – they are just theories that are useful models until something better turns up.
If you would like to understand what I mean by the Kaleidoscope then click on the web http://members.optusnet.com.au/~burnardmorey and go to the publications page to read the essay, Kaleidoscope - the Art of Self-Deception. It explains how we create our own private world which is distinct from everyone else's world.
Updated Feb 2010
How to Learn Faster, and Remember More. Energy, Pattern, and Resonance are the Keys to Memory, and Accelerated Learning.
Page
Three: The Accelerated Learning
Study Guide;
Find out about the author of this program of Accelerated Learning.
Page Five:
Order your copy of the
Guide to Accelerated Learning.
Page Six:
Should you listen to music while
you study?
Page Seven:
Thesleep
you get each night is important for your brain development, and
memory – see what medical experts have to say.
Page Eight:
Making
use of
the knowledge you memorize
is part of the learning and understanding process. See what the Nobel Prize
winning Physicist, Professor Richard Feynman, has to say about his experience.
Page Nine:
Some students have
trouble working with numbers, which are the basis of
mathematics.
The numbers game, NUMERO, has proved a winner worldwide in
helping people think faster with numbers.
Page Ten:
Want a photographic memory?. This page
explains how you can
improve yours.
Page Eleven:
Memory Pill? Food for Thought -
dietary supplements that can boost brain power and memory.
Page Twelve:
READING -
Fluent reading is essential for Accelerated Learning
Education - Poor Reading explained with exercises to overcome the
Problem.
Page Thirteen:
STRESS -
Its affect on Memory: How stress helps or hinders memory and
examinations.
Page Fourteen:
JOB SEARCH - CAREER PLANNING -
What to consider when planning a career and its future prospects.
A Look inside the Study Guide:
Pages – 15 to 20 – are
six ‘windows’ into the Study
Guide, how and why it works.
: Window One: Memory driven by Energy & Resonance
Page
Sixteen:
Window Two: Brain, Mind & Memory – a ‘Learning Machine’
: Window Three: Mind Maps & Memory Patterns
Page
Eighteen:
Window
Four:
Parents
Family Learning
: Window Five: Intuition – a hidden source of learning.
: Window Six: Aging Memory? – You can retrain your memory.
Twenty One:
News Archive
Page Twenty Two:
Training within Industry – Workplace Training –
Vocational Training
Page Twenty Three:
Truth
& Memory - treat
everything you see and hear with a healthy scepticism.
Page Twenty Four:
Drugs
& Memory - Prescription & recreational drugs.
Page Twenty Five:
Violence:
A growing problem in schools. Violence is Learned Behaviour. Video games and TV
can teach violence.
Page Twenty
Six:
The
Evolution of Scientific Thought:
Page Twenty Seven: An e-book on Understanding & Managing Stress
Links Page:
Shared links between websites that
have common goals and