Truthiness

Post-Impressionism / Istvan Nagy/ Hills with blue shades

Mike sent a reply yesterday and I will post excerpts below along with discussion.  As always, there is stuff to be thought about and responses to be made.  I am starting this on Saturday evening while moonshining and trying to recover from an excess of pizza last night.  Don’t know why, just felt like pigging out.  Going over to the ‘Tucky manana for a combined belated birthday for the youngest and early Father’s day for yours truly.  I would be happy to give up the greeting card holiday for me, but Mothers Day is sacred and is not to be missed and mother’s insist on the celebration of Father’s day to validate their unnecessary celebration.

I am posting Mike’s e-mail to me.  I won’t post his Word file but I am going to pimp for my man and urge you to buy the book.

Mike’s Response to yesterday’s post.

I went through the exercise you describe but probably in a rougher way. I started with a single instinct common to mammals which is the perception of pain as a form of punishment - where punishment means simply something to avoid. Next, because pain and risk of pain are willingly accepted when necessary to alleviate hunger, the conclusion can be drawn that hunger is also instinctively perceived as punishment ……. and everything else proceeds from here.

An amazingly ignorant thing that humans do, is believe that they have certainly finally arrived at the truth, when the fact is they thought the exact same thing about every wrong belief that has existed over time on a long string of wrong beliefs about the same subject.

The attached is the version of an article I sent to you a week or two ago in a slightly different form with a different title. This is the version I put in my animal book.

I conclude that what has to happen, is C. [1]This is stated in the most general way given where the investigation started.

Complicating matters, capitalism has the exact opposite goal.

Rationality is not a good characteristic to abstract from Nature for the purpose of promoting the amazing greatness of the most irrational animal on earth.    

Now, I am thinking that we started hanging onto the “rational” millenia ago back in the days of our Greek forebears.  Unfortunately we never got really good at it.  I think that it is because we have atomized and celebrated our atomization into “individuals”.  It seems to me that this atomization is best characterized by the prevalence of greed and it’s near-complete dispersal through the society.  

I think that there is a lot to work on in order to understand how we got here.  I don’t think for a moment that we have arrived at the “truth”.  For that matter, I am in no ways certain that a species of apes with too big of brains and a couple of millenia of bad habits can capture such a mythical creature.

I am trying to give it a go, but I am fully aware of my chances of failure.

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[1]  Here is the key c) decide to live in a rational manner like the other animals.