Seeing should not be believing.

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When I was teaching before the personal computer took over the world one of the main things I tried to teach my students was that just because something was printed in a book did not mean it was true. I wanted them to question things and people including me. I was fairly successful sometimes to my chagrin.

Take the numeral 10 what is its name? Aha, did I hear you say ten or the equivalent in your language? Wrong. Try again. You may still be wrong. Numerals are tools and what the numeral stands for may very according to the base used.

Do you tend to assume that because you read or saw something in a book, on TV or the Internet that it is true?

The police have to deal with witnesses and they will tell you what a problem this is. Ten witnesses have ten different view points which may even contradict each other.

On this board I may understand a post completely differently from the way others understand it.

Knowledge grows and changes and we should be open to this growth and change.

 

Knowledge does change, and so does our understanding of things.

Truth as consensus may be the closest thing to truth we can come up with.

As many people can say that they agree on many things, the problem is that do they have the same understanding of the things that they agree upon.

Different perspectives to even the most commonest of things should be valued. Only by trying to get as many different angles as possible to matters we might be able to discern a nature of things that is most useful for all of us.

I find that open discussion is needed in order to achieve mutual understanding. Disagreement does not rule out mutual understanding.

Bad decisions are made which lead to bad consequences when too many things, like mutual understanding, are taken for granted and discussion isn't considered to be necessary because of that.

 

Sadly in this day and age we have to take some things for granted because to do otherwise would be inefficient. Trust is the basis of believing what we read in a book and the fact that if they are found to be lieing they will be held responsiable for doing so.

Indeed, not everything written down is fact but niether is it fiction. The first thing one should look at before believing something is the source. Who is the author? Where did they recieve their education? Is that establishment credible? Who says its credible? What expertise do they have in deciding what is credible or not? Under whose authority? The government eh? Who elected them? I did? Damn. So I'm the person who is responsiable for what is written in some book?

Question everything but don't question EVERY THING. Society is built on trust and you'll find you won't fit in very well when you start to question every thing and you'll spend more time researching where the information comes from than at least absorbing the information. By no means be a sheep and follow something blindly be prepared to trust those who have authority on certain subjects...

 

Very deep and profound, and I'd say an essential thing to be aware of when one is 'growing up'.

As Abom noted, one would have to eventually build up a 'friends list' of sources to trust as accurate/truthful, else accomplishing ANYTHING would be very difficult, starting from ground zero, as it were.


And on a semi-related note to this, I've occasionally pondered if whether our perceptions are DRASTICALLY different in even simple things like what colours actually appear like to different people. For instance, maybe what we all consider as 'red', appears green to me, but since I've been told "this is red" pretty much from birth, I just call it red.

The most amusing part of that hypothetical example is how would we ever KNOW if this was the case?

 

Excellent example of a cognitive shortcut. The standard is a decimal, or base 10 system, so ten (ou dix en francais) would be the automatic example. But in binary, it represents 2, and in hexidecimal, it represents 16...

I'm not saying that cognitive shortcuts are a bad thing, because we are bombarded with information at an increasing rate, any shortcut saves us time and lets us process more information...

But do we not reserve the right to receive the new information, ponder and debate it before deciding to accept or reject it? Do we even have the right to reject anything for that matter? Gallileo taught that Earth revolved around the sun, and not the other way around. At first, the pope was furious. This new information did ultimately change the way the Catholic Church views itself in relation to the universe, but it took some time to understand that. It was only after taking that time that such accommodations could be made.

Science gaind information faster than most normal people can assimilate it, and the younger you are, the further behind you start. You eventually have to incorporate the basics into your understanding. Religion has to do the same. Geological evidence suggests that the Earth is about 4. something billion years old. So it wasn't 6 24 hour days, but rather 6 creative periods of unspecified length. Evolution will fit in there somewhere, but forgive us if we're not rushing out to abandon our faith in search of your new information. We'd just like to make it fit within our beliefs...